[COLUMN] Darren’s Cannes Diary, Day One - ‘Yes We Cannes’ | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Hello! So, this year I’m going to the Cannes International Film Festival. It’s my first time, and I’m very excited. It’s a real “film critic bucket list” thing.

We thought it might be worth running a diary on the Patreon covering the films that I’ll be catching while here, in case people were interested. Plans are for the diary to run roughly daily, looking back on each day’s films. While the ticketing system is a bit… chaotic, in the next few days this should include reviews of Furiosa, Megalopolis, Kinds of Kindness, Oh, Canada and Bird. Also, a Nicolas Cage surfing movie. With a bit of luck, I’ll also get a chance to see Horizon and The Shrouds, but let’s not make promises we can’t keep.

The opening days of film festivals are interesting beasts. As journalists and celebrities pour in from around the world, there’s an obvious desire to keep things moving along and not to schedule anything too hectic. If you have the good fortune to arrive early, it’s a wonderful opportunity to soak in the Cannes atmosphere, both as a hub for film and as a destination of itself. After all, the next few days won’t afford much opportunity for beach walks and yacht-spotting.

The first film that screened as part of the festival – although, crucially, not the opening film – was a beautiful restoration of Abel Gance’s 1927 classic Napoléon (★★★★☆), overseen by Georges Mourier and featuring an evocative new score courtesy of Radio France. Well, the first four hours of Abel Gance’s Napoléon, because the thing about that film is that it’s big. Cut together from a four-hour version and a nine-hour version, Gance settled on a nice solid seven hours for his historical epic.

Napoléon has the sort of magic you only get from 1920s silent films. By that point, cinema had been around long enough that it had a basic form and language, but not so long that its borders had become rigidly set. It was still possible to get movies that seem to push at the boundaries of what a film could be. Napoléon is such a movie, a film so big that it threatens to break the edge of the frame.

Indeed, Gance’s adaptation of the life of the iconic French figure features a climax so epic in scope that it requires three projectors running simultaneously to show it. It’s interesting to wonder whether the logistical challenges involved in such a screening contributed to the decision to just screen the first half at the festival. Still, it’s hard to complain too much. These four hours are plenty of movie on their own terms.

It is fascinating to watch a silent movie that so effectively codifies so much of what would become the template for the classic “biopic.” This is a movie that begins with the title character’s school days, and follows him through his career and ascent. Gance is very eager to show his work, with various title cards handily signed “(Hist.)” to indicate that they are drawn from real events and even boasting within the film itself that the scenes in Corsica were shot in the same houses where he lived.

Inevitably, given the proximity of this remastering to the release, the default comparison will be to Ridley Scott’s recent examination of the icon, even if this four-hour epic ends where that film begins, with the siege of Toulon. The two films are interesting as a study in contrasts. While Scott presents his central figure as an instinct-driven opportunist who happens to be in the right place at the right time for his own advancement, Gance frames his subject as an instrument of destiny and of France.

The film embraces this idea through its editing. The reign of terror becomes a stormy sea for Napoléon to navigate, the French flag as his sail to guide him through the uncertainty. Double and triple exposures overlay the title character’s face with sweeping vistas and crowds, as if to suggest that Napoléon is one with both the land and the people that produced him. There is something of national myth about all this.

Throughout the biopic, Gance frames his subjects – even in tight and expressive close-ups – with religious and mythic objects surrounding them. It’s rare to see a major character who isn’t standing in the shadow of a flag, a crucifix or an eagle. Napoléon is, in this telling, the manifestation of some primal force, a light in the darkness, guided by fate. Napoléon is rarely seen without his hat, even as a child. He is a silhouette as much as a man, a shadow cast across history.

It's powerful stuff. The lack of dialogue underscores the power of the image in this mythmaking. At the film’s climax, Gance cuts back to the leader’s childhood, reminding us that Napoléon has been preparing for this moment since his school days, even if this battle has higher stakes than simple snowball fights that opened the film. That half-hour school day prologue ended with Napoléon asleep atop a cannon, draped in an officer’s coat. What else could he have grown up to be?

Of course, these sorts of historical films are often about the times that produce them as much as the times that they depict. Gance’s Napoléon feels like a product of 1920s Europe, a nationalist fable frustrated by bureaucracy and indecision. Indeed, the film suggests Napoléon’s victory at Toulon is largely down to his opponents’ division. Their war council is a bickering “Tower of Babel” in contrast to Napoléon’s insistence on “order, calm, silence.”

Gance’s Napoléon is a movie longing for a Great Man, a leader not chosen by politicians or royalty but risen through the ranks and appointed by the soldiers who march for him. It’s a fascinating snapshot of the mood of the movie’s moment, and an illustration of the genre’s larger tendencies towards hagiography that would stretch far into the future. In this telling of the tale, destiny didn’t just bring Napoléon his lamb chop, but the whole damn farm.

None of this is to take away from the joy of the film itself. Even over four hours, Gance’s style remains endearingly playful, even to modern eyes. The scale and spectacle is awe-inspiring, but the film is also formally inventive and occasionally even cheeky. It’s fun, for example, to see a movie from 1927 use animations to depict complex strategic thought, and the film even has fun with its title cards during the enemy war council. It’s a very fine film to start the Festival.

It has been a long and strange journey for writer and director Quentin Dupieux. He made quite an impression as the director of cinematic oddities like Rubber, a movie about a malevolent pyrokinetic tire, and Deerskin, in which a middle-aged man’s obsession with a leather jacket turns deadly. At a time when many directors are slowing down, Dupieux has directed no fewer than five feature films in the past three years. The fifth of them, The Second Act (★★★☆☆), opens the Festival.

As with most of Dupieux’s work, The Second Act treats the fourth wall as a screen door. His recent film Yannick focused on a gunman hijacking a play mid-performance and forcing the actors to perform a script that he was writing in real time. The Second Act operates on a similar principle. It is ostensibly a comedy of manners about an uncomfortable meal at a diner named Le Deuxième Acte, but it quickly becomes clear that it is also a film that has come off the rails.

The movie’s core cast consists of Léa Seydoux, Vincent Lindon, Louis Garrel, and Raphaël Quenard. All four are playing actors who are playing characters within the film, but reality keeps intruding into the frame. Actors begin improvising dialogue, attempt to walk off the project, accuse each other of drug use, and even re-negotiate with their agents. The line between fiction and reality doesn’t so much blur as it evaporates. What is performance and what is authentic? Is there any discernible difference between the two?

This might sound very convoluted and complicated, but it’s to Dupieux’s credit that he manages the keep the film firmly “whimsical” rather than “frustrating.” The Second Act is a surprisingly light film, clocking in at just over 80 minutes and neatly structured into three acts; the actors arriving at the eponymous diner, the actors at the eponymous diner, and the actors leaving the eponymous diner. Dupieux never allows himself to get too caught up in being clever; he’s content to be amusing.

That said, there is a sense in which Dupieux is perhaps biting off more than he can chew here. There is something inherently self-important about The Second Act. In the early scenes, the director (whether Dupieux himself or some stand-in) is conspicuously absent as the film seems to unravel. Later on, it is revealed that the film-within-a-film will be “the first film to be written and directed by AI.” In some ways, The Second Act feels very much like a director working through an existential crisis.

As light as the film is in execution, it also feels very consciously and very aggressively about the big existential issues that it is about: cancel culture, #metoo, generative artificial intelligence, this layered self-aware hyperreality that we all occupy constantly, and the sense in which the arts might ultimately be entirely meaningless as the world burns around us. However, watching the film, it’s never entirely clear that these worries have cohered into a cogent point.

As mentioned above, Dupieux has made five films in the last three years. That would have been an impressive rate of productivity even before the pandemic. There’s a sense that The Second Act might have been stronger if he’d eased his foot off the gas just a little bit, and let the idea properly gestate. It might also simply be the case that Dupieux's reality-bending absurdism is more appealing when it feels a little less self-important.

Still, The Second Act benefits from a good cast, a set of solid and well-observed jokes, and it moves at a decent clip. It’s solid, it’s fun, and it doesn’t insist upon itself, which helps the self-aware comedy go down easier, even without a grand unifying idea to tie it all together. Not a bad start, all things considered.