The opening films across the three programmes at the 75th Cannes Film Festival speak of disparate destinies of contemporary cinema, from the poetic to the political and the pointless. Let's start with the latter.
Cannes' official opening film -- the one with all the red-carpet ballyhoo -- is Michael Hazanavicius' Coupez!. Hazanavicius is known to most filmgoers as the 2012 Oscar winner from the faux-silent film The Artist. His output since, however, hasn't generated much excitement among international critics, and now came this thing called Coupez! (or Final Cut), a French remake of the Japanese low-budget zombie comedy One Cut Of The Dead. The original film, a cult hit among fans, is a loose-limbed, unselfconscious wacky comedy about a film crew who face a zombie outbreak on set. Meanwhile this French reinterpretation is a self-conscious, high-concept film within a film. The original is crazy -- in a way Japanese craziness translates to something akin to national treasure -- while this remake tries so hard to be "crazy", and ends up being inane.
One can assume that Hazanavicius is on a quest to unpack cinephilic history and unearth its lore. The Artist is a nod to the silent era; Redoutable (2017) looks at the myth of Jean-Luc Godard's life in the 1960s; and now in Coupez!, supposedly, he takes us behind the scenes of a cut-rate indie film. Romain Duris plays an overzealous film director hired by a Japanese producer to stage a livestreamed, one-cut remake of a Japanese zombie film (One Cut Of The Dead, of course, how meta everything is!). And as he struggles to overcome all kinds of stupid obstacles, including an actor's incorrigible diarrhoea, Coupez! suggests how a Z-movie crew like his have to rely on a combination of strategy, improvisation and on-set troubleshooting to pull off a "fast, cheap and yet decent film".
Overwrought and overlong, Coupez! posits itself as a celebration of filmmaking wit, a zany hats-off to all heroes behind the scenes of all low-budget films. Well, sometimes it's funny, but mostly it's frustrating, with the jokes strained and the actors screaming, then there's something unpleasant about the poop and vomit gag, not to mention the strange Japanese lady acting all weird. Coupez! is exactly what happens when a European pantomimes a Japanese, thinking it's cool when in fact it's annoying. We all know that One Cut Of The Dead will not ever be deemed good enough to open Cannes, but it's a more honourable, more sincere film in every way.
To wash that off, we turn to the opening film of the sidebar Director's Fortnight programme. L'Envol (Scarlet) is a post-World War I French fable about everyday magic by the Italian filmmaker Pietro Marcello, whose previous film Martin Eden is an ambitious epic that established him as a European arthouse star (we should also go back further, to his 2016 mystical hybrid documentary Lost And Beautiful, which carries the same sensibility as this latest film.)
L'Envol is at heart a romance story, folded neatly inside a modern fairy tale complete with a witch, a dashing prince falling from the sky, and a scarlet sailboat waiting to carry our rural princess off into the sunset. But it's not that simple. The film is also a story of how modernity slowly usurps mundane miracles and pastoral beauty, and how the scar of war runs deeper than what the eyes can see. Raphael (Raphael Thierry) is a war veteran with a limp who returns to his home village to find his wife dead and his daughter left with her aunt. Contending with villainous neighbours, Raphael raises his daughter, Juliette (Juliette Jouan), into a beautiful teenager and probably, as the rumour goes, a witch. As the father makes wooden toys that spin and twinkle, Juliette sings, swims, dances and dreams of a world beyond the field.
Marcello treads a delicate balance as he gives us this film about working-class life, inviting us to see its raw beauty without romanticising it. L'Envol may appear a tad too sweet by the end, but it holds up so well because it never falls into the trap of sentimentalism.
Switching gear, Cannes treats us to Tiralleurs (Father And Soldiers), the opening film of the Un Certain Regard sidebar. The main draw of this film directed by Mathieu Vadepied is its lead actor -- Omar Sy, one of the biggest French stars best-known to international audience from the series Lupin. Sy plays a Senegalese father who enlists to fight with the French Army in World War I in order to protect his teenage son, who was drafted by the colonial power. The question of allegiance -- tribal, familial, national -- is the key here. Sy, speaking a Senegalese dialect, anchors the film with his presence, though Tiralleurs feels too conventional to push any meaningful conversation.
We'll have more updates from Cannes over the next week.
