While writing about various aspects of the 64th edition of the Locarno film festival for MUBI, I also didn’t want to leave aside a bonus for readers of Film Journey. So, in an impulsive act that strikes in the small hours of the night when a visit to as large a festival as Locarno triggers a slightly feverish state (not literally, but the fever of watching up to as many as seven films a day), a simple, mad gesture: A list, in order of preference, of the films seen from August 3 to 13, through three days of rain and many more of San Diego-like sunny balm—an important factor in a festival that prides itself on nightly screenings in the world’s largest outdoor public cinema venue, Locarno’s Piazza Grande. There are many larger city centers—the Zocalo or Red Square would swallow up Piazza Grande in sheer size—but none that packs in 8000 audience members, who, like good cinema church faithful, attend night after night. Only when the rains really pour (which it did one night) do the faithful flee; they’ll even sit straight through crap, which does sometimes unreel in the piazza. The place, perhaps more than the generally populist films that screen there, is emblematic of Locarno as a happy gathering place for film lovers, perhaps the happiest in a world riven by deep, roiling troubles.

1 L’estate di Giacomo/Summer of Giacomo (Alessandro Comodin, Italy/France/Belgium)
2 Nana (Valerie Massadian, France)
3 E na terra nao e na lua/It’s the Earth not the Moon (Goncalo Tocha, Portugal)
4 El senyor ha fet en mi meravelles/Lord Worked Wonders in Me (Albert Serra, Spain)
5 Els noms de Christ (Albert Serra, Spain)
6 The Band Wagon (Vincente Minnelli, US, 1953)
7 Lothringen! (Jean-Marie Straub/Danielle Huillet, France, 1994)
8 Alvorada vermelha/Red Dawn (Joao Rui Guerra da Mata/Joao Pedro Rodrigues, Portugal)
9 Papirosen (Gaston Solnicki, Argentina)
10 Sin titulo (Carta para Serra)/Untitled (Letter to Serra) (Lisandro Alonso, Argentina/Spain)
11 Abrir puertas y ventanas/Open Doors, Open Windows (Milagros
Mumenthaler, Argentina/Switzerland)
12 Buenas Noches, Espana (Raya Martin, Spain/Philippines)
13 The Color Wheel (Alex Ross Perry, US)
14 Hashoter/Policeman (Nadav Lapid, Israel)
15 L’Inconsolable (Jean-Marie Straub, France)
16 El estudiante/The Student (Santiago Mitre, Argentina)
17 Without (Mark Jackson, US)
18 Nayak/The Hero (Satyajit Ray, India, 1966)
19 Low Life (Nicolas Klotz/Elisabeth Percival, France)
20 Les Chants de Mandrin/Smugglers’ Songs (Rabah Ameur-Zaimeche, France)
21 The Cloud of Unknowing (Tzu Nyen Ho, Singapore)
22 Din dragoste cu cele mai bune intentii/Best Intentions (Adrian Sitaru, Romania/Hungary)
23 The Loneliest Planet (Julia Loktev, US/Germany)
24 Schakale und Araber (Jean-Marie Straub, Switzerland)
25 Boxing in the Philippine Islands (Raya Martin, Philippines)
26 Solnetchniye dni/Sunny Days (Nariman Turebayev, Kazakhstan)
27 Terri (Azazel Jacobs, US)
28 Monsieur Lazhar (formerly titled Monsieur Lazhar) (Philippe Falardeau, Canada)
29 Il dono (Michelangelo Frammartino, Italy, 2003)
30 El arbol de las fresas/The Strawberry Tree (Simone Rapisarda Casanova, Canada)
31 The 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Vincente Minnelli, US, 1962)
32 Saya Zamurai (Matsumoto Hitoshi, Japan)
33 Super 8 (J.J. Abrams, US)
34 Tokyo Koen/Tokyo Park (Aoyama Shinji, Japan)
35 Derniere Séance/Last Screening (Laurent Achard, France)
36 Mahapurush/The Saint (Satyajit Ray, India, 1965)
37 Saudade (Tomita Katsuya, Japan)
38 Cowboys & Aliens (Jon Favreau, US)
39 Crulic—drumul spre dincolo/Crulic—The Path to Beyond (Anca Damian, Romania/Poland)
40 Headhunters (Morten Tyldum, Norway/Denmark/Germany)
41 Hanaan (Ruslan Pak, South Korea)
42 Hell (Tim Fehlbaum, Germany/Switzerland)
43 Mangrove (Frederic Choffat/Julie Gilbert, Swtizerland/France)
44 Tai yang zong zai zuo bian/The Sun Beaten Path (Sonthar Gyal, China)
45 El ano del tigre/The Year of the Tiger (Sebastian Lelio, Chile)
46 The Reluctant Debutante (Vincente Minnelli, US, 1958)
47 Et si on vivait tous ensemble?/And If We All Lived Together?
(Stephane Robellin, France/Germany)
48 Goodye Charlie (Vincente Minnelli, US, 1964)
49 Sport de filles (Patricia Mazuy, France/Germany)
50 Onder ons/Among Us (Marco van Geffen, Netherlands)
51 Tanathur/Last Days in Jerusalem (Tawfik Abu Wael,
Israel/France/Germany/Palestine)
52 Senorita (Vincent Sandoval, Philippines)
53 Some Came Running (Vincente Minnelli, US, 1958)

Barely a month after the Society of French Directors (SRF), which runs Cannes’ Directors Fortnight (aka Quinzaine des Réalisateurs), unceremoniously dropped Frederic Boyer as artistic director, film critic and festival director Edoard Waintrop has been named to replace Boyer. A fixture in the French cinema culture as longtime critic for Liberation (and currently blogging on Libe’s website with his column, “Le cinoque”), Waintrop had just departed Fribourg after a successful four-year run as artistic director, and had been named in March to run the Grutli cinemas in Geneva, which formerly housed the Voltaire Center of Animation.

The speedy replacement reflects SRF’s urgency to ensure strong leadership of the Quinzaine, which has been viewed by most Cannes observers as faltering since the departure of Olivier Père, who left the Quinzaine after an acclaimed 2009 program to take over the Locarno film festival. Boyer, who had worked with Père on the Quinzaine’s selection committee, had attempted to strike out in a somewhat different direction than Père’s eclectic sensibility, but the consensus after his second year was that the program was stuffed with too many failed, uninteresting films. Even more surprising to Cannes visitors this year was the widespread view that Critics Week (aka Semaine de la Critique), for the first time in many years, had artistically raced past the hobbling Quinzaine. Once a vital player in Cannes cinephilia with an eye for bold alternatives, Semaine has been a minor sidebar on the Croisette whose films had been routinely ignored by the vast majority of visitors. In the past two years, however, this perception has been changing, and with such vivid films as Jeff Nichols’ Take Shelter landing at Semaine rather than the Quinzaine (or even Un Certain Regard), the Quinzaine’s loss has increasingly been Semaine’s gain.

For his part, Boyer protested that his dismissal had been the result of a concerted attack by French critics and film cultural figures “whose primary goal was to make heads roll.”

Waintrop enters at a critical juncture in the history of Quinzaine, founded in 1969 by SRF as a radical counter-festival to the establishment profile of the Cannes competition–and when Waintrop, now 58, was 16 years old, and swept up in the heady turbulence and revolutionary fervor of Paris ‘68. (Read some of his memories of that time).

In a statement released by SRF, Waintrop describes himself as a “passeur who wants to continue discovering cinema from around the world and present it to the public, critics and other crazy people from the cinema world.” He adds, in phrasing that sounds directly out of the style of his blog, that “I’m a curious person who never gets bored.”

All of which is encouraging for lovers of the Quinzaine, which has recently been the international launching pad for many crucial young filmmakers such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Lisandro Alonso, Albert Serra, Denis Cote and Pedro Costa, and has made the Quinzaine a crucial element in contemporary world cinephilia. Given the tendency of Fribourg’s programming under Waintrop to lean toward films outside of Europe and North America, it might be expected that the Quinzaine’s upcoming editions could follow this pattern. In Fribourg this year, for example, Waintrop’s competition lineup (all selected from Asia, the Middle East and Latin America) included such lesser-known films as Carlos Cesar Arbelaez’ The Colors of the Mountain and Martin Sastre’s Miss Tacuarembo. At the same time, Waintrop is an impassioned writer about classical Hollywood, a kind of updated “Hitchcocko-Hawksian” with an eye for overlooked films both from the past and the present.

By Robert Koehler

A running conversation at film festivals in the US and abroad (mostly abroad): The urgency of film criticism to advocate for certain cinema, and ignore the other cinemas. The best reason? Life is too short to deal very much or very long with crap, and is much better spent considering the good work, and why it is good. Most American criticism is not founded on this principle; rather, it tends to be dominated by a consumerist mentality that says that all films which can be seen commercially should be written about, and those that can’t should be ignored.

The difference between these two approaches–both quite simple on their face, yet quite complex beneath the skin–produces an entirely different cultural effect. For one, the latter requires critics to expend inordinate amounts of energy lambasting bad films that the culture hardly needs reminding are bad. (Green Lantern, for the latest example, despite the noble efforts of Ryan Reynolds to inject it with humanity. Green Lantern is somehow screening at the Los Angeles Film Festival.) “Bad” can also mean “worthless,” therefore, not worth my time to write about it, and not worth your time to read about it. The latter exchanges in an endless grind of pointless negativity, filling web pages and column inches attacking the obvious, like dropping more NATO bombs that only make the rubble vibrate in Libya. Much American criticism does little more than watch the rubble move. The former approach actively supports directions in cinema, represented by the film at hand, that call for our attention, and care. This approach implicitly condemns other cinemas; by ignoring them, passing them over, the silence accorded them directly equates with their value.

This is where criticism and programming intersect, which is also perhaps why I’ve noticed that many of the writers who favor a criticism of advocacy are or have been programmers. Critics do have greater latitude than programmers, to be sure; as all programmers painfully know, not all films desired for a program are obtained, not every film in a program is equally desirable, and just because a film happens to be absent from a given program doesn’t necessarily mean that the programmer considered it unworthy (and indeed, may have wanted it, but couldn’t get it, and this due to innumerable factors too long to get into here). Critics can, if they have the editorial freedom, exactly situate their cinephilia, and by advocating for certain films over others (implicitly or explicitly), precisely define their ideological position on the cinema field.

This is also the other problem with that other brand of critic (my Cinema Scope colleague and editor Mark Peranson, in his wrap-up of Cannes 2010, quite accurately referred to this group–which included more than just critics– as “them.” “They,” for example, were scandalized by Tim Burton’s jury choice of Uncle Boonmee for the Palme d’Or.) They don’t consider their practice or their view of cinema–say, that the films that matter are the ones that are the most heavily marketed, or the ones that the largest number of readers would be discussing right now or next week–as ideological in the least. It never occurs to them that their position is even a position; rather, as some have said to me, it’s (1), their job, and (2), the condition of things as they are. I’m not going to argue with their job–a job’s a job. (We all have one, or two, or three.) As for (2), this is the great illusion of their brand of film criticism, one shared by probably every newspaper entertainment section editor in the world: The “big” movies (this week, Green Lantern, or the ones promoted in the Los Angeles Times trailer as the Los Angeles Film Festival, including X-Men: First Class, Captain America, The Zookeeper, Cowboys vs. Aliens) deserve the big treatment, the “small” films less, and the “unknown” films none at all. This is ideology, all right: The Ideology of advertisers, the force that most fundamentally drives “their” criticism. It informs movie websites and blogs as much as the papers, by the way, as more and more websites are propelled forward by the hits metric that advertisers gauge in order to determine whether or not they want to invest in a given site. The very fact that I’m able to freely discuss this at this site should tell you everything you want to know about where Film Journey stands in terms of “their” advertisers and “their” movies. “We” acknowledge and identify the ideological stance on cinema; “they” don’t.

The criticism of advocacy then means, when it comes to commenting on the latest edition of the Los Angeles Film Festival, that the only films worth mentioning are the films worth watching. I’ve seen about 65% of the program thus far, with six days and twelve films left to see: these are The Dynamiter, Renee, Senna, The Innkeepers, Self Made, Operation Peter Pan, The Yellow Sea, Love Crime, The Guard, Another Earth, Project Nim and Guy Maddin’s live performance/film, The Seduction of Ingmar Bergman.

The films I’ve wanted to see and will miss are: Tsui Hark’s Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame, Position Among the Stars, The Salesman, Tomboy, Karate-Robo Zaborgar and On the Ice.

Then, there’s a short list of films here that needn’t be seen at the festival (or can’t be seen at this point), that don’t succeed for any number of reasons, but should nevertheless be seen eventually: Asa Jacobs’ Terri, James Franco’s The Broken Tower, Richard Linklater’s Bernie, Paddy Consadine’s Tyrannosaur. Oh, and yes, there’s a couple of OK films that can’t be deemed essential: Fernando Perez’ Suite Habana and Gerard Roxburgh’s Once I Was a Champion.

Finally, here are the essentials (including a few which have already screened, so catch them when you can). I will note that this group comprises a small percentage of the overall program, less than 10%. Read into that whatever you want. These are in order, from high masterpieces to excellent:

Nicholas Winding Refn’s Drive (already screened; in release this September)
Tatiana Huezo’s The Tiniest Place (Fri)
Raul Ruiz’ Mysteries of Lisbon (Sat)
Denis Cote’s Curling (Wed, Fri)
Renate Costa’s 108 (already screened)
Theo Court’s Decline (Thurs)
Sivaroj Kongsakul’s Eternity (Thurs, Sat)
Alexei German, Jr.’s Paper Soldier (Sat)
Chad Friedrichs’ The Pruitt-Igoe Myth (already screened)
Stephane Lafleur’s Familiar Ground (Tues, Wed)
Natalia Almada’s The Night Watchmen (already screened)

By Robert Koehler

The Society of French Directors (SRF), which governs the Quinzaine des Realisiteurs, or Directors Fortnight, has dismissed Quinzaine director Frederic Boyer after his second and stormy year. The 2011 edition was roundly criticized and even lambasted (see Jacques Telemacque’s widely discussed Le Monde attack that ran during the festival), and suffered particularly in comparison to the past editions directed and programmed by Olivier Pere, who left after the 2009 edition to take over Locarno in 2010. It further didn’t help Boyer’s position that Locarno 2010, with its overall superb program, only tended to remind people of what the Quinzaine had been, and was apparently no more. For those of us who had witnessed the disastrous Mexican vampire family movie, Somos lo que Hay, at its premiere in Guadalajara, the shock that it was slotted into the 2010 Quinzaine program felt like a shot across the bow, and signaled a crisis. At this point, we were far from Serra’s Honor de Cavalleria or Alonso’s Los Muertos. Now, who will take over? The international festival community will be watching…. (Read more at the Telerama site.)

Speaking of Locarno, the juries announced today further underline Pere’s solidity at the Swiss event and his taste for highly distinctive independence in the cinema. Portuguese producer Paulo Branco, who produced Ruiz’ Mysteries of Lisbon (screening in the Los Angeles Film Festival this Saturday), is president, and certain to steer his jury toward strong, ambitious films. He’s joined by actor-director Louis Garrel, the brilliant German actor Sandra Huller, Swiss filmmaker Bettina Oberli, and Best of Youth co-star Jasmine Trinca. The jury for the typically adventurous Cinema of the Present section is headed by German filmmaker (and co-director of the great Dreileben, Christoph Hochhausler, with three distinctive fellow directors (Raya Martin, Athina Rachel Tsangari and Michelangelo Frammartino) and Karamay producer Zhu Rikun. In full disclosure, I’m on the jury for best debut film, with fellow critics Kong Rithdee and Anthony Bobeau….

Speaking of the Los Angeles Film Festival, it’s urgent to alert readers to two absolutely essential films to catch tonight Monday. Make this your Monday viewing, no excuses: First, at 7:40, Theo Court’s astonishingly beautiful semi-documentary, Decline aka Okaso. (The original Spanish title is so vastly preferable that I’ll refer to the film under that title, and not the glum Decline.) In my Variety review of Ocaso also ID’d as Decline due to Variety’s style policy of listing the English-language title), I noted the film as “an excellent example of the crossbreeding of fiction and nonfiction,” its fusing of reality and poetry. Court observes an aging caretaker, attending to a crumbling Chilean rural estate, and maintaining not only a house and its grounds but a certain way of life and rituals–from cooking to clearing brush. But the film frames and preserves this activity in a kind of suspended animation, cast in a colored haze of both atmosphere and memory. It is where the cinemas of Ermanno Olmi and Victor Erice intersect. That’s probably sufficient praise. Then, at 10:30, and there really is no excuse for missing this one, since it’s THE LAST TIME YOU’RE EVER LIKELY TO SEE THIS FILM IN LOS ANGELES, EVER: That would the incredible doc by Renate Costa, 108 (its international title, as opposed to its more eccentric Spanish title, Cuchillo de Palo). Why this small masterpiece has taken so long to get here–18 months since Berlinale 2010–is anyone’s guess, but good on LAFF for selecting it for the International Showcase section, the section with the vast majority of the festival’s best films. In it, Costa considers the life of her gay uncle living in Asuncion, the capital of Paraguay under the oppressive military dictatorship of Gen. Alfredo Stroessner. But her consideration is wrapped in the optics of incomplete memories, uncertain accounts of the past and the disturbing cloak of ghosts. There is no better recent case of first-person, autobiographical documentary filmmaking achieving a state of poetry, and a prime case of the new generation of Latin American filmmakers transcending the polemics, and anger, of their parents for a more honest and reflective perspective. Did we say it was essential?

Well, some of those well-sourced rumors proved to be on the mark, others less so. As predicted, Terrence Malick’s , his semi-autobiographical meditation-cum-space odyssey on the Meaning of It All, wins the Palme d’Or. The Grand Prix is a tie between Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s widely admired murder-mystery-in-the-night-darkness, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, and the Dardenne Brothers’ well-reviewed The Kid with the Bike, thus continuing Ceylan’s run (after his best director prize for Three Monkeys) as the bridesmaid and not the bride in Cannes. One of the most wildly loved competition films was Nicholas Winding Refn’s Melville-influenced thrilled starring Ryan Gosling, Drive, and he wins best director for going American. Genre dominates the prizes, so it’s no surprise that Maiwenn’s policier, Poliss, received largely with a shrug from the Cannes critical press corps, wins the jury prize, which always amounts to the third runner-up after the Grand Prix (though, this year with the Grand Prix tie, that makes
it #4).

Unlike what our sources told us, Berenice Bejo didn’t win best actress for The Artist; rather, it goes to Kirsten Dunst for Melancholia, a surprise to many since Lars Von Trier’s status as a Cannes “persona non grata” may have presumably pushed the film out of any consideration in any category. Clearly, Robert De Niro would have none of it, and pushed for Dunst. As predicted, Jean Dujardin wins best actor for The Artist.

In what is one of the most significant though consistently overlooked prizes in Cannes, the Camera d’Or for best feature debut goes to Pablo Giorgelli for Las Acacias screening in Critics Week, for which I had heard excellent advance word in Buenos Aires. This marks yet another new name from the Argentine cinema, and is a bit of a swipe at Directors Fortnight, which was loaded with debuts that resulted in disinterest or outright dismissal from many Cannes observers. This will be the year when Critics Week, with Take Shelter and Las Acasias, finally dominated the Fortnight, after being in Fortnight’s shadow for a decade or two.

By Robert Koehler

Woody Allen’s Paris tourism promotion film, Midnight in Paris, clearly caught its Cannes audience–who saw it opening night, some 100 films and what may seem like a century ago–in a forgiving mood. A few, perhaps sufficiently jet-lagged, drunk, who knows, were actually willing to call it a masterpiece, and the same willingness to let Allen slide was something I witnessed the other night at the Academy Theatre, where Midnight made its U.S. premiere. A strange goodwill continues to hover around the character of Allen, whom some believe has made many good films, some great, and even go so far as to claim that he’s the greatest American comedy filmmaker since Chaplin. (These were precisely the foolish words of AFI President Bob Gazzale, not known for his cinephilia, when he introduced the film at the Academy. One can only imagine what bon mots Thierry Fremaux tossed to Allen in the Palais.) Some critics are calling Midnight in Paris things like “his best film in the past fifteen years,” which would mean his best since that world-beater from 1996, Everyone Says I Love You. In more than a few film cultures, had Allen issued as many bad films as he has, he would have long ago been barred from getting anywhere near a movie camera. As it is, he’s effectively no longer an American director, and now officially a Spanish filmmaker: Spain is the primary producing country of Midnight, just as it was of his previous bad films, like You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger and the risibly awful Vicky Christina Barcelona, which depicts a Barcelona where nobody speaks Catalan.

As if Spain needed another bad filmmaker. There is this: Midnight in Paris does start with the only cinema Allen has managed in years (more than fifteen), and for once, he’s not imitating one of his avowed masters. This opening montage of city scenes in Paris looks dull enough, certainly touristic: The Tuileries, Champs d’Elysees, the Madeleine, Montparnasse, the Tour d’Eiffel, even (in his only tip of the cap to Paris modernity), I.M. Pei’s glass pyramid entrance to the Louvre. Just as the montage seems sure to end, it keeps going, showing various views of mostly anonymous streets during an afternoon rain, which then stops, and gives way to night, and what amounts to a third movement of edits around the city leading up to midnight. This is Allen imitating himself, the montage at the beginning of Manhattan, his love letter to New York City, and his first indicator that he had a thing for potentially underage girls. But it does unfold an environment, observes the course of time, and might be likened (particularly in cadence) to montages in some of Heinz Emigholz’recent architecture films.

Nice; some cinema for once. Then the rest of the movie unfolds, and it’s one more time into the crapper with Woody. Owen Wilson plays Gil, a hack screenwriter from Los Angeles visiting Paris with his obnoxious fiance Inez, played by Rachel McAdams, and he’s swooning for the place. She can’t imagine what he’s talking about, which instantly sets things utterly wrong. Inez, it quickly becomes clear, isn’t a human being; she’s both a bourgeois Republican monster and a construct designed such that Gil may easily run away from her. Unlike Ernst Lubitsch, whom Allen sometimes mimics here and who is actually the greatest comedy director since Chaplin, Allen can’t set up an honest relationship, and the Inez monster figure is one of many ways in which he provides Gil with the perfect excuse to escape into his fantasies of Paris in the 1920s.

This comes in the form of a beautiful motorcar that rolls up to the curb at midnight, and in an exact reversal of Cinderella, Gil goes to the ball. It’s hosted by Cocteau, but Gil is taken in by Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, given something approaching life by Corey Stoll. Allen clues the viewer much too early that Gil is imagining this, thus leaving Midnight in Paris hanging unresolved between fantasy and some sort of reality. This nostalgic time-travel device is something he’s done before; this variation most directly recalls The Purple Rose of Cairo, but Allen has long had one foot in the 1920s through his references and musical love of Dixieland jazz. He’s long noted that he sometimes feels that he was born in the wrong era, which is what Gil feels. Until Allen feels the compulsory urge to set things straight, as it were, via Gil as he falls for Adriana (Marion Cotillard), lover of Picasso and Hemingway. The message is delivered that we never know when we’re living in a golden age (Adriana certainly doesn’t, and yearns for the earlier La Belle Epoque), since we’re yearning for the past, which we know only through received wisdom and not the quotidian grind of direct experience.

Some Cannes-goers want to take this as a great breakthrough for Allen, who has supposedly wrenched himself free of his silly romantic notions of a past where all the best art (movies, literature, jazz) has already been made, and we’re just here as recyclers. (It’s hard not to view his entire opus in this light, except for his early, crazy and best comedies, like Bananas, which are mostly firmly rooted in the present.) Yet in the end Gil is a free man in Paris and able to have a chance encounter with a (younger, naturally) woman who runs a–guess it–antiques shop at an open street market. Two nostalgics, made for each other, walking in the rain, which always makes the Paris streets prettier in photographs don’t you know. Woody Allen hasn’t budged an inch, but Cannes loves him anyway.

By Robert Koehler

Surprisingly, the general critical response out of Cannes to Lars Von Trier’s end-of-the-world, end-of-a-wedding romance, Melancholia, has thus far been generally positive. In our track of the current reviews rolling out, including a few from the French press, the pros outnumber the cons 16 to 8, with very few mixed. As can be seen in the responses thus far, the views of Melancholia are frequently seen under the looming shadow of Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, specifically in the two films’ contrasting depictions of the beginning and end of planet Earth. This is because Malick’s film screened Monday, while Von Trier’s screened Wednesday, and in the kind of reflective effect that frequently occurs for film festival attendees, one film in a program begins to have a dialogue with another, and both are viewed inside a joint prism which, seen in different conditions and different times, wouldn’t exist. From a programming standpoint, it may be the first interesting thing I’ve read out of this year’s Cannes, while being certain that the better films in Cannes (such as Jeff Nichols’ Take Shelter, one of the highest scoring films in the critics’ daily roundup at micropsia.com) are far from the Palais.

Below is a roster of Melancholia reviews so far, with links.  But first, this word from Lars Von Trier in the film’s pressbook. Which prompted the question from a journalist at the press screening. Which, in turn, prompted Von Trier’s now-notorious “I’m a Nazi” comment. Which, in turn, prompted Festival de Cannes to label Von Trier as an official “persona non grata,” a label that may or may not mean that he’s being kicked out of his hotel room and being directed back on the autoroute back to Copenhagen. Von Trier’s statement below is where the whole kerfuffle began:

“It was like waking from a dream: my producer showed me a suggestion for a poster. “What is that?” I ask. ”It’s a film you’ve made!” she replies. ”I hope not,” I stammer. Trailers are shown … stills … it looks like shit. I’m shaken. Don’t get me wrong … I’ve worked on the film for two years. With great pleasure. But perhaps I’ve deceived myself. Let myself be tempted. Not that anyone has done anything wrong … on the contrary, everybody has worked loyally and with talent toward the goal defined by me alone. But when my producer presents me with the cold facts, a shiver runs down my spine. This is cream on cream. A woman’s film! I feel ready to reject the film like a wrongly transplanted organ. But what was it I wanted? With a state of mind as my starting point, I desired to dive headlong into the abyss of German romanticism. Wagner in spades. That much I know. But is that not just another way of expressing defeat? Defeat to the lowest of cinematic common denominators? Romance is abused in all sorts of endlessly dull ways in mainstream products. And then, I must admit, I have had happy love relationships with romantic cinema … to name the obvious: Visconti! German romance that leaves you breathless. But in Visconti, there was always something to elevate matters beyond the trivial … elevate it to masterpieces! I am confused now and feel guilty. What have I done?

And now, from some of the critics:

Lisa Schwarzbaum (Entertainment Weekly) pro: http://tinyurl.com/694dcj7 Although Melancholia, by its very title, declares a mournful state of mind, the movie is, in fact, the work of a man whose slow emergence from personal crisis has resulted in a moving masterpiece, marked by an astonishing profundity of vision.

Sukhdev Sandhu (Telegraph) pro: http://tinyurl.com/6fhrxen It takes a baffling, almost bone-headed premise, the stuff of schlocky genre movies, and from it creates a mesmerizing, visually gorgeous and often-moving alloy of family drama, philosophical meditation and anti-golfing tract.

Peter Bradshaw (Guardian) con: http://tinyurl.com/3n3gqdz Once again, Von Trier has written and directed an entire film in his trademark smirk mode: a giggling aria of pretend pain and faux rapture. The script is clunking, and poor Dunst joins Nicole Kidman and Bryce Dallas Howard in the list of Hollywood females who have sleepwalked trustingly through a Von Trier production. Even the spectacle is thin and supercilious.

Eric Kohn (IndieWIRE) pro: http://tinyurl.com/5w7fwbx The greatest possible expression of Von Trier’s recent “no more happy endings” edict, “Melancholia” is supremely operatic, enlivened by its cosmic sensibility, and yet amazingly rendered on an intimate scale.

Kevin Jagernauth (IndieWIRE) mixed: http://tinyurl.com/6ccv3nf We continue to admire the director and his dogged commitment to films that follow his own unique vision and personality right to the bitter end. But it’s that self-indulgence that often sabotages his own works as well. “Melancholia” is a personal project in the best and worst ways. We can’t imagine any other film tackling depression with the directness Von Trier does here anytime soon, but there is a curious lack of sensitivity and even compassion in the picture that seriously holds it back. Lars Von Trier films is still his own most fascinating subject, but with “Melancholia,” it would have been nice if he had
orbited a bit more daringly outside his very comfortable sphere.

Todd McCarthy (Hollywood Reporter) con: http://tinyurl.com/3k6yvre Lars von Trier manages to turn the end of the world into a bit of a bore in Melancholia.  A brooding cross between The Celebration (Festen) and Armageddon drenched in the tragic romanticism of Richard Wagner, this contemplation of the planet’s demise predictably provides not an ounce of comfort or redemption, nor does it offer characters or ideas with which to meaningfully engage, just ample opportunity to wallow in some rapturous images, glorious music and a foul mood.

Drew McWeeney (Hitfix.com) pro: http://tinyurl.com/6fgcm3s This is the second film in a row where Von Trier has dealt head-on with the depression that almost drove him from filmmaking, and I find it really extraordinary the way he’s taken his own suffering and turned it into art.

Wesley Morris (Boston Globe) mixed to con: http://tinyurl.com/3kjhuol This isn’t particularly daring moviemaking from von Trier, not in the way he’s capable of. It’s just severely controlled, touchingly sincere, and, apparently, the result of a conversation he had with unlicensed therapist Penélope Cruz, who opted to make a “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie instead of this one. The hearty, jeerless reception the movie received suggests his vision is preferred medicated. Unpacking American movie genres has always interested von Trier (this time, it’s wedding comedies, disaster film, and psychological dramas). But “Melancholia” has much more in common with 1960s Michelangelo Antonioni. Which means that his protagonist is not, for once, a woman he wants to antagonize. It’s a woman he wants to help in whatever way he can. In part, that’s because that woman is him.

Andrew O’Hehir (Salon) pro: http://tinyurl.com/3emrpud “Melancholia” strikes me on first viewing as something truly special, even in an exceptionally strong Cannes competition that includes several other terrific films. I’m going to invoke the magic incantation here: This isn’t really a review. “Melancholia” demands another viewing or two and some time alone afterwards, something that’s ludicrous even to imagine in this hothouse setting. For what it’s worth — which is nothing much, at this point — I think I prefer “Melancholia” to Terrence Malick’s much-debated “The Tree of Life,” but to have two new career-defining works from major film artists that can plausibly be defended as cinematic and philosophical masterpieces in the same festival is close to miraculous… There is tremendous pain in “Melancholia,” but also ravishing beauty, at a level the abundantly talented Trier has never sustained before. He’s right that it’s not a movie about the end of the world (unless the religious wackos who think that’s coming this weekend are correct). It’s about facing life and death and mental illness with as much courage and love as you could muster, and what could be more grand and romantic than that? If the depresso Nordic class clown is trying to undercut his own movie by talking about Hitler and pornography, it’s only because he’s made something tender and exquisite and metaphysical and vulnerable, and now he wants to smash it.

Mike Goodridge (Screen Daily) pro: http://tinyurl.com/4xhlbpo It’s certainly his most serious film in a while and you don’t get the sense that he is manipulating or mocking the audience as he usually does. It feels like he is passionate about his material here, possibly because it’s a movie about depression and Von Trier has said openly that he battles depression himself. Although at one point in the film I was hating it, by the end I was entirely under its spell.

Peter Howell (Toronto Star) pro: http://tinyurl.com/3ukuryn He dazzled with Melancholia, his new science fiction film, premiering here, that sets a fractious family wedding amidst the impending end of the world, caused by a rogue planet colliding with Earth. Although critical opinions seemed mixed, there’s no denying von Trier is still a potent writer/director and master manipulator of images and moods.

Stephanie Zacharek (Movieline) pro: http://tinyurl.com/3nxjcb2 Antichrist was a scream of pain; Melancholia is more like a heavy sigh, a gasp at the horrible wonder of it all. It isn’t nearly as somber as its title would lead you to believe, and it’s so beautiful to look at that it feels decadent, almost luxurious. It’s also, for all its weirdness, reasonably accessible, as if von Trier had decided — tentatively — that once in a while it might feel good to be part of the human race instead of just railing against it. If it’s true that misery loves company, maybe this is von Trier’s way of reaching out. Melancholia may be as close as he’ll ever come to wrapping us in a bear hug.

Michael Phillips (Chicago Tribune) pro: http://tinyurl.com/3htwgkh Von Trier’s “Melancholia” answers Malick’s spiritual inquiry by saying, well, it was a stupid planet anyway, with a limited shelf life. Yet von Trier, a serious man when he isn’t being the most ill-advised ironic wiseacre this side of a visiting planet, creates startling moments of beauty.

Glenn Heath (Slant) pro : http://tinyurl.com/3upblqz Von Trier avoids antagonizing the viewer with his usual gut-punch theatrics, settling down for a story about colliding worlds, breaking façades, and shifting alliances. The relationships we carry on our shoulders are so heavy the world can literally split apart from the pressure, and there’s nothing like a gigantic blue orb to put specific burdens in perspective. Melancholia finds solace in this respect by dismantling the ways expressions of love, commitment, and family can fail. The hovering balloon lanterns incinerating in the sky, an ignored photograph of a ranch, and dismantled vows are signals of an emotional world shifting off its axis. These are von Trier’s cinematic cave paintings to a pulverizing overture of calamity. Melancholia descends calmly into the fiery red night with an unnerving grace only von Trier could conjure.

Richard Corliss (Time) mixed: http://tinyurl.com/3j3kvpy Every Cannes Festival needs a Wow! moment, and the opening few minutes of Lars von Trier’s Melancholia provided the artistic sensation of Cannes 2011. Even as Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, this Festival’s other big event, re-created the beginning of the cosmos, so, with similarly spectacular imagery but with a greater emotional resonance, Melancholia begins with the end of the world. It’s as if these two highly esteemed, blithely quirky filmmakers had been assigned the complementary subjects of ontogeny and eschatology, and responded with their grand, distilled visions.

J. Hoberman (Village Voice) pro: http://tinyurl.com/3fo5qvu There are many differences between Melancholia and Tree of Life. The comparison is not a matter of filmmaking (although the first five minutes of Melancholia are more innovative, accomplished, and visionary than anything in The Tree of Life); it’s a matter of sensibility. (For some, Von Trier’s appalling skepticism might make Malick’s faith all the more touching.) But for me the most important difference is the distinction between art and kitsch.

Mike D’Angelo (The A.V. Club) con: http://tinyurl.com/3pvguaj fully half of the film is devoted to a portrait of Justine’s depression, which gradually overwhelms her on her wedding day. And by the time that half had drawn to a close, Von Trier had pretty much lost me.

Lee Marshall (Screen Daily) con: http://tinyurl.com/3qxy7cl For all the film’s widescreen panache, the script at the heart of the exercise feels like an uncooked avant-garde play.

Dave Calhoun (Time Out) con: http://tinyurl.com/44w578a This is a lethargic, pretty and frustratingly empty study in ways of living and dying from Danish director Lars Von Trier. He follows ‘Antichrist’ with a more calm and restrained work but also one which feels curiously disengaged from the world and only impressive and powerful on a technical level rather than an intellectual or emotional one.

Simon Gallagher (Film School Rejects) pro: http://tinyurl.com/3b2lkol Melancholia is very much the embodiment of Von Trier’s commitment to producing a cinema of self-harm: it is a manifestation of his inner turmoil, explicated and resolved through this fantastical filmic wound, as he seeks to match the thrilling sensation of his inner melancholia (something audiences will invariably find troubling) with an exterior, artistic sensation. And it is incredibly successful in that agenda, albeit at a cost of the audience’s enjoyment and traditional sense of pleasure. But then those responses are perhaps best viewed as the rituals of cinema that Von Trier is determined to destroy.

Todd Brown (Twitch) con: http://tinyurl.com/3swv2gm Congratulations to everyone who has ever accused director Lars Von Trier of self absorption and hollow pretentiousness. You win this round. Von Trier’s Melancholia is a glossy but hollow exercise with shockingly little to say and – seemingly – surprisingly little effort put in to saying it well. Poor performances and shoddy dialogue are just the most obvious problems with this one, a film that handily wrests the ‘Worst Film Of Career’ title away from The Boss Of It All and, in the process, takes its place as the first Von Trier film that I would classify as just plain bad. Melancholia is a lot like a lottery scratch card, promising a lot under it’s shiny surface but ultimately nothing more than a wafer thin disappointment.

Peter Debruge (Variety) pro: http://tinyurl.com/3e2×829 For all the tyrannical disdain he’s shown other filmmakers over the years, von Trier once again demonstrates a mastery of classical technique, extracting incredibly strong performances from his cast while serving up a sturdy blend of fly-on-the-wall naturalism and jaw-dropping visual effects.

Brad Brevet (Rope of Silicon) con: http://tinyurl.com/3rubljn However, as poetic as that may sound, the film doesn’t offer very much. Melancholia seems to simply come from a place of boredom and von Trier’s interest in making a film because he had nothing better to do.

Roger Koza (Con Los Ojos Abiertos) con: http://tinyurl.com/2oa6ba (Koza notes Malick’s New Age affiliations) Y vendrán los últimos 30 minutos, y el filme deriva indefectiblemente hacia un nuevo poema visual, ahora kitsch y fervientemente religioso en el que la espiritualidad New Age y un evangelismo difuso van fagocitando tanto la totalidad del film como las inquietudes filosóficas de Mallick (quien supo alguna vez traducir algunas obras tardías de Martin Heidegger).

Jean-Marc Lalanne (Les Inrockuptibles) pro: http://tinyurl.com/3tmbzg3 (Lalanne says, in sum, Better than Kubrick!) Certes, c’est Orange mécanique qui, quarante après sa sortie, bénéficie d’une montée des marches (Malcom Mc Dowell, la famille Kubrick…) et d’une copie restaurée. Mais le film du festival, c’est 2001 l’odyssée de l’espace. Après Terrence Malick, c’est Lars Von Trier qui propose son grand film astral. Les cinq premières minutes, techniquement assez virtuoses, prêtent même à sourire tant cette ronde de planètes sur fond de musique classique hurle le désir de Lars Von Trier de surpasser Kubrick dans le métaphysique grandiose et spectaculaire.

Isabelle Regnier (Le Monde) pro : http://tinyurl.com/5tkzgsz Je passe sur les effroyables déclarations du cinéaste danois, qui m’ont violemment déprimée. Son film au contraire, est le plus aimable qu’il ait fait depuis longtemps. Extrêmement impressionnant d’un point de vue plastique, porté par deux actrices au sommet de leur talent (Kirsten Dunst et Charlotte Gainsbourg), il annonce son programme dès le prologue : la fin du monde, qui adviendra par la collusion d’une grosse planète, Melancholia, avec la terre. Si le point de vue du cinéaste est aussi surplombant qu’à son habitude, le film est plus ouvert, et plus ample du même coup, que ses précédents notamment parce qu’il ne regarde plus ses personnages de la même manière. Il leur apporte une plus grande complexité, leur laisse une chance, un degré de liberté auquel il ne nous avait pas habitués.

By Robert Koehler

Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life begins, all too appropriately, with a yolk-colored blob. Like a scientist’s experiment which has been fussed over until it’s lost its original hypothesis (let alone any proof), Malick’s new film is the work of a man who has so overthought his material that it has flipped, and become underthought, a welter of contradictory ideas, a toxic brew of literalism and spiritualism, an acid trip without the necessary acid. He has turned a chamber piece about a Texas family in the post-war era into a bloated behemoth. He has fatally forgotten the wisdom that in the specific lies the universal, and instead imposes an entirely unearned universal construct on top of a small story that should have a running time of no more than 80 minutes, rather than its entirely unjustifiable 137-minute length–a marker of uncontrolled hubris.

I noted in my review in Cinema Scope of Malick’s previous film, The New World, that the key to understanding his cinema is that he’s a birder. This does not apply to The Tree of Life, although there may be more actual birds on screen in the new work. It would be good to report that the key lies in Malick’s previous life (before he became a film director with Badlands in 1973) as a lecturer in philosophy at MIT, where he specialized in Heidegger. The Tree of Life is replete with philosophy, to be sure; oh, my, is it ever, all of it stated, as with every verbal utterance on the soundtrack (most of which are delivered in a nearly inaudible whispered voiceover by the various characters), absolutely and firmly on the nose. But the philosophy is now confused, amorphous, cosmic, furry-headed variations on the now-old New Age movement. Indeed, that would be a better title for the opus: The New Age.

He has made one film, interrupted by another; or, seen from another angle, two films, each refusing to meld with the other. The first is a memory narrative about middle-aged Houston architect Jack (Sean Penn), prompted out of nothing in particular–perhaps, as far can be vaguely perceived from Malick’s fractured depiction of activity, a bad day at the office–to recall his painful childhood growing up in Waco, Tx. with father Mr. O’Brien (Brad Pitt), mom Mrs. O’Brien (Jessica Chastain) and brothers R.L. (Laramie Eppler) and Steve (Tye Sheridan). As Jack grows up, he develops an antipathy toward his father, whom we are told quite bluntly early on represents ”the way of nature,” while mother represents “the way of grace.” (In Malick’s philosophical construct, “nature” is bad, imposing, arrogant; ”grace” is “never having to justify one’s self.” More on this slice of intellectual nonsense later.) Raised in a “good” home but with a strict, disciplinarian father, Jack begins to rebel as he moves toward his teen years, and flirts with bad deeds. Father, who falls on rough times with his failed attempts to cash in on his various patents, seems to try to re-bond with Jack, even as he moves the family to a much nicer neighborhood. (Even though he’s fallen on bad times, a nifty detail Malick never explains.) Later, one of Jack’s brothers dies at age 19 for no known reason (perhaps in Vietnam, or Korea, or somewhere else, who knows? Does Malick?)–a deliberate though unrealized tragedy depicted, in a true storytelling perversity, not near the end of Tree of Life, but at its beginning.

The other film? This would be Malick’s depiction of the beginning of the local solar system, the forming of Earth and the origins of life, from the microbial stage to the dinosaurs. Again, this is not where The Tree of Life begins proper, but some twenty minutes in, after Penn’s voice whispers things like “Brother?” and “Mother?”, some blobs appear and disappear, Jack’s family is introduced, Jack’s mother receives a telegram announcing the son’s death, and Penn’s adult Jack is seen rummaging around his gorgeous architect’s desk and walking amidst a forest of glassy skyscrapers (presumably The Trees of Corporate Life, given the way they are filmed at extreme low angles with ultra-wide focal lenses in identical fashion to the film’s many actual trees). For no particular reason or catalyst, Malick chooses to jump literally into the cosmos, assembling a gorgeous string of images. Derived from pictures by the Hubble deep space telescope, and processed by the Palomar Observatory and the Digitized Sky Survey at Caltech, the images show the births of stars, galaxies and then our planet, followed by a montage of subatomic particles, cellular organisms, ancient fish and then, finally, two CGI created dinosaurs.

From some closely similar music cues and planetary and prehistoric images to its leaps in time and space, this other film simply and openly begs comparison with Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. So, let’s compare. The narrative leap out of the family film into the dinosaur film is not the kind of leap made by 2001’s Moon Watcher ape tossing his bone weapon into the air and transforming in cinema’s greatest edit to a spaceship; there’s no expressive or meaningful transition, but rather, a seemingly arbitrary cut that may have just as well happened sooner or later. The montage of astronomical, geologic, geographic and underwater images that follow in some ways closely parallel the opening montage of primordial landscapes in “The Dawn of Man” sequence in 2001, but they soon have the feeling of a montage in an IMAX film presented in a science park, missing only Morgan Freeman’s narration explaining the development of life on earth. (Perhaps the only spot in The Tree of Life in which voice-over does not occur.) They also indicate a critical problem with the visual nature of Malick’s film, which is that the images are discrete unto themselves, picturesque rather than cinematic, producing the sensation of flipping through pages in a coffee-table photography book (or, in the case of Jack’s family, pictures in the album of a family we don’t know).

Most critical in a 2001 comparison is how this “Dawn of Life” film-within-a-film climaxes, and how it points to the film’s central philosophical defects. A long-necked dinosaur, first observed at its beach hangout, lopes into a forest where it encounters a smaller, wounded dino prey, looking for all intents and purposes like dinner as it presses a claw like a death-grip on the little guy’s head. But, in a truly Spielbergian moment (and even Spielberg couldn’t conceive of such dino-to-dino kindness in Jurassic Park), big dino takes apparent compassion upon little dino, releasing its grip and consoling it with a gentle stroke. This, we can only conclude, is the birth of love, or, at least, pity. (Compare, if you will, this image of big dino’s gentle claw with Monica Vitti’s white hand on the forehead of Gabriele Ferzetti at the end of L’Avventura for a useful contrasting expression of genuine pity.) This is pure anthropomorphism, and precisely the opposite of Kubrick’s apes-into-men. Such a depiction of dinosaur love is little more than human wish fulfillment, a fantasy–even a romance–of altruism amongst animals, and this after having just been told in blunt terms on the film’s whispered soundtrack that “nature” is bad. Kubrick’s apes, having accidentally stumbled upon the usefulness of bones as weapons, deploy their invention to kill members of a competing band of apes, confirming that man’s innately violent nature is certain to make tools into implements of violence. These, not love, are some of the elements of evolution.

A clearer difference in philosophies, between Malick’s essentially naive romanticism–which proves to gird much of what follows in The Tree of Life–and Kubrick’s Darwinian view of natural selection, is hard to imagine. Yet this probably wont stop the upcoming flow of commentary likening The Tree of Life to 2001, encouraged by the participation of Kubrick’s important special effects collaborator, Douglas Trumbull, with Malick, as well as a spate of classical music selections (John Tavener, Holst) which directly acknowledge the influence of 2001. While Malick’s early films, including Badlands and Days of Heaven, combined an awareness of class conflict and the inevitable clashes of human desire with a fascination with nature that bordered on Pantheism, The Tree of Life dives headlong into a world view that can be summed up in the Beatles lyric, “All you need is love.” Mrs. O’Brien, in one of her few whispered voice-overs as the family moves out of their old Waco house, states that without love, life goes by in a flash. Love is seen to finally bridge the growing barrier between Jack and his father. An increasing lack of love between Mr. and Mrs. O’Brien can be seen to fuel his angry outbursts when he’s confronted with his boys’ disobedience.

At the same time, Malick is either uninterested, unwilling or unable to convey emotions on screen, except through the crutch of all those whispered voiceovers allowing us to eavesdrop on characters’ inner thoughts. The annoying mannerism of the whispering aside (and it becomes increasingly difficult to ignore the spectacular misjudgment of the flagrant overuse of this device, to say nothing of its pseudo-poetic language, the on-the-nose obviousness and the particularly vexing issue that about 75% of what’s whispered is inaudible, even when seen in the Directors Guild’s superb big cinema), the emotional undercurrents are crowded off screen for the picturesque. The actual human dimension is replaced by bits of bullet-point dialogue; when Jack faces his father and says, “You’d like to kill me,” it doesn’t shock or resound, because there’s nothing backing it up, since there’s nothing in the father’s behavior that’s remotely homicidal, only aggressive. Malick wants to convey love’s force, and, as he deems it, “grace,” but he can’t find cinematic correlatives for it. His narrative contains all the aspects of a primal father-son conflict, but he drains it away and replaces it with New Age quotations. “The glory” is a term heard often, in a throwback to its use in The Thin Red Line to far more powerful effect, since it was tied to actual human endeavors and historical events. (The New Age effect also flows to the soundtrack: Tavener is a favorite composer with the New Age crowd, as well as the progressive Anglo-Saxon Christian crowd, with whom New Agers have much in common. This is also true of Henryk Gorecki, whose music is also periodically cued.) Even Mr. O’Brien’s real-world work at a giant oil refinery and his efforts to cash in on his various patents comes across as abstract and vacuous, materialist engagements framed in purely spiritualist terms; the refinery resembles nothing so much as a cathedral of industrial pipes, while the Texas state capitol building where O’Brien tramps around aimlessly and to no real purpose is filmed as if it were St. Peter’s in Rome.

The Tree of Life begins with a quotation from the Book of Job (Chapter 38, verses 4 and 7, in which God puts Job in his place), and references Job’s trials with God later during a pastor’s sermon. Nods to God and Job and references and quotations do not, however, by themselves earn meaning. Nor does a train of images early on of the family grieving over news of the son’s death conjure up a Job-like struggle. A detectable pattern emerges: Ideas are stated, and then not explored in cinematic terms. Worse: the ideas contradict one another. Take the matter of grace vs. nature, which Malick clearly intends as his central dialectic. The ways in which these two states of mind/existence are defined by Malick has little to do with any recognizable view of either. Grace is typically associated with either the comforting power of a supreme being, or in Malick’s Pantheistic view, an equilibrium between humans and nature. As for Nature, philosophers have clashed for centuries over it’s essential meaning, ranging from the kind of anthropomorphism dramatized by Malick with his dinos or poets’ use of “the pathetic fallacy” to a more scientific view that sees Nature as an amoral process of birth, life, death, decay and regeneration–the view, if you will, of “2001.” But Malick has wholly confused his terms. Two direct literary influences on The Tree of Life are William Faulkner and D. H. Lawrence; Faulkner for his fracturing of narrative into a stream-of-consciousness, better to convey the unstructured momentum of inner thought and emotions, and for his fascination with the eternal battle between fathers and sons; Lawrence for his concern with the conflict between what he viewed as ”nature” and “will.” Mr. O’Brien is a purely Lawrencian character, which Malick proceeds to utterly misread. Rather than representing nature (that would actually be Mrs. O’Brien, who’s constantly depicted outdoors, under the trees, walking barefoot in the grass, dipping her toes in water), Mr. O’Brien is pure will, and he states it as such in a few lines of dialogue while advising his sons on the cruel ways of the world. His entire character can be viewed as a man trying to exert his will on his sons to follow in his path; the middle son’s interest in music draws him closer to the father, who regrets aborting his own music studies (now channeled into some organ playing of Bach and record-spinning of Brahms and other composers at home), and which seems to spur Jack’s jealousy. This is not nature, but it’s opposite, the human forces impinging themselves upon nature, exactly as Lawrence viewed it.

Ultimately, Malick discards these matters for something far more amorphous: Adult Jack’s quest for meaning, conveyed in a manner that can only be described as graduate film school surrealism. In the early reels, Malick inserts strange footage of Sean Penn in his business suit traipsing through what may be a desert in California or Utah; trippy and maybe a bit silly, but quickly forgotten what with the dinosaurs and Jack v. dad tale that consumes much of the film. But then, in the final reel, it all comes back, with Penn’s Jack still traipsing, climbing over rocks, walking through a door standing alone in the wilderness (I’m not kidding), then the roofless family house (or a small section of it replicated by Malick’s longtime production designer Jack Fisk in the desert) and finally reaching a long, flat beach with lots of folks blankly wandering around. They include, in a true stroke of Kitsch, Jack’s family as they were when he was a kid; these are, it seems, the living dead, or ghosts of Jack’s past, or perhaps something else, since almost nobody in this gaggle of beachside wanderers outside of the family is recognizable from the rest of the film. Nothing much happens; Penn and Pitt walk silently together in the film’s only superstar moment, the kids receive a few hugs, the water laps ashore, and then it’s over.

And to what end? It might reasonably be expected that this sequence should be adult Jack’s final cathartic release of emotional memory, an expunging of familial toxins, a recognition of impending mortality as well as a reconciliation with the past. Whether this was Malick’s intention can only be guessed at, since none of this happens, and nothing else either, expect a bunch of images of various people walking on the beach. Literally, and nothing more, pictures. This is important, since endings are important, this is where he ends the film, accented by such postcard Kitsch as a shot of a field of sunflowers. Nothing more clearly points to a film run aground by undeveloped ideas in contradiction than this.

The tragedy of The Tree of Life is the film itself, a project of such profound importance to the filmmaker that he worked on concepts and images for it ever since he’s been a filmmaker–nearly 38 years. He clearly based the family story on his own memories growing up in Texas as a boy in the late 1940s and 1950s, and this is best preserved on film in the many wonderful, Wyeth-like moments of rambunctious boys playing indoors and out, having fun for the sake of it. (The sole moments of anything like lightness in a film utterly devoid of humor, irony or inference.) He sweated out several 200-page drafts, and when producer Bill Pohlad told him a decade ago that his script contained two films that weren’t joined into one, he worked on it some more, making The New World in the interim. It’s now clear that Pohlad’s criticism was precisely on point; what hardly makes any sense is why the film was subsequently funded and produced when the very problem Pohlad defined was never resolved. Like the New Age itself, The Tree of Life is an aspirational quest that can’t come full circle, since it never determines what it is in the first place, and concludes as a cinema con.

It’s both a strange year and a good year to be away from the Cannes film festival. To not participate in the annual May ritual of descending on the Cote d’Azur (always via TGV off the plane at Paris De Gaulle) and subject yourself to ten days of virtually nonstop viewing from 8:30 a.m. until past midnight–minus times away at the laptop to shoot out hopefully crafted critical responses, composed recklessly when the films are still warm, an athletic process that turns movie watching into an exercise in extreme physical focus toward the screen and away from the fatigue screaming from your body–well….it turns this particular May into an uncommonly peaceful occasion. I’m rather enjoying it, in fact, and based on the responses heard so far as we have our ears to the ground, not missing much of what is sizing up to be a most mediocre Cannes.

Not surprising, given the unexciting lineup announced last month. Kim Ki-Duk anyone? Eric Khoo anyone? Maiwenn? Almodovar, again? Miike, for the umpteenth time? The two overrated Triers (Lars Von T. and Joachim)? Bertrand Bonello AND Naomi Kawase, for God’s sake? Nanni Moretti in the sunset of his career? Even with the awareness that one wasn’t going to be amongst the first in the world to see what Thierry Fremaux et Cie had decided to anoint as “essential” (in both the official selection and the usually superior sidebar, Un Certain Regard) it was hard to justify a trip just to see filmmakers of worth, such as Gerardo Naranjo (Miss Bala), Lynne Ramsay (We Need to Talk About Kevin), Gus Van Sant (Restless), Terrence Malick (The Tree of Life), Aki Kaurismaki (Le Havre), Alain Cavalier (Pater) and Hong Sangsoo (The Day He Arrives). Especially when some or most of these would be seen pretty soon anyway. (Extremely soon, as it so happens: Malick’s insanely anticipated lifetime-in-the-making opus I saw this afternoon. And Woody Allen’s opening night bon bon is screening in Los Angeles this week.)

So maybe it’s a good year to stay away, even if that Icelandic volcano isn’t blowing up anymore, and the Mediterranean coast isn’t being pounded by waves (as was the case in that memorable edition of 2009). From the start, the sense of yawns from the press (there are more press in Cannes than critics) was detectable with Allen’s latest European postcard, this one starring Owen Wilson as a struggling writer suddenly sent back in time from Paris today to Paris in the 1920s. Van Sant’s Restless was judged by most as slight, with his signature filmmaking being applied to a highly tenderized teen tale.

Ramsay’s film–which I picked in a bout of pre-festival hubris as the likely Palme d’Or winner, based on advance word–proved extremely divisive, with some deeply impressed with her ambitiously fractured film grammar applied to a story of a mom (Tilda Swinton, post her the best actress award now, according to all reports) dealing with her seemingly psychopathic boy, and others finding it an unholy mess. The best that many could say about first-time writer-director (and novelist) Julia Leigh’s Jane Campion-endorsed drama, Sleeping Beauty, is that it was precise, or that it recalled Eyes Wide Shut (high praise, as seen from this corner), but a large majority wouldn’t go there and deemed it simply ludicrous.

And that was just the first day. Five full days are done, and upcoming posts will try to synthesize the general critical response, as well as a few individual reviews of films across the sections from the competition, Un Certain Regard, the Quinzaine and Semaine de la Critique. Next is a review of The Tree of Life.

By Robert Koehler

The Turin Horse begins with a micro-fiction by Laszlo Krasznahorkai, reminiscent of both Donald Barthelme’s short fictions placing historical figures in fictitious situations and W.S. Merwin’s prose-poems which combine many different values, but frequently stress two: radical brevity and openness. Krasznahorkai wrote “The Turin Horse” micro-fiction in the early ’80s, and his friends Bela Tarr and Agnes Hranitsky first heard it in a public reading at that time. The story simply tells of a horse in 1888 being mercilessly beaten by its frustrated owner for not budging, and how Nietzsche, passing by on the street in Turin, leapt in to shield the horse from further abuse. The incident left Nietzsche fundamentally altered, ultimately mute and possibly mad, until he died about a decade later. “Of the horse,” the story as well as the third-person on the soundtrack concludes, “we know nothing.”

The Turin Horse, the film, subsequently provides an answer to this open question, and just as suitably, concludes with another open ending: Of the fate of the aging Hungarian farmer, Ohlsdorfer (Janos Derzsi) and his unnamed daughter (Erika Bok, reappearing on screen after her debut as an 11-year-old in Tarr’s Satantango), we know nothing. Knowledge is a difficult thing to ascertain in the world of Tarr/Krasznahorkai/Hranitsky, which is most vividly characterized and defined by movement and the ritualized behavior of everyday human life. This has been the dominant factor since Tarr’s Damnation, though more exactly it was with the director’s previous and crucial film, his adaptation of Macbeth, that he threw out a hyper-realist filmmaking approach influenced by John Cassavetes for a montage of extended plan-sequence takes—arguably the most elaborate camera schemes in cinema since Theo Angelopoulos and Tarr’s fellow Hungarian Miklos Jansco—which involved often nearly invisible choreography of the camera and the bodies in front of, behind and to the sides of it. It’s this choreography that begins to answer the unknown at the end of Krasznahorkai’s story: Fred Kelemen’s black-and-white camera, as important a factor in a film’s final effect as any recent work by any living cinematographer, gazes on….The Turin Horse, living on past 1888 somewhere in Hungary and trotting down a road and driven by Ohlsdorfer, a Beethovian dance of horsepower observed by Kelemen with a constantly moving, roving camera that tracks the horse with intense curiosity, passion, eroticism even—Beethoven, like we say. And with this, the immediate announcement of Mihaly Vig’s chamber score, a circular dirge for small chamber setting (with Vig, Tarr’s “permanent” composer, as are all his fellow partners, “permanent,” leading on organ, which he also plays in his rock band) that becomes one of the film’s two essential audio features. Kelemen’s camera (Kelemen operates himself, and is thus the key dancer in the film’s visual choreography) doesn’t simply move in reverse in front of the horse—though, classified technically as a reverse moving shot, it’s one of the greatest in film history—but around it, to its sides, roving, wandering around her body, considering her power, locomotion, pure movement for movement’s sake, exactly Degas’ obsession with the physique in (frozen) motion unfrozen. This is only one of two times in the film where the horse (played in the opening by a horse with no name, and played subsequently by a horse named Ricsi) works.

The rest of the time in The Turin Horse, the humans work. Unlike Damnation, Satantango, Werckmeister Harmonies or The Man from London, there are no larger stories, nor greater communities surrounding the characters. These are people directly from Samuel Beckett, but translated by Krasznahorkai into a fully grounded setting not too far from the world of Satantango, which is embedded in a fully captured Hungarian farming community and stresses, like The Turin Horse, a specific choreography of bodies through defined physical space, sometimes repeated many times, always daily, the days defining their lives. (The narrative of The Turin Horse is divided into six days, each identified by a place card in front of each section, like a thriller or horror movie.) Ohlsdorfer has a bum arm and hand, so he’s badly dependent on his daughter to help him with chores, and chores are all that fill their days, with rest periods in between of staring out their home’s main window—almost certainly what farm folks in the pre-electric age would do for entertainment, with the window as a screen.

Their ritualized day goes something like this. The daughter usually rises first, with the father shortly after, fully clothed in PJ’s with socks (and usually viewed at an angle echoing Mantegna’s “Dead Christ” which becomes quite amusing through repetition. The Turin Horse, contrary to everything you may have read up until now, can be a pretty funny film, especially when seen more than once.) He swings his legs around the side of the bed, and she helps him take off his bedclothes, which are as many garments as the daytime clothes she also puts on for him like a patient nurse. This establishes a certain complicated patriarchy, but made vulnerable, and the critical role the daughter plays in making everything in the house and the farm function.

In fact, she does most everything: She preps all of the food—largely potatoes, boiled, served in a wooden bowl with no utensils—tends to the oven, the gas lamps, the laundry, refreshing the hay in the horse barn, retrieving water from the well that looks about 50 yards from the house’s front door. Dad, on the other hand, can’t get the day going without two swigs of his preferred booze, palinka, a type of Hungarian schnapps that looks as strong or stronger than vodka. (You know things are going bad on the farm when he doesn’t stop at two swigs, but chases it with a bigger swig straight from the bottle—with Kelemen and Tarr holding on the bottle as he sets it down for an extended still life shot, a vision of possible doom, and one of the moments in The Turin Horse that truly takes the viewer directly back to Satantango, and its extraordinary fascination with drinking and bottles.)

But the father does work, in the stable with the horse, which has decided to stop working. This is the beginning of the film’s Beckett effect, where characters (there are three, with a fourth who enters dramatically at the film’s unforgettable midpoint) are at the beginning of the end point. In Beckett, as in both the fiction and film versions of The Turin Horse, things never actually end, though an end, perhaps The End, seems as though it may be on the horizon—or not, and what may follow is a repetition of what happened before, suggesting an ending that never comes. This is why it’s wrong to label the film or anything in it as “apocalyptic,” a term that we’re getting too used to. (The 2012 effect, maybe.) The horse refuses to budge, again, and Ohlsdorfer, sitting on his rickety buggy and unleashing his whip on the stubborn, tired creature, is repeating history, or Krasznahorkai’s history within the fictional world he’s made up. The horse is re-living her past life all over again, and now, the father and daughter are going to be living five days that repeat themselves with strange constancy, broken up by only two key intruders/incidents. The daughter, playing Nietzsche, steps in and stops Ohlsdorfer from beating the horse, which then exacts her revenge by refusing to eat for the following days.

This ushers in the film’s most overwhelming effect—a raging wind, so ferocious that it makes a kind of strange musical sound (the audio track of the wind is steadily looped for extended sections) and creates a new environment. The wind is already there in the opening shot, but soon, it’s a malevolent force that some will be tempted to interpret as either God or the Devil. (Which it would be if this were a Bergman film; fortunately, The Turin Horse is as far from Bergman as an Adam Sandler movie.) Griffith’s desire of a cinema for the feeling of wind through the trees is amplified here to operatic lengths, and provides the film with a sense of tremendous enormity, paradoxically co-existing with its deliberately claustrophobic sense of a small farmhouse in which two people are barely ekeing out an existence, and frequently can’t step outside. Rituals get reduced: Tending to the stove, sewing, picking through the potatoes, staring out the window, sleeping. Only outside runs to the well are possible in the increasingly horrific weather, which becomes worse when the well runs mysteriously dry. The world, so huge and sweeping in the opening bravura dance and in Kelemen’s giant landscape views of the nearby hills and a lonely tree, feels like it’s caving in.

Then, he arrives. We never know who he is, a neighbor most likely, somebody Ohlsdorfer feels comfortable inviting past his threshold. He’s here, of course, for some palinka; Ohlsdorfer, clearly, is the local go-to guy for palinka. But he soon is clearly here for another reason: In the film’s only monologue, and its only notable chunk of dialogue (the father and daughter talk in the short, clipped language of people who’ve worked back-breaking labor their entire lives), he delivers a warning to them, that any chance for a life of “excellence” and “good” is over, chased out by nameless barbarians who’ve ruined everything. He’s not Nietzsche, but rather a Nietzschean character, like the horse herself, as if Krasznahorkai had returned to his original story, snared a possible character from a possible fiction shadowed by the presence of Nietzsche and deposited him down in the midpoint of the film. He’s a pivot point, a man facing defeat, certainly a foreshadowing of the European disasters to come, but also a universal warning of the collapse of culture. This scene will surely be examined exhaustively by critics and writers, since its one of the rare scenes since Satantango in which Tarr and Krasznahorkai place their thematic cards on the table in something other than purely cinematic terms; it’s an aria in an otherwise nearly wordless opera. But it’s also undermined in an instant by Ohlsdorfer, who’s been patiently listening to his verbose friend, stops him, calls it all “rubbish” and orders him out the front door. Open readings and possibilities characterize The Turin Horse from start to finish, and this scene is no exception: The man, plopping his hulking body down at the dinner, could be a parody of every movie drunk opining about the world (or Beckett character who whips enough energy to muster a speech), seeing nothing but darker and darker prospects with every progressive swig, or he could be the kind of visionary who circulate through the worlds of Tarr’s films, phony or not, with some perception of the way the world actually is. Beyond his conclusions that any chance is dashed for the forces of good and excellence to triumph over the forces of rottenness (an interesting argument to hear on the week that certain forces of good in Egypt triumphed over medievalists and autocrats), he’s here to deliver the word: God is dead.

This may be why, even subconsciously, some rejected The Turin Horse in Berlin, and will do so as it trots through one festival after another toward a deservedly legendary position as a key film of our time. (And not just because Tarr claimed to my face that it’s his last film, which I also don’t believe for a second.) The notion, even within a design of open filmic narrative architecture, that a film would present a case for the non-existence of God is unpleasant to many people, even people at film festivals, where you’re more likely than in many other walks of life to run into atheists. There are the obvious reasons why some (many?) even hate the film: Its repetitions, the almost never-changing music (I spotted on two watching/listenings not just one music track by Vig, but a pair), the elongated pace, the sustained depiction in black-and-white of a mercilessly bleak existence, the rejection of “drama,” maybe even just the sight of people eating boiled potatoes again and again with their hands, the sheer “pointlessness” of it (an emotion that seeped out of several reviews by frustrated critics). But the fundamental Nietzschean concept of life with a God is as frequently despised now (perhaps now more than ever before) as it was in the author’s time.

I’ve mentioned two specific reference points to Nietzsche in The Turin Horse. Sight and Sound critic/editor Nick James helpfully mentioned another one to me: The man at the beginning of Nietzsche’s “The Gay Science” who observes a candle going out as proof that God is dead. The critical turning points in the film begin with the horse refusing to work; the wind; the man and his monologue; the unwelcome visit of Gypsies who urge the father and daughter to join them on their way to America (not, under the circumstances, a bad idea; in fact, the entire film can be prosaically read as a demonstration of why people fled Europe for North America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries) and leave the daughter with a strange book; the attempted departure of the farm, only to make a U-turn just over the ridge of the nearby hill (the film’s biggest mystery—what makes them turn back?); and, on the fifth day, and into the sixth, the gas-lit lamps in the house failing to work anymore, like the Turin Horse. Inside of this are more slices of Nietzsche: The candle/lamp going out, and the large tome from the Gypsies read out loud by the daughter (in what amounts to her only monologue, of sorts), with the passage she reads describing how the churches are being closed by the priests because too much sin has been committed. Tarr refers to the book, a pure invention of Krasznahorkai’s, as an “anti-Bible.” The fascination with this scene, both in the kind of reverential way that Kelemen lights it and frames the daughter and the book, is that the slightly inattentive viewer might actually think that she’s reading from the Bible, but just perhaps an obscure chapter that only Biblical scholars know well. It is, in fact, the third fiction which Krasznahorkai has implanted in the film, the first being the micro-fiction, the second being the film narrative meant to answer the story’s open question, and suddenly, this unexpected kind of meta-fiction masquerading as scripture that’s actually a repudiation of religion.

Tarr’s cinematic design begins with elaborate camera dances, the pure celebration of cinematic movement through space, and ends with absolute stasis and darkness. By the arrival of day six, the storm has ended, the apocalypse hasn’t happened. But this meticulously observed choreography of human beings at work and in everyday life, absolutely materialist and fixed by the clock and the course of the sun rising and setting and rising again the next day, gives way to a disturbing metaphysic without God, a darkness (Kelemen’s images manage as close to pure blackness as I’ve seen in a film since the final scene in Kiarostami’s The Taste of Cherry, perhaps more so since we are watching black-and-white 35mm film) that forces the father and daughter into a Beckett space of motionlessness and the elimination of language. (“What is this?” the daughter says as the light goes out. There can be no real answer.) It’s an extension of the dread at the heart of Van Gogh’s “The Potato Eaters,” only drained of light. What we’re watching at the end of The Turin Horse is the beginning of the end of lives as they are, though not possibly death. The storm is over; maybe, as Ohlsdorfer urges his daughter at an especially dire point, they’ll try again tomorrow. The potatoes can’t be boiled now, but we’ll go on. We can’t go on. We’ll go on.