Cannes ‘06 Critics Notebook: World Auteurs and American Mavericks: Bold Visions and Taking Risks

Dumont’s “war film” is stronger, but ultimately lacks the power of his prior movies “La Vie de Jesus” and “Humanite.” Maybe after a week of films at the Cannes Film Festival - with rape, incest, murder, graphic sex and death aplenty - Dumont’s work doesn’t seem all that shocking. Strangely riveting all the same, the story focuses on a simple lughead farmer, Demester (Samuel Boidon, with a deep-set menacing stare), his childhood friend, the nymphomaniac Barbe (Adelaide Leroux), and another boy she has sex with before both young men are shipped off to war in some arid mountainous region. Predictably, Dumont shows us the horrors and barbarism of battle; more fascinating, however, are Barbe’s tortured madness and Demester’s flat, often expressionless face, occasional smile, and final burst of emotion.

Meanwhile, a new generation of American mavericks has landed on the Croisette this year. With Richard Linklater‘s two films “Fast Food Nation” and “A Scanner Darkly,” Sofia Coppola‘s much-anticipated “Marie-Antoinette” (screening tomorrow), Richard Kelly‘s sophomore outing “Southland Tales,” John Cameron Mitchell‘s roundly appreciated Un Certain Regard entry “Shortbus” and over in Directors Fortnight, Julian Goldberger‘s re-cut “The Hawk is Dying” and Julia Loktev‘s “Day Night Day Night” (screening later), the average-age of U.S. filmmakers in Cannes must be its lowest in years. Is this a positive sign for American cinema? One thing’s for sure; they’re taking risks and breaking the rules.

Inspired, awkward, funny, sweet and shocking, John Cameron “Hedwig” Mitchell’s “Shortbus” arrived on the Croisette like an unpretentious blast of fresh air. A celebration of New York dysfunction and the power of sexual pleasure, the film intertwines three main storylines, involving a Chinese-Canadian marriage counselor searching for her first orgasm, a gay couple, and a Gothic dominatrix. The nonprofessional cast is bold and fresh as they engage in all manner of graphic intercourse onscreen, but their struggles won’t resonate with every viewer.

Still, “Shortbus” features one of Cannes’s most revelatory moments, in which Mitchell effortlessly manages to transform the potentially scandalous into the amiably light-hearted. Some may find the initial image - of two naked men sucking each other off, while a third man gives one of them a rim-job - a tad disquieting. But quickly, the scene turns humorous, as instructions for hand placement and noise-making are issued, and then hilarious, as the trio sing a chorus of the Star Spangled Banner (i.e. “home of the of the brave, land of the free,” etc.). Now that’s patriotic.

A scene from Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s “Climates.” Photo courtesy of the Cannes Film Festival.

Strangely enough, Kelly’s “Southland Tales” also includes a rendition of the Star Spangled Banner - and while it’s not harmonized into someone’s asshole, it certainly isn’t a celebration of American freedom. Sung inside a mega-zeppelin hurling towards its doom, minutes away from an apocalyptic 4th dimensional rift and a wave of suicides, the national anthem functions here as a strange, otherworldly paean to imminent destruction (which I guess is about right). But it’s also one of many confounding pieces of a puzzling mess of a movie steeped in references to “Kiss Me Deadly,” Karl Marx and “Star Wars.”

Is “Southland Tales” a “film maudit,” some sort of post-Godardian pop-cultural blender a la Kelly’s far more resonant “Donnie Darko,” or just simply a “bad movie”? If Kelly is parodying and deconstructing this Hollywood adventure - starring The Rock, Sarah Michelle “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” Gellar, Justin Timberlake and a host of former SNL regulars - as it goes along, he’s not doing a very fun job of it. There are a few choice bits of satire - with Geller’s porn-star chat-show, a Hummer ad that would be at home in “Shortbus,” and a sharp-edged set-up of 2008 America. But Cannes audiences - who left in droves before it was over - experienced the movie as more like a whimper than a bang.

[Get the latest from the Festival de Cannes throughout the day in indieWIRE’s special Cannes ‘06 section.]