Amnesty appeal
To be fair to the Cannes film festival, which is often in the media crosshairs, the vast event is usually moderately efficient. There have been glitches this year. Some press have found tickets for events unavailable the instant they allegedly go live. There was a further screw-up yesterday at the first screening of Pedro Almodovar’s Strange Way of Life. The Irish Times made it into the event, which also featured an interview with the director and his star Ethan Hawke, but dozens of ticket holders – the Hollywood Reporter suggested maybe hundreds – were shut out after waiting for hours in the pouring rain.
By the time this writer damply took his seat, with Almodovar already on stage, the venue did, however, seem full to groaning. We were exiled to a corner of the balcony where 20 per cent of the screen was invisible. It seems that Janet Yang, president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, was among those who didn’t make it in. The festival does (in theory) not take kindly to those who book tickets but do not attend. Will an amnesty apply to those shut out?
Familiar faces
Two faces are everywhere in Cannes this year. One is Catherine Deneuve. Alain Cavalier’s image of her in St Tropez during the late 1960s is the year’s poster image, and it appears on every surface – most spectacularly in gigantic form over the Palais itself. The other is Paul Mescal. Last year the Irishman broke through with his ultimately Oscar-nominated performance in Aftersun at International Critics Week. The people at that strand have rewarded the Kildare man by slinging him on their own poster. He is more visible this year than he was 12 months ago, when he had two films at the event.
Johnny Depp: ‘Yes, you feel boycotted’
The chatter is still all about Johnny Depp on day two. When he failed to appear at the start of the press conference for Jeanne du Barry, the gossip mill decided he was running away from tricky questions about his tempestuous legal tussles with Amber Heard. He eventually popped up, having been delayed by traffic. He seemed unbowed by his recent troubles. Asked if he felt Hollywood was boycotting him, he shot back confidently. “Did I feel boycotted by Hollywood?” he said. “When you’re asked to resign from a film you’re doing because of something that is merely a function of vowels and consonants floating in the air, yes, you feel boycotted.”
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Steve McQueen: ‘It was always Saoirse Ronan and her mother. So there was this bond. There’s this kinship’
Steve McQueen is here to introduce his monumental film on the occupation of Amsterdam during the second World War. Making a little like the fellow who does the fire announcement in a theatre, he points out the exits and explains where the lavatories are. With need. Clocking on at over four hours, the film – which accommodates a stylishly designed intermission card – will test even the most robust bladders.
No talking heads. No maps of arrows advancing across Europe. You could see it as an offshoot from the gallery-based work that won McQueen the Turner Prize
It may test some patience as well. Rigorously structured, Occupied City comprises near-contemporary footage of the city accompanied by readings from Bianca Stigter’s book Atlas of an Occupied City, Amsterdam 1940-1945. No talking heads. No maps of arrows advancing across Europe. You could see it as an offshoot from the gallery-based work that won McQueen the Turner Prize. One can imagine spending time with the elegant Academy-ratio shots before moving on to another room.
This would be to underestimate the intelligence of McQueen’s juxtapositions and the cumulative effect of his cautiously ordered atrocity catalogue. Ms Stiger, the director’s wife, has dug deep and found endless tales of bravery and betrayal. Tales from the “hunger winter” of 1944 and 1945 are particularly gruelling. Melanie Hyams’s voice-over ventriloquises an Amsterdamer finding a trail of seven discarded potatoes and excitedly bringing them home before choosing which book to burn in lieu of fuel for the pot. We hear how the Germans attempted to appropriate Rembrandt for one of their own. Through it all, the increasing catastrophe for the Jewish population casts a pall.
The narration links the address in the relevant anecdote to the footage on screen. Where once something awful happened, now an experimental hip-hop group practice. Elsewhere, older people do their exercises. The psychographic effect – paired with Hyams’s blank delivery – calls to mind the work of Patrick Keiller in films such as London and Robinson in Space. McQueen is layering a ghost history across the face of Amsterdam’s recent past.
Shots of police dispersing anti-lockdown protesters and using drones to film anti-fascist marches sit provocatively in a film about the Nazi occupation. No explicit parallel is being made, but the intertwining temporal spaghetti adds to the unsettling cumulative effect of a singular masterwork.
Where else but Cannes would hundreds queue in the pelting rain to see a short film? Pedro Almodovar declared himself flattered that we came out in such weather, but as a veteran of the event – though never a Palme d’Or winner, surprisingly – he must suspect that the hordes would have waited twice as long in a hurricane for him. (He may not have been aware of the chaos reported elsewhere in this diary.) Clocking in at around 30 minutes, Strange Way of Life – produced with the co-operation of fashion label St Laurent – can reasonably be viewed as a doodle. But it is a doodle at the highest level. A few neat ideas are plucked out and played around with. Two fine actors have fun with archetypes. The production design is gorgeous. Who else would dare?
The shadow of Brokeback Mountain hangs over any such gay western and, the director, happily acknowledging that elephant in the room, includes one specific hat tip
Ethan Hawke, grey and gruff, plays the sheriff of an archetypal western town, in search of the man who killed a woman close to him. We begin with an old friend riding into town in the sort of boiled-fruit green jacket that Almodovar characters more often wear in the stylish quarters of Madrid. Played by a laconic Pedro Pascal, the newcomer is here to protect his son, possibly the killer, from the attentions of the law. It soon transpires there is more to it than that. The two men, who enjoyed a passionate relationship decades earlier, are soon in bed together.
The shadow of Brokeback Mountain hangs over any such gay western and, the director, happily acknowledging that elephant in the room, includes one specific hat tip (that’s surely the western-appropriate phrase) to the Ang Lee film. But Strange Way of Life also trades in a class of wild west camp that takes us back to such unlikely pictures as the Dirk Bogarde vehicle The Singer not the Song. The production design – bold colours everywhere – is as reminiscent of Calamity Jane as it is of Rio Bravo. If anything, the picture could engage a bit more vigorously with those ironic extremes.
Shot in the same part of Almeria where Sergio Leone made the “dollars trilogy”, the picture can’t seem to decide what kind of fun it wants us to have. A diverting doodle nonetheless. Even minor Almodovar is worth 30 minutes of your time.
