Turbulence (Ruy Guerra, 2000) (Patreon)

By almost anyone's reckoning, the 2000 Cannes Film Festival was in-SANE. In an average year, you're lucky to have maybe three, possibly four truly great films at the festival. But for whatever reason -- solid funding? pre-millennium tension? genetically modified Nespresso? -- the 2000 fest was just wall-to-wall hits. To wit, here are a few of the films in Competition that year:

In the Mood For Love (Wong Kar-Wai)

Yi Yi (Edward Yang)

Code Unknown (Michael Haneke)

Songs From the Second Floor (Roy Andersson)

O Brother, Where Art Thou? (Joel and Ethan Coen)

Devils on the Doorstep (Jiang Wen)

Eureka (Shinji Aoyama)

Faithless (Liv Ullmann)

Sentimental Destinies (Olivier Assayas)

Gohatto (Nagisa Oshima)

The Yards (James Gray)

Esther Kahn (Arnaud Desplechin)

Chunhyang (Im Kwon-taek)

and your eventual Palme d'Or winner...

Dancer in the Dark (Lars von Trier)

Even the films that were not that spectacular, like Amos Gitai's Kippur, With a Friend Like Harry by Dominik Moll, or Samira Makhmalbaf's sophomore effort Blackboards, were generally pretty good. And the Director's Fortnight included Chantal Akerman's La Captive and Béla Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies! So yeah, a pretty good year.

I mention all this because the film I'm writing about, Ruy Guerra's Turbulence, is one I never would have sought out were it not for the fact that it too played in Competition at Cannes in 2000, despite being all but forgotten today. A total also-ran, it never received a U.S. release, even on home video, and most critics I know are completely unfamiliar with the film. So I wondered, what sort of film would be elevated by the brain trust at Cannes to stand alongside such august company?

Well, sad to say, Turbulence kind of deserves its lack of reputation, despite its being just bold enough to partly, perhaps just barely, justify its place in a lineup of major contenders. It's a film of big choices, and nothing in it is accidental or escapes whole-hog stylization. But this strained effort, which Guerra wears on his sleeve to be sure, does not make for a coherent vision, even in "experimental" terms.

Jorge Perugorría stars as the nameless protagonist, the ne'er-do-well son of a rich family who is convinced by an early-morning doorbell ring that someone is trying to kill him. This leads him on a crazed race through Rio, meeting up with his party-girl sister (Bianca Byington), harassing his ex-wife at her boutique job (going to far as to smash a plate glass window), and hiding out at his family's dilapidated old ranch which has been commandeered by a group of leather-punk criminals.

Guerra makes the bold but highly discomfiting decision to shoot almost the entire film in extreme close-up, so that we are almost always in the protagonist's sweaty face. At first, this technique seems purposeful, as if it were trying to approximate the movement of the human eye. There is a Brakhage-like aspect to the breakfast scene with the sister, in which the camera swish-pans between their two faces as the talk, frequently going in for close-ups on the sister's bread and jam or the movement of her fingers.

But over time, this visual approach is clearly intended to provoke anxiety and to show us that our narrator is unstable. In addition to the claustrophobic framings, there are frequent uses of distortion lenses that encircle the action with warps and bends, not unlike those seen in recent Carlos Reygadas films, or certain Sokurov classics like Mother and Son. The objective always seems to be the same: keep all visual information compromised, and together with the fragmentary, discombobulated plot, we will understand the main character's week-long breakdown. 

The approach is admirably gonzo, and I can certainly see why the folks at Cannes wanted to give this a chance. If it's not cinematic art, then it is indeed nothing at all. But Turbulence is a relentless, aimless film that relies on an old concept of experimental technique with mental instability. We saw this long ago with the French Impressionists like Dulac and Kirsanoff. But at least they provided great splashes of beauty amidst the despairing visions. In Turbulence, there is nothing but a plunge into an unwaveringly ugly subject position, plagued with paranoia and barely-concealed incestuous desire. And for our part, we just wait for it to stop.