Karina on SpoutBlog

Who would have thought, in 2006, when Old Joy spent a year slowly gathering critical steam after having been all but ignored at Sundance, that Kelly Reichardt’s next film would occasion an item in PEOPLE Magazine? “Michelle Williams Dazzles at Cannes Film Festival,” goes the headline of the story by Brenda Rodriguez. Last night’s Wendy & Lucy red carpet was the first that the actress walked since the death of former partner Heath Ledger, and for the tabloids that’s a major hook. Looking down from the balcony last night at the Debussy, it was a trip to watch the Chanel-clad former Dawson’s Creek star stand on the stage at one end of a line that included Reichardt, Old Joy/Wendy & Lucy producer Anish Savjani, and filmmaker/Wendy & Lucy producer and co-star Larry Fessenden.

When a film this small gets thrust under a spotlight this bright, you worry about that the movie itself will be overwhelmed. I do hope this unlikely attention helps Wendy & Lucy get seen, but coming in with high expectations(Old Joy was one of my favorite films of its year), I was a bit underwhelmed.

Here, as in Old Joy, Reichardt is concerned with a “normal” person’s collision with life on the margins of society. Williams plays Wendy, a young woman driving with her dog Lucy to Alaska to try to find work at a canning factory. When the film begins, she’s low on cash but at least she has a plan, and her run-in around a bonfire with an apparent bunch of hippie vagrants (including Joy star Will Oldham) suggests that permanent rootlessness is not part of it. But Wendy’s car breaks down before she can get out of town, and over a series of days one thing goes wrong after another, ultimately forcing Wendy to abandon all plans in order to survive.

Anti-costumed as an unassuming hipster (short brown hair, sneakers, hoodie), Williams slips seamlessly into the Reichardt’s familiar naturalism, to the point where even when the story requires hysterics, they seem real. And the bleakness of the film’s suburban Pacific Northwest locations effectively heightens Wendy’s increasing anxiety and hopelessness. But there was a hypnotic quality to Old Joy that’s missing here, sparked by the central relationship’s constantly complex combination of tension, melancholy, frustration, set in a climate of transcendent beauty. Wendy & Lucy has the bleak, but it never explores the light. It hits its single tone perfectly, but it’s still a single tone.

Philippe Garrel’s La Frontière de l’aube may be falling to the same fate. This is the first Garrel film to make it to Cannes since 1983, and his presence here was apparently not welcome. As you know, I think the movie is great; many, many people do not, The premiere crowd gave the virtually de rigueur standing ovation, but the press screening ended with boos. Variety trashed it, with Leslie Felperin’s brashly dismissive review teaching us that using the word “bitch” to describe a female protagonist is apparently compatible with the publication’s patented Slanguage. It’s that old double-edged sword: if all goes well, a festival like Cannes can be the platform of an independent filmmaker’s dreams, but a single press screening-gone-bad can make for a crippling comedown.