Arts
Confusion in Cannes
Richard Combs
Cannes In the wake of any major film festival, critical energy is traditionally expended on spotting trends and finding threads in the maze of coming attractions. It is, however, an activity which increasingly flies in the face of the most dominant trend of recent years: the atomisation and specialisation in the forms and techniques of film-making. Most festivals tidily divide their selections into self-sufficent programmes, which can be labelled as young, old or strugglingto-be-born cinema (most mystical and intriguing rubric is Cannes' Les Yeux Fertiles). But the real aesthetic divisions and principles are harder to determine as the forms of traditional, experimental, structural, minimal and televisual cinema have begun to divide and multiply.
Largest of the festivals, Cannes has always been closest to admitting that chaos reigns by staging the 'official' competition in film art alongside a booming marche in film commerce — a juxtaposition that has always begged the question of where the real 'are is to be found. Such diversity should of course not just be expected but welcomed. At Cannes in 1977, however, the diversity was acquiring the overtones of more perverse confusion.
It might have had something to do with the weather, which — overcast, drizzly and frequently very humid — seemed to upset the natives as much as outsiders still attached to postcard visions. It probably didn't have anything to do with the general strike on 24 May, a disruption that had been carefully fitted into the programme. Daytime projections were suspended, but even heavy picketing outside the Paleis des Festivals, protesting the breach in the twentyfour-hour strike for the sake of Une Poignee de Privilegies, failed to turn away capacity audiences for the evening screenings. Still, this was a festival that produced no one outstanding feature, or new alignment or indication of new direction, but an unusual crop of interesting failures and mixed blessings from major directors who seemed to be confidently heading up blind alleys.
For its first hour or so, Robert Altman's Three Women looked to be making good progress along an undeniably difficult route between its familiar American materials and European art movie pretensions. In the end, Altman proves unable to reconcile them, and skids off into that easiest of all solutions, collapsing his elaborate mosaic into a conventional picture of madness. In terms of its restricted scale and tight, intimate focus, the film stands out from Altman's other recent work (Nashville, Buffalo Bill and the Indians) which has been extending its epic coverage, if not its metaphorical penetration, of the American scene. Three Women, in fact, is a story of place both precisely local and airily abstract: an arid region of Southern California serves as a physically exact homeaway-from-home for two Texas girls (Shelley Duvall, Sissy Spacek) who meet as therapists at a geriatric spa and subsequently become room-mates in a plastic oasis of motel civilisation in the desert. Silent guardian spirit of this rocky place is the third woman (Janice Rule) who runs the local bar but spends most of her time decorating the landscape with murals of sexual combat between a trio of scaly humanoid creatures.
For once, Altman seems to have found a situation sufficiently tense and ambiguous to contain the casual interplay of his actors — and with fascinating ease begins to turn a languorous comedy of manners into some dream of primordial existence. The trouble is that, having quite bravely established the principle that mood and colour-tone — predominantly mauve and rose —will count for more than plot, and that characters may be quite interchangeable, he allows some blatant psychological themes to stage a takeover in the second half. Nightmares, a horrifying birth and some glib fusing of the women's individual traumas eventually transform a situation of grandiloquent absurdity into one that is merely preposterous.
If Altman can be seen making one or two beguiling moves in the direction of the European art movie, Wim Wenders further confusesthe issue by going in exactly the opposite direction: Der Amerikanische Freund, an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith which determinedly blends with the tradition of the American B-picture. Wender's film is a bleakly atmospheric crime drama which has tampered with portions of the plot of Highsmith's Ripley's Game but wrought most of its changes through highly idiosyncratic casting. The novel's mysterious Mr Ripley, a Gatsby-like figure of unfathomable wealth and influence, has become (as incarnated by Dennis Hopper) a strangely unconfident wheeler-dealer, dithering on the fringes of art forgery and gangland power struggles. Similarly, Jonathan Zimmermann, the story's focus as a timid, terminally-ill frame-maker who is persuaded that he too can kill for the Syndicate, has become a figure of much more substantial angst and ambiguous motivation.
What Wenders has done, not altogether successfully but with a great eye for intensely lit, burnished compositions capturing some essence of human loneliness, is to adapt the mechanics of the thriller, and the strange, guilt-ridden friendship that develops between Ripley and Zimmermann, to the terms of his own past studies (Alice in the Cities, Kings of the Road) of difficult relationships in times of social dissolution. He also manages the action passages in the plot with considerable aplomb, not only indulging references to great American thrillers of the past (signalled by the cameo roles taken by directors like Nicholas Ray and Samuel Fuller) but occasionally winding up the suspense like some frenzied latterday Hitch cock. •
Perhaps the mast frustrating instance of cultural carry-over and creative confusion at the Festival was Werner Herzog's Stroszek. This features the 'actor' Bruno S, a strange, canny moon-calf discovered by Herzog for his most popular success of recent years, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. Disappointingly, Herzog employs him here for little purpose other than to recreate the success of the earlier film, and invents a Kasper Hauser Goes to America plot-line which eventUally disappears into vacuous symbolism and sentimentality.
At times the film rises above its tedious narrative to demonstrate that Herzog still has an uncommonly acute entomologist's eye for local forms of life, and he makes fine work of the central sequence in which all the signs of the good life which Bruno has acquired on credit are repossessed and redistributed by a quick-fire auctioneer. (Herzog has also made a documentary on this particular, gobbledygook idiom of capitalism called How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck.). But for the most part, Stroszek seems unable to marshal its sense of the absurdities of the American scene quite as trenchantly or as humorously as a number of native commentators have done.
Other offerings in the main festival' seemed to be the product of far less interesting attempts at cross-breeding. The English entry which won the prize for best first feature, The Duellists, took a tight and serviceable Joseph Conrad story and filled it Out with scenic flab and theatrical tit-bits (cameo performances by Albert Finney, Edward Fox and Robert Stephens). The other English contender, Black Joy, seemed equally determined to give respectable literary weight to a slight tale of immigrant life in London by pumping up its Dickensian connotations. The result was merely excruciating over-acting and an hysteric atmosphere supposedly representing the joy of the title.
Away from the competition, however, there seemed to be sufficient threats in the marche (horror films from such accomplished practitioners as George Romero and David Cronenberg) to restore one's faith that 'pure' cinema was still alive and well somewhere away from the bright lights and the glitter.
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