Cannes

Swedish director Ruben Östland jumps for joy at announcement of "The Square" as unexpected (and extremely unworthy) Best film (Palme d'Or) at Cannes 2017

Cannes is known for the perversity and disgruntlement  engendered by its endgame awards. The Grand 70th Anniversary edition was no exception. Most awards were not only surprising but undeserved and disheartening as well. 

On the final day, Sunday, in a desperate effort to catch up with some competition films I did manage to ogle four to wit: 

8:30 AM -- Wonderstruck, by Todd Haynes, featuring fave actress, Julianne Moore, but this time in a limited late role.  She doesn't even appear until late into the film, which focusses on a deaf young girl and her efforts to communicate

It had the earmarks of an important film but I Wasn't in the mood for juvenile deafness this early in the day.  Drowsed  through much of it, not because I was sleepy but because it failed to hold my attention.

12:15, Haneke's Happy End, 

French All star cast with Isabelle Huppert, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Mathieu Kassovitzn, and the real star  of the picture, Fantine Harduin age twelve,  as a troubled teenager who steals the picture from her venerable seniors.  Set in Calais against the implicit background of the ongoing  immigrant immigrant crisis there but mainly on a wealthy dysfunctional industrial family whose founding father was Trintignant.  At the happy  end the elderly Trintignant tries to put himself out of his misery by riding his wheelchair down a ramp into the sea but only gets halfway in, which is about as much as can be said for this stuck in the middle of itself story.

A little less dark dreary and opaque than Haneke's usual offerings in which even La Huppert is hardly more than a  routine housewife and bossy head of family.  

16h15, in La Soixante, the big prjection hall in the Palais annex, away from the maddening crowds up front,

One I was really looking firward to, and was realllly disappointed in; 

"The Meyerowitz Stories, New and Selected" set in New York's Brooklyn district and directed by New Yorker Noah Baumbach. This tedious walkie tawkie family Dramedy shoulda  stayed in Brooklyn but it got into competition here because of its all-star cast: Dustin Hoffman as an aging pater familias of a family whose main interest,  it seems, is watching and critiquing baseball on TV., and his two feuding sons, full time loser Adam Sandler and West Coast winner Ben Stiller.  Dustin is a professional sculptor but not as well recognized as he thinks he should be, until at the end we see that one of his pieces is getting into the Whitney.  Along the way we attend art gallery opening parties and meet the likes of Sigouney Weaver (Playing herself as a celebrity at an art vernissage) and Candice Bergen is also in there somewhere, very very New Yawk -- but ultimately this is a long string of set pieces of the kind that in the hands of Woody Allen might have been coherent and edgy but under the disjointed directorship  of Bumbauch is one long fumble with a few high points between fumbles -- notably the big rough and tumble confrontation between Big bro Sandler and cool li'l bro Stiller.  Stiller is the one character in the film who has real conviction but his tight performance gets lost in the fumbling of all the others principals. Most of the dialogue is particularly nebbishistic.

Would have walked out halfway through but got stuck in the middle of a long row and couldn't get out without causing undue disturbance, so, I grinned and bore it. Basically, let's face it --a waste of time.

Immediately following, in the same venue, came a competition film with the cryptic title of "You were never really here" by British femme helmer Lynne Ramsay.   Even though  film was so dark and brutal that halfway through, bludgeoned into near blindness, I was wishing I wasn't there, I couldn't give it a complete passup because of the presence in the lead role of favorite American actor Joaquin Phoenix.   In this bloody mess, far from his usual sympathetic portrayals, Phoenix plays a brutal bearded hitman who dispatches victim  with an ordinary hardware store bought hammer -- with which he bashes and slambangs bad people to bits like a toxic avenger on a rampage -- but some flash scene inserts indicate that maybe he learned his violent trade as a soldier in Iraq ~ so maybe it's not entirely his fault that he's a ruthless killer, and he mainly kills bad people such as kidnappers and abusers of teenage girls, and also he loves his aged mother...

The mise-en- scène itself is really ugly with large hunks of dark things blocking the view and the musical score is relentless schizzy suspense thriller stuff but there is something about Joaquin that even in such an ugly presentation you can't help rooting for him. 

The picture was so stomach turning that I had to ankle it before the end to keep from puking, but --

a scant hour later on the pressroom TV There was Phoenix -- in a tux and -- sneakers! -- accepting the festival Best Actor award.  He obviously wasn't expecting it or he might have had time to get hold of some real shoes.

But I am glad he got the award because it really was an exceptional performance in an exceptionally disgusting film.

And now the other Awards ...

Golden Palm (Palme d'or) THE SQUARE from Stockholm.

The jury liked it because it "addressed important issues in an important way" -- I saw it early in the week and felt that the way in which important issues were approached was so trivial and artificial that I had to give it the Ankle after about twenty five tediously pretentious minutes -- to keep from being put to sleep!

Best Actress; German star Diane Kruger (one-time Helen of Troy to Brad Pitt's Alexander)  as the forlorn wife of a husband and child killed by a Terrorist bomb blast in Tarih Akin's "AUS dem Null" -- didn't see it, so, No Comment.

Best Director to Sofia Coppola for "The Beguiled" was so far from Best Direction of the festival that it seemed like a crafty in joke and nod to the select circle of the annointed. Not that her feministic reinterpretation  of Don Siegel's 1971 minor masterpiece was badly directed -- just that it was misdirected like a misguided missile and was far less of a directorial achievement than half a dozen other films, for example Le Redoubtable by Michel Havanicius or Jupiter's Moon by Hungarian Kornel Mundruczo -- or Hikari by Naomi Kawase ~ if the jury really felt compelled to recognize a woman director.

In Un Certain Regard, the powerful Tunisian film "La Belle et la Meute" (beauty and a gang of beasts) by femme director Khaoude Ben Mania, in which the beasts are the policemen who rape a young girl and then try to bully her out of filing a report, was inexplicably overlooked, while a boring piece of nonentity from Iran, Lerd, (a respectable man) was awarded best film.  Ugh. Shrug. Blugg. Uma Thurman headed this jury -- where were their heads at?

However, the one prize I am in total agreement with, was best director in this secondary festival category, Taylor Sheridan, for the RipRoaring vengeance drama in the snow WIND RIVER starring Jeremy Renner as a man with a power gun on a speeding snowmobile.  This one should have been In Competition as it was way better than any competition film I saw.

Alex, Cannes

The Day After the Cannes 2017 Stresstival

Photo credit  © NIVIERE/VILLARD/SIPA