The Captive
Certain competition choices in Cannes make critics’ jaws drop. Sometimes it’s in awe, but way too often in disbelief. I choose to think the programmers invited Atom Egoyan to join the tight Palme d’Or race as a friendly gesture towards Canada’s film industry and having their relationship with TIFF in mind. Otherwise it would have to indicate they truly value his latest entry, The Captive, enough to put in on the same level with Mike Leigh and David Cronenberg’s achievements. This is simply impossible. Egoyan, who had the biggest professional blast in early nineties, follows the catastrophic strike of Devil’s Knot with this stinker, proving that sadly, as a filmmaker, he’s remained deeply buried in that past era’s mindset and aesthetic.
The idea of a dense drama about child abduction, the discovery of a pedophile network, and following a detective investigation parallel with the parents’ growing distress and disorientation, set in a picturesque remote Canadian countryside sounds like a ready made recipe for a captivating thriller, doesn’t it? But Egoyan’s disconnect, an inability to expand his take on things or adjust his creativity to the modern standards brutally brings it down. The Captive has a B-class genre TV-film flavor to it, even moreso because of its eighties aesthetic, dated perception of framing, camerawork, lighting, and use of music. It obviously distrusts its audience’s cognitive abilities, feeling the urge to depict everything as bluntly as possible. The unbearably loud, pompous score indicates danger without a miss, and the bad guy (Kevin Durand) is a pedophile cousin of The Silence of Lambs‘s Buffalo Bill, with an affection for classical music and hair gel.
Reality is not an issue for Egoyan. When the kidnapper steals Matthew’s trees (Ryan Reynolds plays the father – all actors seem rather misplaced and mishandled, sadly), somehow the tiny load is enough to mark at least a couple miles of the street, leading to the killer’s nest. If the previous sentence didn’t sound indicative enough, it’s worth adding that one of the bad guy’s associates wears a black wig and a hooker dress (sexy villain!) and is let in to a highly guarded, glamorous party as the only one without an invite. Her mission is – again, no surprises here, we’ve all watched Alias and Nikita – to secretly poison one of the characters’ water and discreetly switch their glasses. Yes, the only empty seat in the room is next to her victim. Yes, the viewers see the glass swapping in a theatrically staged series of close ups.
It ‘s hard to comprehend how on earth a film this heavy-handedly directed and overtly redundant in its willingness to indicate everything in an irritatingly theatrical manner could happen in 2014, less than a year after Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners so stylishly and creatively bent all the well-known rules of a child abduction drama.
Wild Tales
While Egoyan cuts the wound open and pours salt inside, Argentinian director Damián Szifrón looks at the gushing blood and has a blast. His Pedro Almodovar produced Wild Tales is an episodic macabresque with traces of the latter’s funkiness, a pinch of Tarantino, and brutal humor reminiscent of recent Israeli genre thrillers. It follows five separate stories that are similar in what the production describes as pushing themselves “towards the abyss, into the undeniable pleasure of losing control.”
Luckily, unlike Egoyan’s flop, here the characters might be losing it, but the director’s grip is firm. Szifrón is fully in charge of his absurd, bloody and wickedly dazzling universe that entertains the audience without a miss. The film competes for the Palme d’Or, yet somehow my gut feeling tells me it has no shot at the big prizes because it might be too much – some would take it as a compliment – fun. It seems to be the curse of Cannes: the juries tend to favor films with a more “serious” approach, seemingly perceiving the ability to entertain as a distraction from the “important” matters. It seems to be the case of Only Lovers Left Alive, Jim Jarmusch’s competition entry from last year. Loved by the audience, the film went virtually unnoticed by the judges. But here, in Cannes, where journalists are striving to catch a breath under the ceaseless flood of serious subject-matters and sophisticated filmmaking, a film that brings joy along with its quality can be truly appreciated.
Saint Laurent
Quality is something the cult designer Yves Saint Laurent valued the most, along with innovation. Bertrand Bonello’s Saint Laurent is this year’s second take on the famed creator’s oeuvre and, subjectively, more adequate in term of the cinematic approach. Unlike Jalil Lespert Yves Saint Laurent with Pierre Niney, the Gaspard Ulliel-led pic is less of a classic, narrative biopic, and rather an emotion-fueled, loosely knit attempt to grasp and portray the spirit of YSL’s creativity and mindset in the time of his company’s most intense blossoming, the 60s and 70s. The very title, Saint Laurent, distances itself from an actual person and points more into the direction of an idea, a phenomenon.
The lead is very well cast and Ulliel, whose facial features, however much prettier, do evoke a believable Laurentian aura, has done a great job preparing for the part. His gestures, intonation and body language are coherent and far from gimmicky. The impressive weight loss proved to be not only for show, but indeed a logical tool indispensable to fully get into the part’s mindset. Despite its luxurious, sleek look, Bonello’s method — non-chronological, parallel, inspired “moments” instead of a traditional storyline – position him closer to indie cinema. The film is over two hours long and will certainly bore those who don’t respond to the emotional palette it is displaying, as some conversations with fellow critics suggest. Saint Laurent is perhaps more like the velvet YSL valued so much – sleek, sensual and ethereal, yet not flattering for everyone.
The Salvation
Westerns might have lost their lead in the genre business, but have never really died. Being resuscitated sinusoidally over the decades, the last few years have been especially fruitful when it comes to varied reinventions of the seemingly old and rigid structure. John Hillcoat’s The Proposition and Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford are just two of those successful attempts. In The Salvation, Danish director Kristian Levering does not attempt to turn the codified structures upside down. Instead he delivers a very entertaining, pure breed, old school western with a modern twist – and mesmerizing casting including Mads Mikkelsen and Eva Green. These are two actors who are proficient when it comes to expressing emotions without dialogue. Eyes and facial muscles are very busy here, as it’s their twitches and blinks, tension/release that dictate the pace of this classically narrated yet still very contemporary film.
The story by acclaimed scriptwriter and director Anders Thomas Jenssen is a one of Jon (Mikkelsen), a Danish immigrant and ex-military who, after eight years in the United States, finally manages to arrange for his beloved wife and young son to join him. Soon after their arrival, both are brutally murdered and Jon, who avenged them by killing their odious perpetrator, becomes a target for a local deed collector, who turns out to be the deceased’s brother. Jensen managed to appropriate the story by introducing characters who are immigrants — and removing Native Americans from the picture almost completely. Indians are gone, all killed, but the fight doesn’t stop. Just that now it’s the whites who kill each other, each driven by what they consider just.
Eva Green creates a character that’s interesting in terms of the Western’s gender politics – a mute, mutilated woman who despite her handicap is as strong a fighter as the men who surround her, consciously using her appearance to her advantage, as bait or as a shield. Mikkelsen continues his lone-warrior-on-the-trail streak (Valhalla, Michael Kohlhaas), yet again creating an intense character as predictable and multidimensional as a western should allow. The film also gains a certain adequacy due to the way it portrays the distribution of power and corruption of morals under permanent persecution. Men with guns, who first use them and then think? Sounds strangely familiar, and, transplanted to modern America, not that funny anymore. Shot mostly in South Africa, The Salvation has great cinematography, atmospheric music, and an innate power that makes it a delightful screening, perfect for Cannes’ famed Midnight Screenings section.
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