Brad Pitt and Laramie Eppler in The Tree of Life Michael: if the Cannes jury are feeling brave, it may win one of the big prizes
DONALD CLARKEin Cannes
Poliss ***
Footnote ****
Michael ****
A FAIR few low-key punch-ups have been taking place in and about the screening rooms at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. As the official competition gets into its stride, a surprising number of films have been receiving wildly divergent reviews.
Most everybody agrees, however, that Nanni Moretti's Habemus Papam(you won't need to be told the title means "We Have a Pope") is tolerably amusing (see full review in yesterday's Life & Culture).
A similar shoulder-shrugging consensus – ho hum, ho hum! – has gathered around Maïwenn Le Besco's Poliss. The film attempts to fashion a naturalistic soap opera from actual cases investigated by the Child Protection Unit of the Paris police. Le Besco, a former actor, does a good job of conveying the black humour that helps lighten the officers' moods. But the narrative is furiously muddled, oddly rushed and – particularly in a shock dénouement – curiously underdeveloped.
On to the fights.
Everybody this writer talked to following the screening of Joseph Cedar's Footnote,a wry comedy from Israel, thought the film a notable triumph.
Detailing the relationship between a grumpy, intellectually reactionary professor of Hebrew and his sat-upon son, also an academic, the film manages to extract humour from the most unlikely situations.
Featuring innovative use of disconcertingly dramatic music, Cedar somehow manages to balance Kafkaesque paranoia with broad knockabout humour. Yet many critics found the film utterly baffling. They’re all wrong and we’re right.
The really nasty brawls, however, concerned Markus Schleinzer's Michael. This is the Austrian director's first film, but, having long worked as Michael Haneke's casting director, he can hardly be regarded as a novice. Fans of Haneke's grim work will have some idea what to expect. Extraordinarily daring – arguably irresponsible – the film details the relationship between a paedophile and the boy he has imprisoned in his basement. Featuring a stunning, blankly chilling performance by Michael Fuith as the disturbed protagonist, the picture is a small masterpiece of malign banality. Already, angry voices are suggesting that the picture "sympathises" with the paedophile.
It does not. It simply chooses not to explicitly express the moral outrage that will animate any sane viewer.
If the Cannes jury are feeling brave, Michael, despite receiving some excoriating reviews, might walk away with one of the big prizes.
The Tree of Life ***
Director: Terrence Malick. Starring: Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain, Sean Penn, Fiona Shaw, Hunter McCracken
FEW FILMS have ever been so eagerly anticipated as has Terrence Malick's latest opus. The creator of elliptical masterpieces such as Badlandsand The Thin Red Lineis hardly a mainstream figure. But the many delays that have struck the project – it was once thought that the film might make it into Cannes as long ago as 2009 – have conjured up a veritable fug of mystique.
Some feared we’d never see it.
Last night The Tree of Life,an intimate family drama disguised as millennium-spanning spiritual epic, finally touched down in Cannes. We rubbed our eyes bloody in disbelief.
What did we see when vision returned? Well, the first thing to say is that it is very much a film in the Malick style. As with The Thin Red Lineand his underrated The New World, significant sections of the picture comprise shots of beautiful things accompanied by quasi-philosophical aphorisms delivered in sonorous whispers. At times, it's a little like watching a National Geographic documentary narrated by Moses.
This aspect of Malick's style is most conspicuous in a truly stunning sequence that seeks – no joke – to depict the history of the planet from its fiery inception to the extinction of the dinosaurs. The Tree of Lifeis, surely, the only film at this year's Cannes that features single-cell animals as minor characters. Using razor-sharp digital animation, scored to appropriate classical music, the interlude pops the eyes almost as aggressively as did the opening of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
But what’s it for?
The main body of Malick’s film is taken up with a low-key drama set in central Texas. Brad Pitt plays the aggressive, frustrated father of three sons. A gifted musician, who never had the guts to go professional, he now works in engineering. We begin with the family learning that their eldest son has died and then flash back to examine the boys’ lives in a mildly idyllic suburb of Waco. The film also features occasional shots of Sean Penn, playing one of the grown sons, wandering about present-day skyscrapers and making occasional visits to the Great Metaphorical Desert (you’ll recognise this tundra from many freaky 1960s pictures).
Rarely has a director worked this hard to make something so extravagant out of such a simple story. Featuring copious nuggets of voice-over – the characters question God and each other constantly – The Tree of Lifeis, like so many American movies, an examination of tensions between fathers and their sons.
Played with forgiving, porcelain grace by Jessica Chastain, the mater familias borders on the saintly. Her husband takes out his frustrations daily on the unfortunate boys. He’s not a bad man, but he seems unable to allow his better side to flourish.
There really is nothing new here. The scenario is familiar from a million misery memoirs and – though the juvenile actors are solid – neither Pitt nor Chastain develop any new moves for their stock characters.
Never mind. Malick's films have never thrived on plot. They have always been about texture, sweep and – latterly – philosophical insight. One can't deny The Tree of Lifeoffers visual pleasures. Shot in grey haze and sun flare by Emmanuel Lubezki, the talented Mexican cameraman, the images have a sleepy beauty.
The music is perfectly chosen and the editing plays to an elegantly loping rhythm.
But, ultimately, the enterprise feels like a great deal of fuss about not very much. Malick is attempting something most unusual in modern cinema. He is seeking to have a conversation with God (not necessarily the official Christian one with the beard and the robes, you understand).
Sadly, the questions he asks are, for the most part, the ones you’d expect to hear from a 12-year-old who’s just had his goldfish eaten by the cat. Why are we here? Why does God allow bad people to exist? More damaging still, some visualisations of these ponderings – a door-frame sits on a rocky hill – would have been cheesy enough to grace an ancient Supertramp LP cover.
Still, for all its rampaging flaws, The Tree of Lifedemands to be seen. The picture was roundly booed at its press screening yesterday morning. Supporters then responded with vigorous, lengthy applause. Any work of art that can raise those sorts of feelings is worth having.
