[COLUMN] Darren’s Cannes Diary, Day Eleven - Rendezvous avec George Lucas | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

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2024-05-27 14:00:13

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The second Friday technically marks the end of the Cannes Film Festival. Sure, there are screenings and events on the Saturday – including the catch-up screenings, the closing ceremony and the awards – but the last new films to premiere at Cannes premiere on the Friday. As a result, there is something of a buzz around the day.

As these diary entries have discussed, part of the appeal of going to Cannes isn’t just the films themselves. It’s the experience of the festival, taking everything in. So that has meant trips to the Marché and to the Immersive Competition, along with red-carpet premieres and classic screenings, just trying to convey a sense of what the festival actually feels like. After all, one can watch most of these movies from the comfort of one’s own home, if you’re willing to wait long enough.

So, on the last day of the festival, it seemed like a good opportunity to attend one of the big interviews, Rendezvous avec George Lucas. Lucas was receiving an honorary Palme this year, and part of that process involves sitting down for a ninety-minute interview talking about his life and career, his legacy and his movies. Meryl Streep had done a similar sit-down at the start of the festival, and there are worse things to do in Cannes than spend an hour-and-a-half with a screen legend.

Lucas occupies a weird space in the cultural landscape, and it’s fascinating to see him at the same festival as filmmakers of a similar generation like Francis Ford Coppola, Paul Schrader, Kevin Costner, and even David Cronenberg. Those are all directors whose films (and even interviews) suggest that they are working through some sort of existential crisis, whether personal or professional – or both. As Lucas took to the stage, in a blue shirt, pants, and sneakers, that was very much not his vibe.

If anything, the only filmmaker of a comparable age who seems anywhere near as comfortable at Cannes as George Lucas was Ron Howard introducing his documentary, Jim Henson Idea Man. Then again, this was always Lucas’ unique energy. Lucas never seemed driven to revolutionize the economics of the industry in the same way as Coppola. He never seemed to yearn for the awards validation sought by Spielberg or Scorsese. Lucas just tended to do what interested him.

This was very much the tone of the interview. Lucas was friendly and cordial, but he was also marching to the beat of his own drum. At one point, as the interviewer attempted to guide him towards Star Wars, Lucas politely ignored the question and clarified that he hadn’t yet finished talking about American Graffiti. To be clear, the tone was never confrontational or aggressive. It was just a filmmaker who was operating on his own time and at his own pace.

To speak personally for a moment, Lucas was never really “my guy” among “the Movie Brats.” Of the five, I’ve always been more drawn to Spielberg, Scorsese, Coppola, and even DePalma both as filmmakers and personalities. However, in my years as a film critic, I’ve grown to respect Lucas’ willingness to be frank and candid – and often unapologetic – in stating his opinion, even when I firmly disagree with that opinion.

Lucas has never seemed as concerned with others’ opinions of his work or his artistry as contemporaries like Spielberg and Scorsese. There is something undeniably refreshing in that. Lucas is soft-spoken and polite, but he’s also comfortable in his own skin. As a result, he’s always an interesting interview subject, as the answers are rarely couched in double-speak or ambiguity. When Lucas says something, it’s easy to accept that it’s because Lucas believes it.

So it was fun to hear Lucas remain adamant on certain points of contention between himself and the Star Wars fandom, such as his insistence that Star Wars is “for kids” and his refusal to release anything but the dirty old prints of the original Star Wars movies. In the midst of a festival that seems to suggest that older generation of studio filmmaker is navigating a series of existential nightmares, it was reassuring to know that George Lucas is entirely comfortable being George Lucas. Good for him.

In the midst of a film festival, it can be difficult to separate a narrative around a film from the film itself. This is especially the case with The Seed of the Sacred Fig (★★☆☆☆), the latest film from veteran Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof. The film arrived in Cannes with a lot of buzz and excitement. Shortly before the festival began, it was announced that Rasoulof had been sentenced to a public flogging and eight years in prison for his public statements and filmmaking.

As the festival began, it was announced that Rasoulof had fled Iran. There were rumors the festival had scheduled the premiere of his latest film, The Seed of the Sacred Fig, as the penultimate film of the competition in the hope that it would give Rasoulof time to make his way into Europe and to Cannes for a triumphant homecoming. Indeed, it seems entirely possible that the only reason The Seed of the Sacred Fig wasn’t the closing film was the possibility that he might not make it.

It’s a remarkable story, and one that is almost tailor-made for an international film festival. The Iranian film industry is remarkable, because the country has become a bastion of artistic expression largely in resistance to the nation’s authorities. In 2012, Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb’s This is Not a Film was famously smuggled out of Iran to Cannes hidden inside a birthday cake. Rasoulof’s previous film, There is No Evil, shot in secret to avoid government censorship.

This is the paradox of modern Iranian cinema. The events that inspire some of the nation’s more urgent modern cinema are the ones subject to the most scrutiny. The Seed of the Sacred Fig is built around the death of Mahsa Amini in September 2022, a woman reportedly beaten by the police for refusing to wear the hijab. These same events inspired Guy Nattiv and Zar Amir Ebrahimi’s Tatami, which premiered at Venice last year and which also had to be shot in secret.

It’s hard to overstate how seismic and revolutionary this feels, and the palpable anticipation that such a narrative creates around a film. This is a movie about a director who has had to flee his homeland because the authorities are so threatened by the art that he made. He is producing a work so urgent and so vital that it speaks to that culture of repression and violence – a film that had to be shot in such secrecy that even the cast didn’t know of the director’s involvement.

With such context, the film itself becomes largely irrelevant. The film’s mere existence feels like a miracle, and the presentation of its director at Cannes feels like living proof of the power of cinema as an artform. Setting aside the actual content or quality of The Seed of the Sacred Fig, this is the perfect closing statement for the Cannes Film Festival. It’s proof that cinema matters as an artform, that it can speak truth to power, and that it can survive in the face of incredible repression.

With all of this in mind, there was never any real possibility that The Seed of the Sacred Fig could live up to the narrative around The Seed of the Sacred Fig. The film follows an Iranian family caught in the midst of the protest movement that emerged in the wake of Amani’s death. Iman (Missagh Zareh) has just been appointed an investigator for the Iranian authorities, on his way to being made a judge. His daughters, Sana (Setareh Maleki) and Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami), are students.

The Seed of the Sacred Fig runs nearly three hours. The first ninety minutes or so are given to sketching a portrait of the situation in Iran. Much of the movie is shot in interiors, very obviously a reflection of the cast and crew’s need to keep production a secret, but these sequences are interspaced with actual footage from the real-life protests, depicting the brutality and the violence employed by the authorities in dealing with the opposition.

This opening stretch can be a little clumsy and heavy-handed. To its credit, the film doesn’t shy from the horrors visited upon students – there’s an extended and unsettling sequence of buckshot being removed from a young woman’s (Niousha Akhshi) face. However, the film also seems to look for “perfect victims.” The movie stresses that these victims were just bystanders caught up in the marches, rather than allowing them to be protestors themselves. The women are unimpeachable.

However, the film runs into trouble in its second half, as it descends into a particularly clumsy parable for the situation in Iran. On being appointed investigator, Iman was issued a firearm. However, when the firearm goes missing, Iman descends into paranoia. Convinced that his family have betrayed him, he imposes a series of increasingly totalitarian measures on the management of his own household, often seeming to want to pull the women in his life back into some imagined and idealized past.

This isn’t a bad hook for a film, but it’s also a very strange structural choice. The Seed of the Sacred Fig spends ninety minutes explicitly depicting and explaining the state of modern Iran, and then transforms into a ninety-minute parable for the situation that it just explained in great detail. If anything, the narrative might work better flowing in the opposite direction, extrapolating outward from the family to the larger state.

The Seed of the Sacred Seed then quickly descends into a jumble of ideas that don’t really cohere, building to a climax that is – by turns – The Shining meets Scooby-Doo. The movie begins as something vital, urgent, specific, and contemporary and then collapses into a clumsy genre exercise. Of course, it’s a miracle that The Seed of the Sacred Fig exists (and was screened) at all. It may have been asking too much that it live up to its own narrative.

That said, The Seed of the Sacred Fig is at least a more interesting object than the actual closing film of the competition, Michel Hazanavicius’ The Most Precious of Cargoes (★★☆☆☆). Hazanavicius is a very strange director. He is an Oscar-winning director for his work on The Artist, one of those movies that feels like it has seen its reputation and legacy diminished by actually winning Best Picture. However, Hazanavicius never embraced Hollywood, instead returning to the French film industry.

Hazanavicius occupies a strange space between comedy and prestige. Before The Artist, he was most notable for his two OSS 117 films, spy spoofs starring Jean Dujardin. His work since The Artist has included a segment in the anthology sex comedy The Players and the zombie comedy Final Cut, a French remake of One Cut of the Dead. He has also, however, directed The Search, a bleak war drama starring Annette Bening and Bérénice Bejo.

The Search feels important here, because it was a loose remake of the 1948 American film of the same name, a movie about the displaced orphans of the Second World War that “has long sat on the periphery of Holocaust film.” With The Most Precious of Cargoes, Hazanavicius moves right from the periphery of Holocaust film into its center. A beautifully animated movie about unimaginable atrocity, The Most Precious of Cargoes is the most twee Holocaust movie since Life is Beautiful.

The Most Precious of Cargoes focuses on an anonymous woodcutter (Grégory Gadebois, replacing Gérard Depardieu) and his wife (Dominique Blanc), who live near a train line which runs to Auschwitz. One morning, the wife finds an abandoned baby in the snow, thrown from the train carriage in a desperate attempt to spare her the horrors of the concentration camps. Against the woodcutter’s advice, the wife takes the child in and decides to raise her as their own.

Before continuing any further, it is worth acknowledging that it is entirely possible to construct an animated movie about the Holocaust. Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus remains one of the most compelling and effective studies of the horror. Animated films like Waltz with Bashir can grapple with truly unsettling and nightmarish ideas, perhaps even more effectively than live action. So there is nothing inherently wrong with the idea of making an animated film about the Holocaust.

Still, The Most Precious of Cargoes is achingly and earnestly sweet in a way that doesn’t reconcile with the material. The movie opens with self-aware narration (Jean-Louis Trintignant) joking about how much they hate cliché stories, before the film embraces an incredibly cliché story. Alexandre Desplat’s score shamelessly tugs at the heart strings, eager to guide the audience through the film’s emotional arc with little room left for the viewer to process what is happening on their own terms.

The Most Precious of Cargoes ultimately falls into the same trap as Life is Beautiful, attempting to construct a triumphant feel-good narrative about events so horrific as to exist almost beyond human comprehension. The film is full of shockingly misguided moments, perhaps most obviously a closing monologue that clearly aspires to the romantic sentiment that “this is an imaginary story… aren’t they all?” while dealing with a historical atrocity that very clearly wasn’t imaginary.

The Most Precious of Cargoes wasn’t technically the last film of the festival. That honor fell to Peter Chan’s She’s Got No Name (★★★☆☆), a Chinese true-crime historical feature that screened outside of competition. However, it’s interesting how the mood can shift dramatically from one screening to the next. The three evening screenings of The Most Precious of Cargoes were packed out. In contrast, there were maybe three dozen people in total at the critics’ screening of She’s Got No Name.

This more relaxed (and late-night) atmosphere afforded me the opportunity to strike up a conversation with one of the journalists in attendance, a Chinese writer from Shanghai. It’s just worth sharing this detail because they also conveyed to me – after the screening – that apparently the English and French subtitles for She’s Got No Name were almost comically out of step with the actual Mandarin dialogue in the film itself.

The bulk of She’s Got No Name is set in Japanese-occupied Shanghai during the Second World War. When the dismembered corpse of Big Bear (Eric Wang) is found, his wife Zhan Zhou (Zhang Ziyi) is accused. However, the brutal methods employed by police inspector Xue Zhiwu (Lei Jiayin), along with questions about the murder weapon and the difficulty recovering the body’s head, cast doubt on the official narrative of the crime.

It is undoubtedly reductive – although a little funny – to consider She’s Got No Name as “a Chinese Zodiac.” Indeed, some of the archetypes even map across the two films. These are epic historical studies of true crime cases focused on the details that slip through the cracks, populated by washed-up detectives and curious citizens, building towards the vaguest sense of resolution and closure decades after the fact.

Of course, few films are flattered by comparisons to the work of David Fincher, and She’s Got No Name is an undeniably heavy-handed and clumsy piece of work. The film tackles big ideas like complicity and systemic misogyny, but in the most blunt manner imaginable. It doesn’t help that the film runs two-and-a-half hours, and so keeps hitting these same thematic points over and over and over again.

Still, there are moments of artistry in She’s Got No Name. The Japanese occupation looms like a shadow over the narrative, informing and deepening the movie’s themes. The discovery of Big Bear’s body, involving a blind downstairs neighbor Song (Jackson Lee), is genuinely impressive visual storytelling. The interspacing of the drama with scenes from a dramatization being drafted by socialite and playwright Xi Lin (Zhao Liying) is a clever formalist conceit.

She’s Got No Name is hardly one of the more memorable films of the festival, but it is at least solid and functional. It’s far from the worst postscript for a trip to Cannes.

Check out the rest of Darren’s Cannes columns below –