2008 Festival de Cannes: Part Six

Day 8

Rave reviews here mostly for The Changeling. Angelina Jolie’s career-defining performance, the nature of evil and corruption and determined struggle against evil and so on. It’s rather mind-boggling, but no less so than the French film critics who largely trash Kornel Mundruczo’s Delta. Mundruczo, kind of a protégé of Bela Tarr, made this classically-structured, beautifully shot and poetic film about the love between a brother and sister on the waterways of the Danube. There are the Bela Tarr faces of Hungarian peasants, but Mundruczo is at once more lyrical and even romantic. The main actor of Delta died when the film was already 75% complete, and Mundruczo had to start all over.

The hot ticket here last night was the premiere of Che, the two-part epic about Che Guevara by Steven Soderbergh, which the Cannes festival decided to play at one 4 ½ hour sitting.

It’s a strange film. Soderbergh with Che and the small band of revolutionaries leaving Mexico for Cuba and follows their armed struggle against Battista and the American-backed government by filling the film with much detail. He intercuts this narrative with several other strands – Che’s speech to United Nations in New York and an interview with Che – both of these shot in black and white in contrast to the main color narrative. This is filled with much detail about military strategy and political rhapsodizing about the structure of the future Cuban society. For all of its length and action, the film is strangely under-dramatized, and you don’t know that much more about Che coming out of the film than going into it. Che is rather kind of a narrative of the Cuban revolution, but even here it is strangely uninvolving, perhaps because Soderbergh wanted to keep distance and maintain some sort of “objectivity”. How and where this film will travel is hard to imagine; there will undoubtedly be some Alka-Seltzer moments for the distributor.

A wonderfully exciting surprise here last night was the premiere of a first feature by a very young Argentinian filmmaker, Pablo Aguero (he is all of 31), Salamandra. Set in a “lost valley” in Patagonia, a hangout for renegades and hippies from all over the world, the film is as ambitious as it is original.

Alba, a thirty-year old mother, gets out of prison following the end of the dictatorship, and comes to get her six-year old son, Inti. Together they make the long (1200+ kilometer) journey, hitchhiking their way to El Bolson. Here is a world of constant parties amid squalor, animals and bugs, children who attack the houses of newcomers amid which the kind of crazy Alba and her precocious son (among the most astonishing child-actor performances of all time) try to build a new life. The film doesn’t miss a note, and the frequently hand-held camera, never obvious or intrusive, gives the film an immediacy and psychological currency.

I’d go see this film again if it were playing somewhere right now.


- Facets Multi-Media Executive Director Milos Stehlik, reporting from the 2008 Festival de Cannes.