The first film in the official Cannes film festival competition set the festival rolling with a roar of anguish, and will surely walk away with some prizes
We Need to Talk About Kevin
Director: Lynne Ramsay. Starring: Tilda Swinton, John C Reilly, Ezra Miller, Ashley Gerasimovich, Jasper Newell, Rock Duer. In competition. * * * * *
VOGUISH NOVELS all too rarely translate into worthwhile movies. The urge to stay faithful to the beloved text often hampers creativity. Enthusiastic hosannas should, thus, be put the way of Lynne Ramsay, Scottish director of austere gems such as Ratcatcherand Morvern Callar, for making such an imaginative, misanthropic, gut-wrenching film out of Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin. The first film to screen in the official Cannes competition, this unsettling puzzle-picture sets the festival rolling with a roar of anguish.
Considering the publicity surrounding Shriver’s novel, it is surely giving nothing away to explain that the film deals with the aftermath of a school massacre. The mournfully elongated Tilda Swinton stars as Eva Khatchadourian, the mother who, still living in the area of the atrocity, must endure daily taunts and occasional acts of vandalism. Told largely in flashback (the novel was an epistolary piece), Ramsay’s film demonstrates that the protagonist never quite got on with her troubled son. He screamed frantically as a baby (or did he?). He deliberately soiled his nappy to a late age (really?). He maliciously vandalised his mother’s redecorated study (or was he just trying to help?).
A literal-minded viewer would regard these parenthetical questions as absurd. Ramsay presents the son – played quite terrifyingly in teenage years by Ezra Miller – as a monster plucked straight from a horror film. The gorgeously stylised, constantly hyper-real visuals suggest, however, that we might be viewing events from the perspective of a troubled, not entirely disinterested observer.
Full credit must go to cinematographer Seamus McGarvey, the pride of Armagh, for investing the images with a pop-art vibrancy that allows every corner to throb with menace.
If you were searching for flaws you might argue that the picture is perhaps overly stylised. Swinton delivers a flawlessly brittle performance, but is she a little too grandly unreal to allow empathy or even sympathy? These are quibbles. The strongest praise one can heap on Ramsay’s film is to say that, though it leaves you confused, you feel the need to ponder the moral quandaries long after the credits have rolled.
If the film picks up no prizes in 10 days’ time then questions will be asked.
Midnight in Paris * * *
Sleeping Beauty *
Restless * *
LESS WELL received outside the United States than within, Woody Allen’s European films have always exhibited an overly romantic view of the world’s great cities.
Lord knows what the French audience made of the first sequence in the director's Midnight in Paris, which opened the event on Wednesday night. The Eiffel Tower, Montmartre, the Moulin Rouge: you may as well open a similar Irish event with shots of the Blarney Stone and frolicking leprechauns.
Happily, more self-aware than usual in such projects, Woody rapidly makes it clear that the film is actually about our need to invent idyllic versions of foreign places and distant times.
This is one of those Allen films in which a current star – remember John Cusack in Bullets over Broadwayand Kenneth Branagh in Celebrity– offers a quasi-impersonation of the great man. Owen Wilson plays a (you're way ahead of us) neurotic Hollywood writer holidaying with his ghastly wife (Rachel McAdams) in the city of love. Sometime after he arrives, he is spirited away to the 1920s, where he encounters Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso and – the only people who appreciate his story of time travel – a surrealist cabal that includes Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel.
He falls for Marion Cottilard’s model, but she regards his romanticisation of the 1920s as faintly absurd. Surely he would prefer La Belle Epoque.
Like a great many recent Allen projects, the script feels a little hurried and incomplete. But cheroot-scented, lost-generation Paris is attractively rendered and the film’s central argument – we can never treasure the present – very articulately expressed. All in all, a perfectly decent slab of late Allen.
After the triumph that was We Need to Talk About Kevin, the official competition plunged into queasy bathos with Julia Leigh's deranged Sleeping Beauty.
Is it too early in the festival to drag out the p-word? There’s no avoiding it, alas.
The debut feature from an acclaimed Australian novelist, Sleeping Beautyis nice to look at, elegantly edited and utterly, utterly, pretentious. Doing nothing to distinguish herself from a pretty block of wood, Emily Browning plays a student who moonlights as a high-class prostitute in a universe apparently modelled on Stanley Kubrick's wretched Eyes Wide Shut. On one job, dressed in lingerie that reveals the top of her nipples, she serves fois gras to hoity-toity men in dinner jackets. Later, she allows herself to be drugged unconscious while more posh men fondle her and talk dirty. "Your vagina will not be penetrated," the absurdly stilted madam explains. "Your vagina is a temple." A straight face is kept throughout.
If the film were directed by a man – with its ogling of an actress who only recently appeared in Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events– then it would, most likely, be flushed down the nearest drain before contact was made with the police. Leigh presumably has some feminist thesis mind. Sadly, the film made this writer feel slightly ill.
In movies such as Elephantand Paranoid Park, Gus Van Sant has allowed his own camera to go to some inappropriate places. But the main problem with Restless, which opened the Un Certain Regard section last night, is an inclination towards cuteness and off-the-peg eccentricity.
The film is the latest addition to one of cinema’s most unlovely genres: the sick-pic.
Mia Wasikowska (currently more ubiquitous than oxygen) stars as a pretty young girl who, despite suffering from a terminal brain tumour, remains in good enough spirits to romance a young boy – this is a film about odd people, but it is not an odd film – who wears Edwardian frock coats in the house and dressing gowns out of doors.
Everyone in it is good looking. The score is nice. But, in its supposed attempts to address the great unknown, it is bogus to the point of offensiveness.
Read Reel News from Cannes in The Tickettoday
