CANNES 2012: AMOUR, LAURENCE ANYWAYS and RUST AND BONE—By Ryan Lattanzio

Thanks to the good people at the San Francisco Film Society, the Consulate General of France in SF, the French American Cultural Society and La Semaine de la Critique, I was sent last week to the 65th Cannes International Film Festival as a critic and jury member. Six days into the festival, and I have managed to see a ton of films both good and bad, and I am living the dream of the magpie cinephile.

To start, the best film I have seen so far in the Main Competition is Michael Haneke's Amour. Who knew that the Austrian provocateur behind such films as The Seventh Continent (1989), The Piano Teacher (2001), Cache (2005) and The White Ribbon (2009 Palme d'Or winner) was capable of feeling anything? Amour is the director's most emotional, tender film to date. It marks a shift in his career that resembles late Ingmar Bergman or Carl Theodor Dreyer: restrained, pensive and deeply felt.

Amour is about love, of course, but it is also two hours of a woman dying. Yet Haneke renders this depressing material redemptive and utterly compelling. It's as good a rumination as any about getting old and getting on in life.

The film is also a tribute to seasoned French actors, starring Jean Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva as Georges and Anne, an elderly married couple whose amour is put to the greatest test of all when Anne suffers a stroke that paralyzes half of her body. Georges, with the help of his daughter Eva (Isabelle Huppert), must care for Anne in the final months of her life. We know from the outset that she is going to die. The film opens with police breaking into the couple's apartment to find Anne splayed on the bed amid a funereal bouquet. Natch, in Haneke tradition, this image cuts to the title card Amour.

Trintignant is my pick for Best Actor at the festival, which ends on the 27th when the Palme d'Or and other awards are announced. As Georges, he is calm, sensible and devoted to his wife, yet we also see the personal toll Anne's condition takes on him in several unsettling dream sequences which punctuate this lovely, elegiac film.

With the exception of one crucial scene, Amour never leaves the apartment, which looks more like the chateau in Bergman's Cries and Whispers than a bourgeois flat. We are confined to these large rooms with Georges and Anne for two hours, but instead of suffocating, it's riveting. Haneke does not sanitize with cliches or sentimentality, and like all his films, Amour is starkly realized, but this time with more heart than head (something new for Mr. Haneke, otherwise known for his cinema of nihilism and dread). I walked out of the theater completely wrecked. I didn't know Haneke could make me feel such feelings.

Another excellent film, this one from the Un Certain Regard category, is enfant terrible Xavier Dolan's Laurence Anyways. With this glam epic, Dolan has made his most personal film yet. All he had to do was not cast himself in it.

With its huge, episodic structure spanning 10 years in the life of a couple, Laurence—shot with vibrant color in a 1.33:1 aspect ratio that immediately evokes Dolan's cinephilic nostalgia—smacks of '90s era Pedro Almodovar in telling, through broad brush strokes and intimate moments, the story of a man who realizes he was meant to be a woman. The title character, played with sensitivity and bravado by Melvil Poupaud (a regular cast member of Ruiz and Ozon), becomes a transsexual over the course of the movie but his girlfriend Frederique (the effervescent Suzanne Clément whose performance recalls Kate Winslet's as the manic pixie dream girl in Eternal Sunshine) decides to stick with him. She wrestles with this decision for the rest of her life, as Laurence and Fred are constantly on-and-off, hot and cold.

Given that the film clocks in at nearly three hours, and though it feels surprisingly breezy, Laurence, like Dolan's coiffed pompadour, is going to need a pair of scissors if it's ever going to find an audience across the Atlantic. But it's a big, beautiful film, where we really get the sense that these two flawed but endlessly watchable people are crazy in love with each other. Dolan pumps '80s New Wave tunes, sometimes ad nauseum, into the film and its uber-'90s aesthetic (the shoulder pads, my god those shoulder pads). Sometimes his tendency to smear his style all over his substance does a disservice to the characters and the story, but Laurence is leaps beyond Dolan's previous efforts J'ai tue ma mere (2009) and Les amours imaginaires (2010). Though the 23-year-old director is not quite ready to sack his punk sensibilities and aesthetic attitudes, Laurence is a mature film, a near-masterpiece that's been one of my favorites at the festival.

A film I was far less thrilled with but one that is generating a lot of buzz around La Croisette is Jacques Audiard's Rust and Bone, or as it is known in its very chewy French title De rouille et d'os. It is Audiard's follow-up to the 2009 political drama A Prophet. Like that film, Rust and Bone takes its characters and audience on a grand tour of emotional hell. Overwrought melodrama with some seriously good acting make up this otherwise flavorless picture about (you guessed it) two broken souls who come together amid the scraps of their personal tragedies.

As Stephanie, an orca trainer turned paraplegic after a random accident on the job, Marion Cotillard throws herself headlong into her stripped down, untreated performance. The role churns the actress through the wringer and finds her doing some brutal gymnastics of grief and otherwise. Cotillard, along with Matthias Schoenaerts (Bullhead) as Ali, a single dad, amateur boxer and antihero par excellence, could potentially nab the Best Actress prize. In one scene in a hospital—as much as I hate screaming scenes in hospitals—she articulates her emotions with rare fluency. I refuse to dispel the nature of her accident, as forthcoming American trailers no doubt will, but the way she cries out mes jambes, mes jambes is some of the most gut-wrenching, heart-crushing stuff I've witnessed at the festival.

With its contrived incident-driven plot, which is overly determinant of the characters' lives, the film stinks of Alejandro González Iñárritu gone out of control. But there is also, undoubtedly, a reckoning with cinema Americana, like that of Darren Aronofsky, with the film's trembling camera and gritty lens filter. But at the beating bloody heart of the film is the love story of Stephanie and Ali, who meet at a club where Ali is a bouncer. Beneath all the film's ramblings about working class malaise, and a narrative momentum that's frozen in melo-molasses, there is something so moving about the film that I cannot shake. Plus, it uses Katy Perry's pop ballad "Firework" in such an unexpectedly tender way, I couldn't help but feel my heart strings pulse and pull a little bit. Rust and Bone will be nominated for Academy Awards, mark my words, and it's really going to work with American audiences.

INCEPTION

[This consideration of Inception is not for the spoiler-wary!]

With Inception, Christopher Nolan has evocatively architected the mind of the dream. Which is in and of itself nothing new; but, admirable for being accomplished through film. Architecture has long been a tool used to envisage spatial relations within dreams. A house is, after all, the classic Jungian dream symbol for the psyche. In this, Inception is not too dissimilar from Charlie Kaufman's filmic constructions—Synecdoche, New York and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind—absent their humorous whimsy.

I won't bore anyone with crafting a plot synopsis as review. Rather, I express regret that Christopher Nolan was not made available to me for interview. I would have tailored our conversation to talk less about his film—which stands on its own merits—to talk about what he has discovered in his explorations of dream theory.

The image I find most resonant in Inception occurs late in the film when Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Ariadne (Ellen Page) hazard limbo in search of Mal (Marion Cotillard), who has—in effect—kidnapped Robert Fischer, Jr. (Cillian Murphy). True, the scene is ponderous with exposition but this allowed my perception to slow down to take in the image of the houses in water. Memory has placed these past homes in the fluid matrix of the dream. As Cobb explains, he and Mal built their world in limbo to include the first apartment they shared, the house in which Mal bore him children, and Mal's own childhood home. Walking straight on into her childhood home, one faces the dollhouse, which when opened reveals the safe, in which Mal has hidden her totemic top. By placing it in the safe Mal has made her totem a secret even to herself; however—by Cobb touching her totem and setting it to spin within the safe—he reminds her of its purpose and meaning; a shift which will provide the film's narrative its tragic subplot. I love Nolan's image of the spinning top, not only for being—as Ariadne recognizes—"an elegant solution" to the problem of knowing when one is in a dream; but, because it frames the concern, which I find interesting in its own right. The distinction between the waking life and the dream life is an impassioned concern.

In shamanic dream theory this crisis of discernment would be an opportunity to locate "the scout." I understand "the scout" to mean that which is authentic to the dream in contrast to the many phenomenological and visual distractions with which the dreamer populates and decorates the dream. I'm not convinced that this is something taken into the dream by the dreamer—i.e., by way of the totem, let's say—because I believe "the scout" needs to be something endemic to the dream recognized by the dreamer. In that sense, Nolan is more true to "the scout" in the scene in the bar where Cobb is alerting Fischer to the strangeness of the dream as a means of alerting his awareness that he is in a dream. As I understand it, that strangeness would alert the dreamer to the proximity of "the scout", or to what is most endemically authentic to the dream. Lucidity, however, is always a hazardous dance within a dream. Too much lucidity causes a dream to call attention to itself, which—in Nolan's vision—is represented by projections attacking the dreamer. I'm impressed that Nolan has thought this one out with regard to his introduced fiction of extraction and inception. The notion that one can thieve the dream does, indeed, strike me as criminal.

The central convention of Inception is that a dream can be dreamt within a dream. Nolan structures this as a vertical descent as if one were riding an elevator between the levels of a department store. This premise is, again, not original. In shamanic dream theory these levels would be called "gates" and, allegedly, there are seven gates. If one can manage the instability of the various gates to arrive at the seventh gate, this is when the accomplished shaman (i.e., dreamer) is entitled the choice of not returning to the starting point of the dream and opting instead to propel forward into infinity, which is not quite the same as oblivion. The press notes for Inception are correct when they allow that dreams are where the intimate and the infinite meet, not so much through memory as one would expect or as limbo allows, but through the discipline and process of traveling through the gates, dreaming within dreams.

I appreciated Nolan's texturing this discipline of traveling through the gates with, first, the expansion of time so that a minute in the waking world becomes five minutes in the dream world becomes five years in the dream within the dream and five decades within the cubed dream. I found this a provocatively simple understanding of how the spatial-temporal empties into infinity. Second, I was impressed with the importance of the instability factor in successfully maneuvering within the cubed dream; that something like a van carrying dreaming passengers tumbling over and over will create weightlessness in the embedded dreams. I found the scenes where Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) was fighting subconscious security in a depth without gravity to be profoundly thrilling. His strenuous performance involved levitational hand-to-hand combat in a whirling tube set up in an old zeppelin factory in England. Its sensual simulation of the physical qualities of torque was fantastic. And here I must insert applause for composer Hans Zimmer's exciting score, essential to the scene's tension.

Other than for that, I have only two semi-complaints about the film. Ariadne, the name of Ellen Page's character—i.e., the architect hired to create the labyrinths for the extraction—was such an obvious association that it kept pulling me out of the story. One could say it called attention to itself and I wanted to attack it. I get that she builds labyrinths. I get that she guides people out of them.

Secondly, is what I've come to believe is an in-joke—if not a mere synchronicity—structured into the film, though I'm not sure it was intentional. Intentional or not, any joke from Christopher Nolan is appreciated. (When he appeared at WonderCon, he never once cracked a smile.) Here's the in-joke: in Inception, a musical cue is affiliated with the "kick" to bring the dreamers back from their dream state. The chosen musical cue is "Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien" written by Charles Dumont and Michel Vaucaire in a signature performance by Édith Piaf. Nolan stages limbo as a place where one grows old filled with regrets and my understanding is that regrets are illuminations that arrive too late. In this sense, "Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien" is an apt choice, though rendered a bit eerie (i.e., familiar) for Marion Cottiard having won the Oscar® for her performance as Édith Piaf. Again, within Nolan's own visuals, this choice of song made me turn to look at him directly.

My final note: I've watched the film twice, which does it service.

Cross-published on Twitch.