The sun is beating down on the Festival de Cannes, but inside the screening rooms it's a very dark affair, writes Michael Dwyer
It has often been remarked that the people who return suntanned from the Festival de Cannes are those who didn't do any work. This year, however, the sun has been so strong every day and the queues for most screenings are so long that we are all getting sunburned just standing in line. How we suffer for our art.
Once inside the festival cinemas, it's a very different story, as the mood darkens time after time. After dishing up an opening film in My Blueberry Nights that proved more slight and insubstantial than an amuse-bouche, Cannes has presented a menu heavy on serious issues, encompassing abortion, suicide, adultery, domestic abuse, and diverse forms of graphic violence - all in the first five days. Zoo, the movie about men having sex with horses, is about to be served up, if we can stomach it.
It has not been uncommon for audiences to exit the cinemas in numbed silence, and such was the case after Saturday's world premiere of Garage, the only Irish production showing outside the festival market this year. It screened in the prestigious sidebar section, the Directors' Fortnight, founded by prominent French directors after the riots of May 1968 to "defend the artistic, moral, professional and economic liberties of cinematic creativity". Garage marks the second accomplished collaboration between screenwriter Mark O'Halloran and director Lenny Abrahamson after their black comedy Adam & Paul, which dealt with a couple of Dublin junkies. O'Halloran's evident interest in outsiders as dramatic characters and his concern for how they struggle to survive in society takes on a deeper, darker tone in his screenplay for Garage, which moves away from the gritty urban setting of Adam & Paul to a small town in the mid-west of Ireland.
Physically, it's another world, set against beautiful natural landscapes that are handsomely captured by cinematographer Peter Robinson. The protagonist, Josie (played by Pat Shortt), is a simple man who has spent his entire adult life working on the outskirts of a rural town, as the fastidious caretaker of a rundown petrol station that seems doomed for closure. The area is not dissimilar to the locale of Shortt's hugely popular comedy series Killinaskully, but while Garage begins deceptively humorously, O'Halloran is more intent in exploring the underbelly of festering frustration in a place that has seen better, more hopeful times.
Josie is introduced as a lonely, good-natured man whose world is his work, an innocent who seems suspended somewhere between childhood and adulthood, even in middle age. When the owner (John Keogh) hires 15-year-old David (newcomer Conor Ryan) to work at the garage over his summer holidays, Josie enjoys having company during the long gaps between customers, and joining David and his young friends for cans of beer down by the railway tracks at night. And Josie feels an attraction towards a shop assistant (Anne-Marie Duff), imagining that there might be more to her friendliness towards him.
Under Abrahamson's sensitive, perfectly measured direction, the movie's tone gradually turns more serious, until a crisis is unwittingly triggered with emotionally devastating consequences. The dialogue, which consistently rings true, is used sparingly in a film where silence speaks volumes. Crucial to this achievement are the understated performances of an exemplary cast, in which Shortt is revelatory, subtly expressive as he tenderly captures Josie in all his complexity, and he inhabits the role so completely that any early mental referencing of his comic creations is soon dispelled.
In the festival competition for the Palme d'Or, brothers Joel and Ethan Coen, who collected that award for Barton Fink in 1991, are formidable contenders to retake it with No Country for Old Men, in which they bring Cormac McCarthy's novel to the screen with stylistic virtuosity. The setting is West Texas in 1980, and the body count escalates after the startling strangulation of a young prison officer at the outset. The killer is one of the most cold-blooded and amoral villains in the history of cinema and played with sinister gravitas in an effectively adventurous performance - and with very bad hair - by Spanish actor Javier Bardem. He ruthlessly executes any man or woman in his way when he sets out in dogged pursuit of a Vietnam veteran (Josh Brolin, never better), who stumbles upon the scene of a multiple murder and finds and escapes with a briefcase containing $2 million. The third participant in the extended chase that ensues is the philosophical sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones) who is disillusioned by the alarming lawlessness that has overtaken his country.
The consequences are powerfully gripping as the Coens ratchet up the tension in a visceral thriller that stands with their best work (Miller's Crossing, Blood Simple, Fargo) and is embellished with oodles of their trademark droll, quirky humour. This modern western is consummately photographed by their regular lighting cameraman, Roger Deakins, and the cast, which includes Woody Harrelson, Kelly Macdonald and Tess Harper, is splendid.
The other outstanding film in the festival competition to date has been the Romanian production Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days, which is set later in the 1980s, shortly before the fall of the Ceausescu regime. The predominant colour in its visual scheme is aptly grey, reflecting the grim drabness of life in that era. The film takes place over a single day and night as one young college student (Anamaria Marinca) helps another (Laura Vasiliu) prepare for an abortion, which was illegal in Romania at the time. They navigate the absurd bureaucracy involved in booking a hotel room where the abortionist ups his price by demanding sex with each of them in advance. As this man methodically carries out the abortion on the frightened student, writer-director Cristian Mungiu challenges us not to avert our eyes during a chilling extended sequence, keeping the camera fixed on the clinical precision of an operation that is scarily primitive. There is a far more disturbing scene to follow as Mungiu proves equally unsparing of his characters, and his audience, in a challenging, uncompromising film. Playing the stronger, more practical of the young women, Marinca (a Bafta winner for the TV drama Sex Traffic) gives a performance against which all others will be judged before the best actress award is presented next Sunday night.
Abortion again features as a central theme in another East European film shown in competition at Cannes, The Banishment, in which a dour husband discusses that option with his criminal brother after his wife tells him she is pregnant with her third child and that he is not the father. Based on a William Saroyan story (The Laughing Matter), it marks the second feature from Russian director Andrei Zvyagintsev after his auspicious debut with The Return. While he reaffirms his gift for framing striking visual compositions in The Banishment, he takes his own sweet time about getting anywhere in his pretentiously oblique treatment of the slender narrative. An hour into the Cannes press screening, the film prompted guffaws when a character asked, "What's going on?" There were dozens of walkouts while the movie crawled along for another 97 minutes.
THE MOST DIVISIVE entry with the critics has been Christophe Honoré's Les Chansons d'Amour (Love Songs), which is set among the self-absorbed young bourgeoisie of present-day Paris, talking and smoking profusely as they try to deal with their complicated sex lives. And for much of the time, they express their emotions through bursting into song in the manner of original screen musicals from the French film The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, to the recent Irish movie Once. As the potentially bisexual magazine sub-editor at its axis, Louis Garrel displays a decent singing voice on the poppy tunes that pepper the soundtrack of this slight but pleasant divertissement.
Singer Norah Jones makes an unremarkable acting debut in My Blueberry Nights, the thoroughly disappointing Wong Kar-wai movie that opened Cannes this year. She plays a lovelorn young waitress who's as naive as the film itself. In New York, she befriends a Mancunian cafe manager (Jude Law sounding like Ant or Dec); in Memphis, she gets drawn into the disintegrated marriage of an alcoholic cop (David Strathairn) and his wife (Rachel Weisz); and in Nevada, she takes off on a Thelma & Louise-influenced journey with a young gambling addict (Natalie Portman).
While it is replete with the visual flourishes we have come to expect from Wong, this, his first movie in English, is so simplistic, trite and contrived that one feels embarrassed for the actors saddled with so much puerile dialogue. It is as misguided and tiresome as Lars von Trier's US-set pictures (Dancer in the Dark, Manderlay), but at least they were unintentionally funny.
Michael Moore ladles out the humour in equal measure with the message in Sicko, his first documentary since Fahrenheit 9/11, the 2004 Palme d'Or winner at Cannes. His target this time is the US health-care system, and adhering to his now familiar formula, he draws on statistical data and human experience - his website request, "Send Me Your Health Care Horror Stories", yielded over 25,000 such stories within a week of being posted.
From the evidence he presents, it is hard to disagree with his depiction of the US health-insurance industry as callous and avaricious, of the pharmaceutical companies as exploiters grossly overcharging for medication, and of the political establishment as being in their well-lined pockets.
Moore is as selective as ever as he loads his case in this polemic-as-entertainment, but some of the biggest laughs from the Cannes audience came when he uncritically extolled the British National Health Service and the French 35-hour working week, with all its associated benefits, as templates the US should adopt. Nevertheless, the best place to live, he concludes at the end of his global tour, is Cuba - although there's no sign of him moving there.
More from Michael Dwyer on Cannes in The Ticket on Friday
