Something to See

This year at Cannes something really unusual happened. No, it was not festival directors booting a vaunted guest, Danish writer-director Lars von Trier, for his supposedly anti-Semitic comments during his press conference (though they kept his film). And it was not the celebrity glam mass of male star power—Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp, and Sean Penn (who starred in two films)—all together in one place. Nor was it the coming of much anticipated films, rumored to be deeply personal, specifically von Trier’s Melancholia after his hotly controversial Antichrist (2009), or the premiere, at last, of American writer-director Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, a film that was three years in post-production and rumor had showing at Cannes last year. Nor, finally, the very real possibility that either or both of those films, or a couple of others, given the track record of their directors, could immediately leap to classichood (lots try, but in the elusive alchemy of filmmaking, hardly any succeed).

No. Though the last prospects proved true enough, the big surprise lay in the fact that the festival’s very best films, small and large alike, came from filmmakers who drew their substance and fire and even their style from matters deeply religious. This seems really odd, given that presently much of the Western world, and especially its literati, including the mass of filmmakers and critics, dwells happily in a glib secularism that a priori scorns all things in the least religious. And now, to just about everyone’s gaping surprise, comes a chorus of superb films that query those purblind exclusions. These films were not in the least soppy, didactic, or simplistic—the aesthetic and religious crimes that befall much of what passes for “religious” film. Rather, an array of filmmakers from all over the globe worked their medium in quite breathtaking ways as they wrestled in pure, lucid, and merciful resolve with multiple forms of human brokenness—all those brutalities that implant “the question mark turned like a fishhook in the human heart,” as novelist Peter De Vries put it in his beautiful but excruciating novel about the death of his young daughter (The Blood of the Lamb, 1961). And, most of the time, with such dire matters came at least the breath of hope and rescue, sometimes gloriously so. Surprise, surprise.

The first of these surprising films opened the Un Certain Regard competition, a special gathering of films, usually low-budget ones, that push cinematic boundaries. Director Gus Van Zant, maker of Good Will Hunting (1997) and Milk (2008), came with Restless, an aptly titled film about teenager Annabel, played by Mia Wasikowska (last year’s dazzling Jane Eyre), in the last stages of brain cancer. Rather too chirpy and cute, the story nonetheless depicts an intense relish for being alive. Annabel pals up with a troubled young man, Enoch (Henry Hopper, son of the late Dennis), who hangs out at funerals and whose only friend is a ghost, a Japanese kamikaze pilot name Yoshi (Ryo Kase). This would be a bad trip if not for that jaunty thematic, the pleasure, even thrill, of simply being alive, something the film contends is a pretty good gig even when death speeds and parents die in accidents. Unfortunately, writer Jason Lew doesn’t quite know what to do with this giddiness; he fails to wonder from whence it comes. In the film it seems, rather, a peculiar evolutionary twitch, even though, as he contends, the birds sing every morning in exultant response to the recognition that they are still alive. Still, kudos to Lew and Van Zant for picturing, albeit with some gush, one sizeable metaphysical clue to what humankind is for, both before and after Darwin. If theodicy troubles the faithful, surely the surfeit of such pervasive splendor in the ordinary should provoke just a bit of metaphysical perplexity among the doubtful.

Perhaps the festival’s most unlikely film, full of narrative gusto, came from Israel’s Joseph Cedar, the maker heretofore of rather labored war dramas. The Footnote recounts the rivalry between two Talmud scholars, in this case a father and son. The cranky father labors obscurely in meticulous old-school textual analysis while his son preens in the media with theory-driven revisionism. Both take their work seriously, but all is greatly complicated by the nasty politics of prestige and money. (In Israel, the stakes are high.) Wonderfully scripted and narrated, full of humor and twists, the film moves toward flat-out tragedy as it poses the hard question of what good, amid such tawdry squabbles, is the Talmud, anyway. And with that query, happily, and agonizingly, the film ends. As in life, so also in the movies.

That also applies to another great surprise from the Middle East. In Where Do We Go Now?, writer, director, and actress Nadine Labaki focuses on the difficulties of co-existence in one backwater Muslim-Christian village in Lebanon. The film tracks the increasingly desperate and, at times, very funny measures a cabal of village women, Muslim and Christian together (and collaborating clergy), undertake to keep peace between the believers. (The biggest obstacle lies in the usual one: too much testosterone, males within both groups who at the least offense react with their fists—or guns.) Labaki persuades us of both the inveterate silliness and the chastening nobility of that cadre of peacekeepers. The film should run on every screen around the globe.

And then the big three, all very different from one another but all gorgeous, transfixing, and searching. They push the old, hard questions, as old as the Fall, now exacerbated by a general loss of hopefulness about much of anything. Then again, maybe there is some sort of more. Maybe.

First, though, Lars von Trier, and no one musters grim better than he does. His recent films gather to a scream of indignation at the pitiless storm that randomly befalls people and, in particular, their doings with one another. For better and worse, von Trier hauls viewers inside troubled souls, even into the limited mental world of a martyr, such as heroine Bess in his breakthrough film, Breaking the Waves (1996). In Dogville (2003), he lashes the banalities and deceptions masking the narcissism of enlightened, self-congratulatory do-gooders of a liberal sort. Divine judgment, in this case delivered by Grace (Nicole Kidman), never seemed so fitting. His brutal, inflammatory Antichrist, a film von Trier embarked on as he emerged from a long bout of fierce depression, recounts the aftermath of the death of a one-year-old while his parents made love in the next room. Here he sketches the limits of mutual and self-inflicted desecration, and the film is genuinely horrific.

Melancholia sounds no cheerier, and it isn’t, though it is notably more polite (no repeat of sexual self-mutilation, for instance). The first half recounts the psychological implosion of fancy bride Justine (Kirsten Dunst, who won Cannes’ best actress award) during an opulent wedding reception on the enormous estate of her half-cad brother-in-law (Kiefer Sutherland). He’s a downright saint compared to the bride’s parents and her boss. The sister (Charlotte Gainsborough) alternates between love and loathing, dutifully announcing the latest shift. Justine is surrounded by “assorted characters of death and blight” wrapped in seeming splendor, as Robert Frost puts it (“Design”), and marriage to a well-meaning simpleton will not divert her from her pervading sense of woe and meaninglessness. Von Trier’s accomplishment is that inside this black hole, we actually sympathize, although the bride herself seems painfully self-indulgent.

The second half of the film deals with an enormous asteroid named Melancholia that has been “hiding behind the sun” and is headed for a very near miss with earth, or so the scientists predict. Except the end comes, and it is, thanks to sensational special effects, spectacular—and fearsome. We’re encouraged to conclude that the asteroid has simply delivered with dispatch the demise that the human species would before too long have managed on its own dreadful terms (with a whimper instead of a bang). In his controversial news conference, von Trier admitted that the part of Christianity that attracted him most was its honesty about suffering, although he’s now fascinated with the difference between Roman Catholic and Orthodox understandings of Light and the Holy Spirit. Let us hope.

A far brighter work comes in Jean-Luc and Pierre Dardennes’ The Kid with a Bike, with which the brothers added to their Cannes laurels, winning second place in a tie (they have twice won the big prize, with Rosetta in 1999 and The Child in 2005). Stylistically they have sustained and updated the practices of Robert Bresson (see Paul Schrader’s Transcendental Style in Film), deemphasizing expressivity in acting, eschewing close-ups, and emphasizing motion, and while these restraints sound constricting, they are by the Dardennes superbly realized, critics suggesting that the viewer in uncanny ways is induced to enter the filmic space itself. As with Bresson, though their plots follow similar moral and spiritual trajectories, these tales remain fresh, gripping, and finally bracing.

And like Bresson, the Dardennes display marked religious concerns, though they admit no more than the presence of such. Chief among these is concern with the consequences of European secularization, leaving their characters rootless and clueless. In their new film, a boy has been abandoned by his father, who sold his son’s treasured bicycle. The boy fights for father and bike at every turn, and the outcome is never assured. Only the intervention of a local hairdresser (well-known French actress Cecile de France) offers the kid a sliver of hope. Far from a tear-jerker (put away the tissues), the film hunts bigger game than gush and roses, and a gorgeous thing it is. Think instead of Saul and David or Abraham and Isaac, the sorts of dramas which the Dardennes, educated in Catholic Left schools, hark back to with regularity.

But surely, the big event at Cannes was the winner of the Palm d’Or, Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, a flat-out visionary spectacle that covers three different periods in the life of the O’Brien family, though most of it takes place in 1950s small-town Texas. The film begins with bad news, diverts to cosmic history for fifteen minutes, returns to Texas, and concludes in the present and some future somewhere. And there’s never been anything quite like it, either formally or thematically, though Tarkovsky and Malick himself come close. Even those critics who have quarrels with the film, small and large, advise that everyone see it ASAP. So they should, for Malick enacts with expansive, dead-serious gorgeousness, and with wrenching immediacy and poignancy, both the horror and the glory of the created world and life within it (and for him all is created).

As the title plainly announces, Malick has in mind that other tree in Eden, the one sorely neglected by so much attention to good and evil, though, to be sure, he emphatically does not neglect “the horror,” either natural and personal. As such, the film offers something of a theodicy wrapped inside a lush meditation on creation and destruction (the epigraph is from Job). Malick’s thrust throughout is to insist, especially visually, on a Presence whose radiance counters brokenness—on a “way of grace,” of love in and for all things or, in a line he repeats from The Thin Red Line, “the glory smiling through,” even amid stark, harrowing evil. In this, viewers see through Malick’s eyes and perhaps, for that matter, as one line in the film suggests, from the vantage of God’s own relish for lavish beauty. After all, in the central motif of the film (and of the Judeo-Christian tradition), all comes from Light, and finally all moves toward Light, that mysterious, radiant Alpha and Omega of Love Itself.

Indeed, for Malick this reality begins in the wonder of wonder, an aesthetic grasp of the mutlifoliate gift of all being (something toward which science also points in the film’s renditions of cosmic history). And Malick is not alone in this vision, for he mines the same amplitude that has informed much of American literature from Edwards and Melville and, of late, Annie Dillard and Marilynne Robinson. In short, this masterwork has at its core, as one family member put it, a “crazy theophanic” leap, both daring and wildly bracing. Unfortunately, a pretty thorough ignorance of Western cultural history (and especially the religious components thereof) impedes many American film critics from recognizing just how very radical, and yet how very traditional, is Malick’s Christian vision of time and life within it. Baffled by the conspicuous presence of “spiritual” stuff throughout, they simply lump Malick’s film with New-Agey pablum. This impercipience extends to those who should know better. In The New York Review of Books (July 14), Geoffrey O’Brien, editor in chief of the Library of America and a brilliant film critic, calls The Tree of Life “audacious and magnificent” but seems entirely stymied by questions of meaning, contenting himself with a few dutiful references to Freud, of all people. And on it goes. That same sort of flabby opacity afflicts Matt Zoller Seitz’s “Guide” to the film in Salon (July 2), even though he references Craig Detweiler’s eloquent online review (posted on May 26 at craig.purplestateofmind.com). Of major critics, only A. O. Scott in The New York Times (May 26) and Richard Corliss in Time (May 16) seem to get it.

So it is that Cannes 2011 delivered several big surprises. The first is the sheer number of films in which religious matters, whether pitched straight on or obliquely, loomed large. Second, and better still, these same films provided the best filmmaking—inviting and often downright beautiful, no matter how somber their substance. For those skeptical of the persistence or cogency of religious appetites and visions, of both the thirstiness and glory of being, perhaps it is time to have another look-see.

Roy Anker is professor of English at Calvin College. His most recent book, Of Pilgrims and Fire: When God Shows Up at the Movies, was published last year by Eerdmans. In addition to Books & Culture, he would like to thank Calvin College’s Dean of Research and Alumni Association for support that made the trip to Cannes possible.