CANNES 2012:Wes Anderson returns, Jacques Audiard keeps things classy, and an Egyptian docu-drama based around events in Tahrir Square tries to find its feet amid the hustle and bustle of Cannes 2012, writes DONALD CLARKE
Moonrise Kingdom ***
Directed by Wes Anderson Starring Jared Gilman, Kara Hayward, Bruce Willis, Edward Norton, Bill Murray, Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton
94 min, playing in competition
From the opening frames, the director leaves us in little doubt that we’re back in Andersonland. The camera meets its characters head on, then drifts backwards at a leisurely pace. The credits are in an elegant pink script.
Wes Anderson is still in control of his lovely aesthetic. It’s just a shame that it doesn’t appear to be attached to anything.
The latest, star-studded film from the director of Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums is certainly an improvement on recent live-action doodles such as The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and The Darjeeling Limited. Set in a pastel-shaded, dry-cleaned version of the 1960s, Moonrise Kingdom, which opened the festival on Wednesday night, features two of the director’s trademark bright children. Young Kara Hayward lives in (what else?) a lighthouse with her predictably off-centre parents (Frances McDormand and Anderson-essential Bill Murray). She has made friends with Sam (underpowered Jared Gilman), a boy scout who has kept his status as an orphan secret from his superiors. The first half of the film deals with their efforts to flee into the wilderness. The second half meanders around a chaotic aftermath.
There are many beautiful things here. The film makes unexpected and very effective use of music by Benjamin Britten. Movie aristocracy such as Tilda Swinton (“Social Services”), Ed Norton (scout middle-management) and Harvey Keitel (scout supremo) embrace the arch tone with great relish.
Indeed, Anderson is so successful at being himself – a displaced addict of New Yorker magazine humour from the 1950s – that one can easily ignore the emptiness of the project. Yes, it’s fun to imagine the opening sections as Badlands crossed with Swallows and Amazons. Sure, the moments of posh slapstick tickle the sides. But the film’s stubborn refusal to engage with the emotions is ultimately somewhat alienating.
Hello? Hello? Is there anybody in there?
Rust and Bone ****
Directed by Jacques Audiard Starring Marion Cotillard, Matthias Schoenaerts, Bouli Lanners, Céline Sallette, Corinne Masiero, Alex Martin 120 min, playing in competition
Jacques Audiard is now in an enviable position. With films such as The Beat That My Heart Skipped and A Prophet, the French director sustains a populist sensibility while still attracting great critical acclaim.
Rust and Bone is a trickier film than A Prophet. Derived from stories by Craig Davidson, it bravely refuses to settle down into a comfortable rhythm. The protagonist is hard to love. The chief female character keeps slipping out of the story. But the film demonstrates real emotional purchase throughout. Acting awards from the Cannes jury are not out of the question.
Rising Belgian actor Matthias Schoenaerts plays Ali, a wandering layabout – homeless as the film begins – who has chosen to migrate to the south of France with his young son. He secures a bed in his sister’s house and takes a job as a bouncer.
One night he rescues Stéphanie (Marion Cotillard), a troubled young woman, from a bar fight and begins a friendship. It transpires – hold on to your hats – that she works as a trainer of killer whales at a local marine park. Following a serious accident at the facility, Ali and Stéphanie become closer.
Rust and Bone has, in other words, all the makings of a three-hankie potboiler. But Audiard maintains such a cool, distant tone that the film never risks dallying with melodrama.
Cotillard’s intensity has never been better used. The director makes unsettling use of watery expressionist sequences that link Stéphanie’s catastrophe to another grim event in the film’s final quarter.
There is, perhaps, a little too much going on: Ali returns to boxing, and becomes involved with illegal surveillance. One longs to engage a little more closely with Stéphanie’s story. But this remains a very classy piece of work. Audiard continues to impress.
After the Battle **
Directed by Yousry Nasrallah Starring Menna Shalabi, Bassem Samra, Nahed El Sebai, Salah Abdallah, Phaedra 122 min, playing in competition
When the programme for the festival was announced, many observers expressed puzzled interest at the inclusion of Yousry Nasrallah’s realist docu-drama in such an apparently strong slate. It must be something special. It’s not.
The Egyptian director begins promisingly. Genuine footage of the protests in Tahrir Square blend with drama in a manner that suggests Haskell Wexler’s experiments with the 1969 Democrat convention in Medium Cool. But the picture too quickly settles down into dry didacticism and muddled romantic noodling.
His intentions are admirable. The story follows Reem (Menna Shalabi), a middle-class, liberal woman as she encounters Mahmoud (Bassem Samra), one of the working-class men who participated in the mounted assault on the protesters.
In the aftermath, he has been ostracised and his son has been bullied. Nasrallah’s sympathies with the revolution’s aims are never in doubt, but he is keen to demonstrate how honest idealism can easily mutate into self-righteous bigotry. Mahmoud is, it transpires, as much of a victim as the people he ineffectively assaulted.
Sadly, the middle-section of After the Battle is weighed down by too much explicit musing on the film’s political themes. At one point, somebody actually discusses “the illusion of political solutions to personal problems”. Characters act as ciphers for moral positions. Nobody seems to have any sort of believable inner-life.
The film will unquestionably have historical value. But it struggles as drama.
