Films with weighty themes have taken an unusually prominent role at this year's Cannes Film Festival, reports Michael Dwyer
THE 60th Festival de Cannes has been testing the endurance of its audience, not merely because of the sheer volume of enticing movies on offer and the consequent scheduling clashes, but in the heavy themes explored and graphic scenes that challenge viewers not to look away.
For me, the most uncomfortable experience came very early on Tuesday morning at the first screening of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, based on the best-selling 1997 book by Jean-Dominique Bauby and directed by Julian Schnabel, the New York painter who turned film-maker with Basquiat and Before Night Falls.
The film begins in December 1995 when Bauby, then 43 and the editor of Elle magazine in Paris, comes out of a three-week coma at a hospital near Calais. "Keep your eyes open," is the first sentence Bauby hears, before being told he had a stroke that caused the extremely rare condition of "locked-in syndrome", which compromises the stem between the brain and the rest of the body.
The first half-hour makes for deeply unsettling cinema as Schnabel immediately places the viewer in Bauby's position, observing everything from his point of view, which is blurred until his eyes adjust to light again. We cannot but share his shock and anxiety at realising that his body is paralysed from head to toe and that he cannot be heard, even though his brain is in perfect working order.
That extended sequence is so convincingly recreated that it initially takes on a suffocating intensity beyond claustrophobia, as if one had been buried alive. The only relief comes with the discovery that Bauby has one remaining form of communication, by blinking his left eyelid. With the encouragement of a dedicated young speech therapist and her use of a re-ordered alphabet that priorities the most commonly used letters, he painstakingly expresses himself by blinking when the correct letter is pronounced aloud.
Bauby's instinctive response is terse: "I want death". Within the severe limitations of his altered existence, however, he finds a reason to go on living, and to deal with the guilt and regrets that shroud his thoughts, by dictating the book that over a year later becomes The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.
Schnabel's thought-provoking film proves life-affirming yet unsentimental. The committed performances of a very fine cast led by Mathieu Amalric as Bauby, and notably featuring Mare-Josée Croze, Emmanuelle Seigneur, Max Von Sydow and the late Jean-Pierre Cassel, invest it with heart and integrity.
Another man's horrific real-life fate is the subject of Michael Winterbottom's A Mighty Heart, showing out of competition in the official Cannes selection. It follows the dogged quest to find and rescue Danny Pearl, the south-Asia bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal, after his abduction in Karachi in January 2002.
A Mighty Heart is based on the memoir by his widow, journalist Mariane Pearl, who was five months pregnant with their first child at the time, and is played by an effectively understated Angelina Jolie. Through her frightened eyes, the human level of the story compellingly unfolds in parallel with the complex political dimension as we observe the meticulous five-week search carried out by Pakistan's counter-terrorism unit, the FBI and several journalists.
The film, which benefits from Winterbottom's experience of working in the region on In This World and The Road to Guantanamo, methodically reveals layers of data and the counter-claims made during the investigation before it reached its tragic conclusion. It takes on a greater urgency at a time when BBC Gaza correspondent Alan Johnston has been missing for three months.
The disappearance of a middle-aged man after a car accident in Jerusalem triggers conflict, though not of a political nature, in Psalms, Raphaël Nadjari's Israeli production. Nadjari is less concerned with an explanation (none is given) than with the plight of the man's wife and two sons, who have to exist on a on a diminished budget when his bank account is frozen. On another level, this loquacious, funereally paced film attempts to prompt debate on the wife's rejection of her devout in-laws' response, which is through faith.
Two former Palme d'Or winners returned to the Cannes competition this week with movies falling far short of their best achievements. Paranoid Park is another of Gus Van Sant's low-budget, minimalist movies featuring mostly non-professional actors, this time recruited on MySpace. It plays like a weaker companion to Elephant, which earned Van Sant the coveted Cannes prize in 2003 and followed two male students planning a shooting rampage at their school.
The protagonist of Paranoid Park is another alienated teen, Alex, who is 16, living with his divorced mother in Portland, Oregon, and evidently more interested in skateboarding than sex. Van Sant, who finally appears to have discovered skateboarding - can breakdancing be next? - squanders time admiring the activity in what are essentially grainy music videos.
There is, eventually, a moral dilemma, when Alex is suspected of involvement in the death of a railway security guard struck by a skateboard, and Van Sant later replays several apparently banal scenes that are given context and meaning by details ever so gradually revealed.
The biggest disappointment at Cannes has been Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof, which began life as an 87-minute picture partnered with another directed by Robert Rodrigeuz in Grindhouse, a double bill homage to 1970s B-movies. Since Grindhouse failed to ignite the US box-office, the movies have been separated and the accompanying fake trailers dropped, and Tarantino has over-generously added 40 minutes to his segment.
The B-movie pastiche works in such incidental details as having a deliberately scratchy, badly spliced print with a washed-out look, but Death Proof, which is now almost as long as some old double bills, is a double feature in itself. A grizzled Kurt Russell plays the linking character, a malevolent, misogynistic stuntman who takes pleasure in driving women off the road, even if it means killing them.
He finds easy prey in the first half, but the women in the second part are sassier and tougher. In case we didn't get that, they spout expletives incessantly throughout endlessly banal conversations conspicuously short on Tarantino's trademark witty dialogue.
His inner geek has taken over from the smart film-maker in this tiresome exercise that finally sparks to life in the last reel, for an expertly staged, extended car chase that name-checks Vanishing Point (1971) as its influence and echoes the stuntman's scorn for CGI effects.
Reverting to the US cut for European release in the autumn would make sense. And I expect the entire cast of Babe to fly over the Festival Palais on Sunday night if Death Proof repeats Tarantino's 1994 Cannes triumph with Pulp Fiction and gets him a second Palme d'Or.
On the side
The spotlight at Cannes is on the movies in competition for the Palme d'Or, but the festival sidebar programmes always yield discoveries.
Control, which opened the Directors Fortnight strand this year, marks an assured feature film debut for Dutch photographer Anton Corbijn, who has shot album sleeves for U2 and directed music videos for them, Depeche Mode and Joy Division.
Ian Curtis, the gifted singer-songwriter with Joy Division, is the subject of Control, which begins near Manchester, in 1973, when it was grim up north and Curtis was an introspective, Wordsworth-quoting 17-year-old David Bowie devotee. Two years later, Curtis marries his best friend's girlfriend, Deborah Woodruff (on whose memoir the screenplay is based). He joins local band Warsaw, changes their name to Joy Division, and Manchester impresario Tony Wilson signs them to Factory Records.
The movie follows the rise of the band and the complications in Curtis's life: fatherhood and its responsibilities; adultery with a Belgian fan; his first epilepsy attacks; and the pressures and demands of fame. It ends on the eve of the band's first US tour in May 1980, when Curtis killed himself at the age of 23.
Control, which is in black and white, follows the traditional arc of the doomed rock star scenario. While it will hardly prove illuminating to Curtis's admirers, it is fuelled with an evident empathy and affection for him and his music.
Corbijn found the perfect actor in Sam Riley, who belies his relative inexperience by bringing Curtis vividly to life, and he's electrifying when he passionately performs on stage. Samantha Morton is affecting and refreshingly unmannered as the troubled Deborah.
Beginning a decade earlier, in 1962, and continuing through the 1970s, My Brother Is an
Only Child follows the turbulent experiences of a disaffected youth in Latina, south of Rome. Born to Catholic parents, Accio enters the seminary as a precocious boy but is overtaken with post- pubescent lust. In his late teens he enthusiastically joins the fascists, to the horror of his older brother, an avowed communist.
The screenplay is by Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli who, having scripted The Best of Youth and Romanzo Criminale, are clearly fascinated by the political and cultural movements of the period. This film, nimbly directed by Daniele Luchetti, is dramatically involving and entertainingly comic.
And then there is Zoo, which arrived in Cannes trailing potential notoriety because of its theme: men who have sex with horses. Readers of a sensitive disposition may prefer to turn the page now. As it transpires, the movie doesn't sensationalise its subject, treating it matter-of-factly in a muted, stylised manner.
It's not the first film to reflect on a sexual attach- ment between men and horses, which was fuzzily treated in Equus (1977). Zoo takes its title from the abbreviation of zoophile, as these self-declared horse lovers describe themselves. It describes how they made contact over the internet and gathered at a Seattle farm, where they filmed their sexual activities with the animals.
That came to light in 2005, when Kenneth Pinyan, a 45-year-old divorced engineer, bled to death after a stallion perforated his colon. Bestiality is not illegal in the state of Washington, so no charges were filed.
When none of Pinyan's fellow zoophiles would appear on camera, director Robinson Devor recorded audio interviews with them, which are played under footage of actors in what is a dramatised documentary.
It is difficult and troubling as the men talk about "being zoo", as the Pinyan character spends the weekend with his ex-wife and their young son before he meets his death, and when animal rescue workers question the zoophile assertions that the stallion had to be a willing sexual partner.
