Karina on SpoutBlog

Under discussion:

The Best of Youth  (2003)

It’s Che day. Steven Soderbergh’s Guevara epic has its world premiere this evening at 6:30, and as of this 9am writing, ticket-less gawkers are already lining up outside the Palais, some with Cuban cigars, all with signs declaring their need tickets. From a press and industry perspective, people are definitely talking about the film, but everyone seems less interested in what’s going to be on screen tonight than in how it’ll eventually be seen.

Che is screening here for the press and the public as a single, four-hour film, but it’s playing in the market for buyers as two separate pieces, The Argentine and The Guerilla. This leaves open a number of possibilities: a) the film(s) could be released franchise style, ala Kill Bill; b) the two films could be picked up by different distributors (unlikely, but not impossible); and c) one half of Che could be seen theatrically whilst the other does not. Rumor has it that the second half of the story is currently in better shape than the first; it remains to be seen what would be lost if half of Che was demoted to straight-to-DVD.

And then there’s the competition. The competing film so far most popular with critics is probably Arnaud Desplechin’s Un Conte De Noel, a messy masterpiece of a family drama that––we think––has absolutely no shot of impressing a jury under Sean Penn’s mandate to give the Palme D’Or to a filmmaker “very aware of the times in which he lives.” If we’re to take that pullquote to mean that Penn intends to select a film with Something to Say about the horrors of war, than Waltz with Bashir is the only competition feature to screen thus far that really applies, and buzz on that one seems to be petering out as the fest moves along. There’s certainly room for Che to make an impression, especially on a jury with more than one prominent Hollywood name, who may be inclined to hail one of their own; again, as of this writing, it’s too early to say whether or not the film will deserve it.

One film that *doesn’t* deserve plaudits, but which may be able to ride the wave of relevancy to release nonetheless, is Born in 68, an 173 minute French prestige film screening in the Marche. Laetitia Casta stars as a young libertine who becomes involved with two student wannabe revolutionaries in Paris in May 1968. The three move to a farm and start a commune and have babies and make a lot of expository statements about whether or not they’re Doing Anything For The Cause. After the first hour, the film moves through years at a laughable pace (watch Baye’s hair become progressively grayer so that she doesn’t have to act!), and eventually tracks the children born on the commune through the 80s and 90s.

There’s potentially a thread of interesting critique going on here: the 60s counter culture was in theory about changing the world, but in practice, it was really about sex, drugs and theory; future generations picked up the mantle, but left the theory behind, dispensing with the charade that a youthful interest in politics is anything but excuse to party. Casta’s son celebrates the fall of the Berlin Wall by hooking up at a gay bar to the sound of “99 Luftbaloons,” but is this any worse than his mom, responding to the riots of ‘68 by abandoning Paris in order to make babies, goat cheese, and have stony orgies? Interesting stuff, but unfortunately, the film doesn’t really take it up, preferring instead to indulge in the soap opera aspects of the story (although, I must admit: when said gay character announced in the late 80s that he was waiting for the results of some blood tests, I walked out). Hell, who am I to complain––at least it makes for a lot of nudity.

Born in 68 isn’t terribly made––it’s actually shot rather beautifully, although the script could use some work––but it is offensively milquetoast. It’s basically the French The Best of Youth, which was in turn the Italian Forrest Gump. I guess we’re looking at a new genre: the Overlong Ensemble Piece Condensing 40 Years of a Single Country’s History As Seen By Innocents With A Knack For Showing Up At The Right Place At The Right Time. The fact that only one of these movies is blatantly about a person with mental deficiencies is only a technicality.

Under discussion:

La vie moderne (Modern Life)  (2008)

La Vie Moderne, playing here on the Un Certain Regard sidebar, is the third documentary portrait of a group of rural French dairy farmers that Raymond Depardon has made this decade, and as such, comparisons between Depardon’s overall project and Michael Apted’s 7 Up series are not unapt. But where Apted’s seven films across forty years have come to define a changing Britain through the personal evolutions of a single generation, Depardon paints a portrait of a region and a way of life that seems on the verge of almost certain collapse due to nothing more than the natural passage of time and collision of generations. Taking on the triple role of interviewer, cameraman and narrator, the filmmaker’s affection for and rapport with his subjects is obvious, his tenacious patience a welcome contrast to the aggression employed by so many self-referential documentarians.

Depardon’s style of inquiry certainly requires more of an investment from his audience than fans of contemporary crowd-pleaser non-fiction might be used to, but it’s an investment that pays off. Where coarser filmmakers approach their subjects with laser-guided precision, essentially turning each question rhetorical, Depardon simply sets up a camera and has a conversation. In long, often unbroken takes, he slowly, gently chips away at his subject’s defenses until, apparently without realizing, they begin to unpack their own statements and reveal their true meanings

The film is structured as a year-long roadtrip. Through footage shot on a camera mounted to Depardon’s dashboard, the filmmaker takes several minutes in between each location to envelop us into the terrain ahead of his destination, as Depardon goes from farm to farm and family to family, catching up (and catching us up) on what went on whilst he was away. It’s a documentary in which no event is actually directly documented; each subject simply sits down in front of Depardon’s camera and explains their version of events past and present, and a few months or years later, Depardon comes back to repeat the process and track how things have changed. More than anything else, this is a movie about the passage of time.

The over all mood is somber, resigned. A once-dominant culture has become a sub-culture, and from there it’s petering out completely as patriarchy and matriarchs die. The younger farming families send their kids to boarding school and encourage the children who stay home to avoid the family business. Without family connections, those who wish to become farmers find it impossible. This is partially due to lack of demand, but there’s also the question of authenticity and legitimacy.The young mother from Lyon who wants to build a goat cheese business seems like a carpetbagger compared to the lifers caught on Depardon’s camera, who have never lived elsewhere and never contemplated an alternate career.

There’s not a superfluous moment in the film, but most of the Moderne’s core ideas come across most beautifully in the narrative thread about the Privat family, who have appeared in each of Depardon’s farmer films. Brothers Marcel and Raymond are in their 80s, and though both still tend to their goat and sheep daily. When the film begins, nephew Alain has just married a woman he met via personal ad, and has moved his new wife and stepdaughter into a separate house on the Privat farm. Alain’s uncles never married, and they bristle at the introduction of an independently-minded woman an her young daughter into this “family of bachelors.” Within a long, funny and seemingly unedited single-camera interview, Depardon gently breaks down the Privats’ polite defenses. “I don’t like being pushed around,” Marcel finally complains. The threat posed by Alain’s wife to Marcel and Raymond’s solitude and autonomy is a neat metaphor for the anxieties that run spoken and unspoken throughout the entire film, about the encroachment of technology on tradition and the passage of time.

My first couple of nights in Cannes, I was in screenings until almost midnight, and then I’d go to meet the people I’m staying with at the Grand Hotel, where we’d have drinks and then eventually share a long cab ride back to our place. The Grand is, apparently, Where Everyone Goes, which has it’s charms, but it also inevitably results in 30 minute waits amongst a partially-tuxedoed mob around the bar in order to have the privilege of paying 10 Euros (about $17, I think) for a single cocktail. Apparently, it wasn’t always like this. “Where’s the Cannes dive bar?” I wondered aloud to a group of veterans. The answer: “The Grand WAS the dive bar.” Whoops.

So when I heard that Alamo Drafthouse and Fantastic Fest founder Tim League was planning on throwing a renegade karaoke party in Cannes last night, I really, really wanted to see him pull it off. But it seemed impossible. So what if he had brought his portable karaoke system all the way from Austin? Where was he going to find a bar––in Cannes, during Cannes––that would be amenable and available to a bunch of scrappy Americans looking to scratch a drunken irony itch? And with the exchange rate being what it is, how would any of us be able to afford the amount of alcohol necessary to fuel such an endeavor?

But he pulled it off.

It was a triumph of collaboration. Instead of a bar, Tim set up shop in a falafel place called Twins, which agreed to stay open until 2 and sell wine and cans of beer for 2 Euros. He borrowed a microphone from Salon.com’s Andrew O’Hehir––the same tiny, directional mic that Andrew uses to record podcasts. I don’t remember where they said they got the P.A., but I think I remember someone saying it had to be returned to someone at the Finish Film Society at the end of the night. And filmmaker and sometime Spout blogger Michael Lerman sent out emails to spread the word.

The crowd spilled out of the tiny Twins and filled the cobblestone street, blending with the throngs pouring out of the Petit Mejestic at the end of the block. Eventually, someone from that hotel came around and huffily stacked their tables and chairs adjacent to Twins. No one left just because they couldn’t sit down. Brit Withey of the Denver Film Society shot an iPhone video of me performing “Love is a Battlefield,” which I sincerely hope never sees the light of day. Lloyd Kaufman showed up at one point, and Tim grabbed the microphone and begged the Troma genius to sing. I tried to stop him as he made his escape, and he promised me he was just going to an ATM and would be right back. Lloyd Kaufman lied to me.

Sometime around 1:30, just as Glenn Kenny was gearing up to sing “Mack the Knife,” the cops arrived. Something about noise complaints. They said we could have one more song, and Tim tried to get the whole crew to join in on a mass sing-a-long of “We Are the World.” No one was into it––at the end of the day, no one really ever wants to sing “We Are the World.” Of course, it didn’t matter––any party broken up by uniformed officials counts as an unqualified success.

My camera is broken, so I didn’t get any pictures of the festivities (hence the above graphic). If you’ve got any or have seen any (preferably less incriminating for Your Blogger than that iPhone video), let us know in the comments.