"Intimacy"
The Broker
Lyra's Brothers
Tori and The Lodge
The Holy Spider
"Especially"
◎ Secretary of the round head
The 75th Edition of the Festival de Cannes came to an end, the first time in three years that the Festival has been held as scheduled. With the gradual improvement of the covid-19 epidemic in France and the lifting of various restrictions, this edition of Cannes has finally returned to its former pomp and circumstance, with the number of participants significantly higher than last year. As Europe's premier film event, the Cannes Film Festival is home to some of the highest quality art films and author films in Europe and the world, and its main competition unit can almost be called a major weather vane for the world film industry outside of Hollywood.
Master two palme d'or
The most important event of this year's Cannes Film Festival is that Swedish director Ruben Ostlund won the Palme d'Or for the second time for his new film "Triangle of Sorrows". Five years ago, Österlund had already won the award for Square, when he was only 43 years old. Interestingly, the last time the award was awarded coincided with the 70th anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival, the organizing committee specially produced a diamond-encrusted trophy; This time coincided with the 75th anniversary, the organizing committee specially produced a pink rose quartz 18k gold diamond trophy, the two special trophies were all pocketed by Osterlund, and he became the luckiest Double Palme d'Or winner in history.
Like Square, Triangle of Sorrows remains a mixed-scorn work, but that didn't stop the linton-led jury from favoring the game. The film is divided into three chapters, giving people the impression of watching Picasso paint more than a dozen drafts of the bull in a row: first starting from the most ordinary details of life, then to a scene with complicated characters and complicated plots, and finally walking into a metaphor for the history of the entire human society, from simplicity to complexity and then into simplicity, the whole process is not only hilarious, but also creates a huge space for reflection. Ostrund's recent works have become increasingly complex, difficult to classify, and can even be said to have created a genre of absurd satire. They are neither comedy nor slapstick, but use precise and subtle observations of human behavior and deliberate overheated techniques to push the audience far out of the comfort zone of psychological feelings and question the nature of social relations.
Rookies are new enough
In addition to touting several of the world's top Mesozoic film creators, Artistic Director of the Cannes Film Festival, Tirière Fumao, continues to introduce new people from his "list of concubines" in a timely manner. However, judging from the development trend in recent years, although there are many new people, there are very few who can really be called "new talents". Their new works often lack the courage and energy shown by their first famous works, and there are certain fluctuations in the level.
For example, this year's Belgian young player Lucas De Haute and his work "Intimacy" that won the Jury Prize have received a lot of praise, but there is still a lot of room for improvement in terms of structural awareness and theme expression. The other two newcomer faces, Ali Abbasi and Leono Sehay, were also winners of the "One Kind of Attention" unit award in previous years, and this year's works "Holy Spider" and "Exotic Land" were shortlisted for the main competition unit, but these two works also tended to be mediocre social problem dramas, which lacked depth and lost style compared to the previous works, which is a pity.
On the contrary, the older generation of creatives who have been shortlisted for the main competition in Cannes for many years have shown even more amazing creativity this time: the Dane brothers have dedicated the most heterogeneous work of their careers, "Tory and The Lodge", and won the 75th Anniversary Award this year; The 84-year-old Polish director Jez Skolimovsky created the road film Donkey Call, which featured donkeys, which received numerous acclaim at Cannes and eventually won the Jury Prize; In addition, there are david konenberg, Claire Denis and other directors who have been excavated and admired by Cannes for many years to launch new works. These works may hardly be called the best works of these film authors, but they are one of the most characteristic, bold, and therefore controversial works in their creative sequences.
The Rise of Asian Cinema?
Among the 21 works shortlisted in the main competition of this year's film festival, five are from Asian or Middle Eastern (American) directors, accounting for nearly a quarter, which is not a small number. In East Asia, kore-eda and Park Chan-wook's new works were both shortlisted for the main competition and won awards, the former continuing the theme of "Thief Family" and helping South Korean national actor Song Kang-ho win the film emperor, and the latter winning the best director award for "The Determination to Break Up", making South Korea another big winner in this film festival outside of Ostlund.
In fact, it is Kore-eda, Park Chan-wook and Song Kang-ho who have been guests of Cannes for many years, not only the new works of the department will be shortlisted, but also invited to become members of the jury, so it is only a matter of time before they are awarded; It is not so much that the award means the "rise" of Asian films, but rather that after "Parasite" won the Palme d'Or, Europe's belated blessing and recognition of Asian films, and this recognition will inevitably continue the "strategy" and "stereotype" of European film festivals in film selection.
In the Middle East, the main competition of this year's festival selected three Islamic films, in addition to the above-mentioned "Holy Spider", there are also "Boys from Heaven" and "Lyra's Brothers". However, it is worth noting that of the three works, only "Lyra's Brothers" is produced by Iran and directed by Iran, and the main production funds of the other two films are from Northern Europe, and the creators are naturalized or settled in Northern Europe. Thus, Cannes's excavation of Asian cinema and filmmakers is still essentially aimed at supporting European cinema.
Admittedly, we do see in these films a very rare and rare social landscape in Middle Eastern cinema: "Holy Spider" is a genre of extreme religious forces within The Shiites in Iran, the game between secularism and religion, the underground pornography industry and the social status of women, although it is still relatively crude overall, and the technique is quite similar to the prototype of some kind of Hollywood blockbuster; "Boys from Heaven" mainly revolves around the confrontation between Sunni secular government and religious authority, creating three or four images that insist on truth, goodness and beauty, but these films are more or less conspiracy-like and spectacle to the Islamic world.
The only exception is "Lyra's Brothers", which not only provides a comprehensive and in-depth depiction of the bottom family in Iranian society, but also allows us to see the extent to which the sense of security at the bottom of the society under the sanctions of the United States against Iran has been destroyed, and the humble living situation of women under the traditional patriarchal family system. This expression is both a great distance from the Farhati-style social melodrama and creates a huge tension with our perception of other Iranian films. Because of this, the film also won the Fabisi Award from the Film Critics Association.
Gender, race, class
Since last year, the topic of gender has become the most important topic of the three major European film festivals, from "Titanium" to "Happening" to "Alcaraz", female filmmakers have won the highest honors in the three major film festivals, which also highlights the attention of the whole of Europe to this issue. The same is true of this year's Cannes Film Festival, where, with the exception of individual films, the vast majority of films in each section of the festival deal directly or indirectly with gender power relations.
Perhaps the most epochal part of this is the Ukrainian film Butterfly Vision, which focuses on the story of a female military expert who was raped by a Russian soldier: motherhood prompted her to give birth to a child, but her relationship with her husband deteriorated irrepressibly sharply, and the husband could only masturbate in extreme nationalist behavior and eventually commit suicide. However, in the end, we find that the heroine did not give birth to the child out of love, because the child was just born and she entrusted it to the adoptive family. The film's several twists and turns outline an extremely complex psychological state for us, which not only reflects the most current fate of women, but also can be seen as the shocking echo of the writer Alexievich's "No Women in War", and can also make people personally appreciate the tragic situation of everyone in the war.
The issue of race and refugees still occupies an important place in European film issues, and this issue is often associated with issues such as community and class, forming a more pluralistic and complex critique of social relations in the thinking of creators. In Christian Mongi's new work, Mr. Magnetic Resonance, two Sri Lankan migrant workers make waves in a small town in Romania, and the hero himself returns to the town after being abused while working in Germany. From here, we can see the complex hierarchy, gender, and religious makeup, and how far-right forces are expanding their territory step by step, turning seemingly innocent and harmless civilians into demons at their disposal.
Migrant workers often suffer extremely unfair treatment, sometimes risking their lives, such as in the Dane brothers' Torrey and The Lodge, where the two protagonists who came to Belgium from Ghana can only sing for a living in restaurants. But this is not their main business, in order to make money faster and return to the vicious smuggling facilitators (ironically these people come from community churches), they can only help belgians to start the dirtiest business. The most shocking thing about the film is that the moral dilemmas that usually play a significant part in their works have been completely erased, leaving only the threat lurking in the darkness and the protagonist who is constantly acting but knows nothing about the threat. This also makes "Torrey and Lodgeta" a psychological thriller film rather than their best moral drama, and the subversive creativity grows into a charming flower in the cracks.
Epidemics and psychiatric symptoms
Over the years, many films have begun to directly express the physical and psychological feelings brought by the epidemic, and more films, although not directly involved in the new crown epidemic, hope to have psychological or physical resonance with the audience during the epidemic by showing loneliness, illness and desire for the outside world.
The "Mediterranean Fever", which was screened in the "One Kind of Attention" unit and eventually won the best screenplay award in this unit, is such a film that directly reflects the repressed mental state of modern people. As the story progresses, we come to realize that the protagonist is severely depressed and wants to seek suicide, and the reasons for this include many aspects, such as his political depression of not being recognized as a Palestinian immigrant, the family depression of taking on child support in family relationships, the reversal of gender relations, and the social depression of lack of interpersonal communication without a fixed job. Although the film gives a picture of life that does not belong exclusively to the epidemic era, it is undoubtedly closely related to the isolated and lonely mental state of people under the epidemic.
If the epidemic has brought psychological and spiritual pain to the vast majority of people, then people with physical diseases are personally experiencing the threat of illness and death. "A Kind of Concern" section of the work "Especially" tells the story of a person suffering from lung fibrosis who refuses treatment and hopes to spend his last time in nature. In the film, the heroine suffers from breathing difficulties, and her husband's care for her is useless, until she sees the magnificent natural scenery of the Norwegian fjords on the Internet and decides to go alone. As time went on, her illness gradually worsened, but she was given the opportunity to re-experience life and life, and to gain indescribable freedom and peace beyond her past life and decaying flesh.
If the covid-19 pandemic has broken the current history and the "post-epidemic era" has quietly begun, then many creators are actually rethinking the relationship between man and nature and between people at this historical node, trying to find a certain balance under the framework of individualism and humanism.
It is no coincidence that the main competition unit and "Donkey Call" co-won the Jury Prize "Eight Mountains" and the director's bi-weekly unit of the award-winning work "Mountain" are both titled "Mountains", especially in "Mountain", the hero is far away from the world, discovers an unknown luminous creature between the snow peaks, and obtains a superpower in the mysterious creature that can make the arm shine transparently. The heroine who met pingshui did not fear this, but naturally accepted the "flaw" that had never been seen before. This is undoubtedly a reminder to the audience that no disease, whether physically or mentally, is not enough to isolate people from each other, and perhaps the terrifying virus of the new crown epidemic will also become the "light of enlightenment" for a new era of mankind.
In addition, this year's Cannes Film Festival is not short of pearls. For example, the main competition unit received enthusiastic but no results of the work "Torment on the Island". The film should be seen as a political film about the black-box operation of power, but it is not at all unfolding in the familiar, Gafras-esque way. It's a daily, casual, holidayy, dynamic political film unfolding in a resort, where politics no longer operates in a way that anyone is familiar with, but becomes a nude dance in the dim light of a nightclub: seductive, nihilistic, meaningless.
At the same time, a good film does not have to be grand epic or explore any social issues, and it may be enough to be able to write personal experiences in the way that comes from the bottom of their own hearts, such as the director's biweekly award-winning film "Sunny Morning". The title of Mia-Hansen Love's new work is taken from a small poem by the French poet Jacques Prevel, "A Clear Morning", which tells the self-contradiction of a lonely person: there seems to be a shadow outside the door, but no one appears; He is aware of his loneliness, but he also understands that he is not completely lonely – and this may be the inevitable fate of every film creator.