The sensible question is why anyone would venture to the sunny Riviera in so lovely a month as May to sit in the dark, hour after hour, day after day, days on end. And all of that sitting in the darkness was to find some kind of light, or at least glimmers thereof. Oddly, though, it worked, and then some, though in a very unexpected way. The 2008 Cannes Film Festival lacked any film that flared incandescently in the usual firmament of many really fine films. Instead, the big surprise was the cumulative efflorescence of the whole lot—not only as cinematic dazzle, of which there was plenty, but as a resounding chorus of wonder and praise for one of the more mystifying portions of the human riddle.
A curious sort of luminousness inheres in all things, in objects to be sure but infinitely more in the mystery of palpable selves. Indeed.
Understand, first, that the entries at Cannes came from all over and went everywhere. A young filmmaker from Kazakh-stan, Sergey Dvortsevoy, brought Tulpan, the plainly told story of a young ex-sailor who wants to herd sheep on the barren steppes. From the Philippines came Serbis, a seamy tale of a dilapidated family-run porn house (still sporting, with ham-fisted irony, the huge marquee from its prosperous days, F-A-M-I-L-Y). From Italy came striking crime stories about guns, the mob, and teenage boys (Gomorrah) and guns, the mob, and aging politicians (El Divo). Brazil and Argentina delivered splendid films about hard lives in hard places. The list goes on, more than one can absorb in the ten days, film after film of fresh story and cinematic elegance. There were bad movies too, very bad, ones to walk out on (once), but, ah, the wonder is that so much was so very good—and that so very many, for all their unsortable profusion, went after the same daunting subject matter. There was with startling regularity a resolute, wondrous sort of meditation on the marvel of being human as soul-in-the-flesh—how much we all are somehow, in an ever-strange brew, consciousness and spirit but also fundamentally of and in flesh. Clearly, that is something we’ve always known, at least in our heads, but we forget easily, or even deny it.
These films grab us by the collar and compel our attention by means of images, or sequences of images, usually wordless. The great Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein thought that with the embrace of sound and dialogue, the medium soon came to neglect the power of the visual image. On the evidence at Cannes, he was unduly pessimistic. The festival was a feast of telling, memorable images, the sort one could hang on the wall as icons of the glory (and bane) of what people are.
A very pregnant woman, nude, showering, the camera in close, dwelling on her distended abdomen, nothing at all soft-focus gauzy about it. For one, she’s an inmate, and two, an inmate in the mother’s wing of a ramshackle Argentine prison, and there she will birth her child and rear him till age four.
In 1928 Los Angeles, the look on the face of another young mother, strained and uncomprehending, when police present to her a boy who is not her abducted son. They brook no dissent. Unbelievably, it’s all true, as in actual history.
In a starkly urban Anywhere, a driver at a traffic signal instantly goes sightless, the viewer seeing the sudden white nothing that he sees. And then everyone goes blind, one by one, stone-white blind.
In San Paulo, a jobless, middle-aged, single mother of four, all by different fathers, with still another on the way, mutters sweet love to her sleeping youngest. When he’s awake, she only rails at his very existence.
On a whim, an aging woman, sixty-plus, a part-time seamstress, pretty happily married, beds a customer ten years her elder. The camera watches it all, wrinkles, frailty, and flab, trying to cipher what brings people to this pass and whether this will indeed yield bliss, as the title suggests, or plain old hell-to-pay.
And there were many more such images, prodding us to ponder how much we are our bodies and what, indeed, they make of us. That is, to some extent, the sort of thing we expect film to do—watching and witnessing, variously displaying this world and human experience in and of it. This empirical bent has had its downside, for sure, as in filmdom’s long history of exalting physical appeal, “sexiness,” as it used to be called, particularly in Hollywood’s fixation on glamour and romance, on and off the screen. It is, after all, the dream factory, and how it does love to prettify, objectify, pander, and profit, cashing in on the reductive gaze so often lamented in contemporary critical theory. At Cannes, something quite different was underway, at once searching, exultant, and, for lack of a better term, hallowed, evoking a sense of transcendent mystery, even presence. This we understand well enough when doting on landscapes or babies; it is harder to see in our own mottled creaturehood and the raw, palpable selves of others, at once glorious and ignoble, in-carnate, in flesh, first and last, bound and tangled and headed toward death. But these films push on through tawdriness and misery to the essential goodness of being alive in the flesh.
What did you see at Cannes? Strangely, or maybe not, a cluster of films about mothers and motherhood (where males are either absent or don’t look so good). That really began at last year’s festival, with the Palme d’Or (grand prize) winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, a dire Romanian film which beat out, rightly so, the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men, as good as that film was. With striking but unpretentious naturalism, writer-director Cristian Mungiu follows one young woman’s harrowing abortion in a country where that was forbidden—not for any moral reason but because its abominable dictator simply wanted more people to tyrannize. What first seems a plea for abortion rights subversively questions the practice itself, suggesting finally that there may be worse desecrations than those perpetrated by a crazed communist state. And this happens, by and large, wordlessly, with Mungiu’s camera simply watching and wondering, bothering to show all, graphically and at length, vivid and urgent, lingering sufficiently to let the human crux of it all seep in.
As it happens, last year’s North American films got around to the same kind of rumination that was so prominent at Cannes in 2008. First there was this issue of the tenacity of motherhood—to birth, nurture, and, yes, venerate flesh born of woman. The mother-impulse came in Juno, a Canadian film starring young phenom Ellen Page as a savvy, restless (and relentlessly cutesy) teenager who on the cusp of an abortion opts instead to birth the child for adoption, though that too is complicated, and religion, frankly, has nothing to do with any part of her choice. Her “why” lingers throughout the film, as does the resolution of the Type-A career-woman adoptive mother (Jennifer Garner). And there was Lars and the Real Girl, a poignant though implausible story of a deeply shy, small-town twentysomething who purchases a human-sized sex doll to be a companion (and not at all for its usual commercial purpose). How his family and the town respond shakes up a lot of notions of what family and community should look like. There were others too, bracing and engaging and yet altogether seeming pretty tame stuff, compared to what showed up in Cannes (pray that all those stunning films find North American distribution).
The young woman standing on a train platform waiting for the police to return her kidnapped son is Christine Collins, a hard-working single mother in 1928 Los Angeles (admirably played by Angelina Jolie). Director Clint Eastwood returns yet again to searching questions about parenthood, family, and guilt, matters that have long preoccupied him, beginning with his masterpiece Unforgiven (1992); this new film, Changeling (tentative title), will be Eastwood’s most popular in a long time. The story, based on a long-forgotten actual case, centers on the disappearance of ten-year-old Walter Collins, who turns out to be one of a number of boys missing and unaccounted for. This is the stuff of melodrama, but much of it is sadly true, and there are no happy endings. Collins’ devotion to her son and her work are complete, and Eastwood gives Collins her due. “Ferocious” best describes her commitment, though at no time through her long ordeal does she go soppy or hysterical, even when the police have her committed to the local psych ward. Hers is a profound travail, and to her aid, if not outright rescue, comes a suave and equally ferocious Presbyterian minister, Gustav Briegleb (John Malkovich), whose passion, as shown in his sermon radio broadcasts, is the reform of a corrupt and vicious police department (here again the story is all too solidly grounded in history). And Christine never gives up, even long after everything has come to look very grim. That is love and love-beyond-hope, and the question is why exactly. After all, reason has its supply of reasonable nostrums—move on, get over it, life awaits—with which the heart’s fiery love has no truck. Somehow, mysteriously, life proves an implacable gift.
The same jolting current roars through Leonera (Lion’s Den) by the youngish Argentine director Pablo Trapero. Martina Gusman plays Julia, a disaffected student rather randomly living with her boyfriend and his friend in the apartment her mother left when she long ago went back to Spain. Julia ends up arrested for the gruesome murder of the boyfriend, and only then does she find out that she is pregnant by the same, though there is a suggestion it might be the roommate. Well, prison and pregnancy have a way of clearing the head, and Julia’s dissolute fog fades as she gives all to birthing and rearing the boy within the prison (the mothers in her cell block are allowed to have their children with them till age four, when they give them up to family members or the state takes custody). Her task is not easy, just as it is not for any of the other mothers, who are generally a pretty rough crew. The plot-line sounds tear-soaked pablum, and so it would be if Trapero did not sustain throughout a sober, brooding realism. Like Julia, we find out a lot about wherein lies the value of living, and again that resides in the peculiar bondedness that emerges between mother and child and also among mothers, a fierce sisterhood made so by their common troth to children. In the bowels of that rusty, falling-down prison, of all places, love has no limits, for better and for worse. Much of the time, or at least more than was necessary to tell the story, the camera simply watches women striving hour-by-hour in a hard place.
Versailles has more than a little irony in its title, for it has little to do with opulence. Writer-director Pierre Schoeller’s story follows the fate of yet another single mother and son. Judith Chemla plays the homeless twentysomething mother of a five-year-old (Max Baissette de Malglaive), who fears that France’s super-nanny state will take her boy. The pair escapes to the woods surrounding the famous estate, and there they find an angry, solitary squatter, Damien (Guillaume Depardieu, son of the famous Gerard), in whose care she leaves the boy while she decamps to find work. Finding a job that’s half rehab for herself, caring for the aged infirm, she returns months later to retrieve the lad, only to find the pair long gone to who-knows-where. She has lived in a world outside the “safety net,” an alien sphere without last names and numbers, so there is no way to trace either the squatter or her son, and that is the cost of eluding the bureaucracy. All are stricken: mother, reluctant squatter-father, his own parents to whom he hands off the boy, and, lastingly, the boy himself, shuffled from her to anywhere, himself a seeming squatter bereft of “real” family. Like these others the picture is striking in its lack of comfort, and all its characters are plainly more than flawed.
In Linha de Passe (The Passing Line, tentative English title), the Brazilian writer and director Walter Salles (Central Station, 1998) and co-director Daniela Thomas tell the story of a deeply troubled poor family. An aging and pregnant-again single mother tries to raise her passel of four sons, aged ten to eighteen, all of different fathers, on her cleaning lady wages (her employer cuts her when she discovers she’s pregnant—so she can “rest”). She fumes and rants at her motley bunch: the eldest could make it as a soccer pro if only he had the “fee” to pay to the scout; the next, already a father, works as messenger fast on his way to crime; the third, dutiful and hard-working, is a charismatic Christian, though his church and faith wane; and the biracial youngest yearns to find his father and drive a bus. She loves them, a lot, though they feel it not at all, for in either frustration or duty she does nothing but rant when they’re about. Bodies bring us to strange places indeed, and we use them to get by some means or another somewhere else, wisely or otherwise. And in the end, all four boys do move on, to God knows where, unforeseeably, eerily, recalling the rapturous bittersweet ending to Central Station.
The splendid Dardenne brothers, Luc and Jean-Pierre (L’Promessse, L’Enfant), brought The Silence of Lorna, the story of a young Romanian woman (luminous Arta Dobroshi) who’s in the citizenship business, so to speak, part of a gang running various scams to get Belgian papers for assorted undesirables. It’s not her calling, to be sure, for she actually sympathizes with her clients, mostly addicts and mobsters, her compassion leading her to pregnancy, or so she thinks. The film is not as bold, either stylistically or thematically, as the Dardennes’ earlier work (twice winning the Palme d’Or), its ending ambiguous and grim, but still it haunts and jostles long after, suggesting a kind of miracle that science itself cannot detect. And along with all the mother-and-son vehicles came My Magic, a Cannes favorite, Singapore writer-director Erich Khoo’s story of an alcoholic father, an enormous man, looking much like a sumo wrestler, who shakes off the booze long enough to aid his bereft son. It’s an intriguing film, though in the end its slightly cloying sentiment and its gestures at magical realism tend to subvert its power.
With resolute visual patience, these filmmakers give painstaking meditative heed to the material, bothering to look and look and look yet again. The gist of the perspective seems to be something like this: psycho-chemical we are, but that does not seem the half of it. There is still, surprise, that irreducible datum of being alive and conscious in flesh, and revering the flesh, not to mention the wonder and puzzle of being at all. And this shows up nowhere more persuasively than in those tales where mothers know this, well, in their bones and soul.
That’s not the half of it, though, so born and constrained are we of flesh. No one catches this better than Woody Allen, who is again, happily, in top form with Vicky Cristina Barcelona, starring Javier Bardem, Scarlett Johansson, and Penelope Cruz, in the best romantic comedy Allen has made in a couple of decades. Its breezy voiceover narration and swirling network plot belie its rueful meditation on the strangeness of human longing, and especially so when it comes to romance—meaning what we really want relationally. Tellingly, the best and brightest do no better at this, and probably a good deal worse, than the ordinary bloke. All the education and the glamour money can buy seem only to muddle the appetites further still. Recent Ivy grads Vicky (Rebecca Hall) and Christina (Johansson), once roommates, are larking on family money and friends in Barcelona when approached one evening by a local artist-lothario (Bardem), who smoothly invites them to fly off to his island for a cordial erotic weekend. Vicky objects—she’s a strait-laced career girl, duly engaged to a frothy go-getter—but Christina, exotic, vaguely artistic, and very thirsty, likes the idea. Complications ensue, and when the seducer’s daft artist-ex, Maria Elena (Cruz), shows up, things get stickier, funnier, and dumber still. Christina thinks she has found her true love(s), and Vicky rethinks everything, and in the end nothing changes, despite all the exhausting sturm und drang. Somewhere behind his jaunty narrator, Allen stands bemused, grieving, and mildly alarmed at the human proclivity, at once flighty and profound, to yearn and ache for some other or more, if we could only figure out who or what that is. The film is an old man’s rueful meditation (Allen is 72) on the vagaries of the human comedy among those who should know better, at least by now—and Allen, the implication is clear, pointedly does not exclude himself from that indictment.
German writer-director Andreas Dresen’s Cloud Nine echoes Allen but without the humor and the youth, making for an arduous journey through old-age love or lust or whatever it is that fuels these folks. For no apparent reason, elderly seamstress Inge (Ursala Werner) seduces customer Werner, ten years her senior but robust still. Her longtime spouse is a good, kindly fellow, though on the bland side; his favorite pastime is watching videos of trains. Dresen’s choice to film scenes of lovemaking rather clinically—in full light and single takes at middle distance—effectively detaches viewers from most of whatever frisson these characters feel. The age, look, and staging of the participants foils all the usual titillation, emphasizing still more the puzzle of what propels people towards physical intimacy. Viewers understand well enough what’s happening, and then some, but the camera’s neutrality has the effect of mystifying motivation. And the more we see the bodies, the more we wonder, in awe of the conspicuous incursion of both age and desire, at the opacity of knowing inner cause. Clearly, the affair disrupts the monotony of sameness, and it no doubt also recalls, at least momentarily, the rush of passion and romance that fires youth. The further we travel with these folks, though, the more problematic it all gets, especially after Inge tries to explain to her husband why she wants to leave him. Soon enough, cloud nine turns rainy, though the protagonists are, remarkably, loath even to suspect what’s ahead. We’re left with a strong sense of the blithe narcissism, psychological and moral, that no doubt fueled the business in the first place. Body and soul, oh how they twine.
Any suggestion that self or soul somehow float disconnected within the body shatters in Blindness, Mexican director Fernando Meirelles’ adaptation of the 1995 novel by Nobel Prize-winner Jose Saramago, Portugal’s most widely translated contemporary writer. So many of the claims of fundamental human decency and goodness presume normalcy, a notion subject to rapid shifts in unforeseeable ways. How quickly it all goes, personally and socially, the minute threats and peril emerge, something that seems to be getting truer by the day. First just one man falls blind, terrifyingly rendered by Meirelles, who’s a master of nightmarish cinematic effect, as in City of God (2002) and The Constant Gardener (2005). And then everyone, and the world fast goes to hell. There is even the suggestion that God himself has gone blind, and we are the ones who must show him around. So frail is civilization, the film suggests. What hope there is in Blindness depends on one exception to a world gone blind, and then, more than likely, the whole thing starts over. Cheery it is not; neither is it forgettable.
The usual terms for describing what these films seem to acknowledge are, if of a secular bent, embodiment, and, if religious, creatureliness. Here, though, in noting the visceral impact of these films, neither seems to stretch nearly far enough, as if they’d passed a boundary of some mystifying sort. And film can do that. Witness a recent book by prominent film theorist Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. [1] Sobchack on the one hand describes existence as a “radically material” mix of body and consciousness, “an irreducible ensemble,” yet she remains throughout the book, despite a prolix host of sometimes painful neologisms (“inter-objectivity,” “egological,” to name only two), more than a little baffled by the peculiar power of the material world and her reactions to it, for they don’t readily fit, labor though she does in trying to make them, the reductionist categories of postmodernism.
Late in the book she meditates in considerable surprise on what she calls “the charge of the real,” meaning the capacity of the bodily image, animal or human, to shake viewers from the detachment of simple “aesthetic valuation” to a visceral recoil that ends in “response-ability,” a recoil that elicits ethical action. Insofar as the “fictional space [on the screen] becomes charged with the real, the viewer is also charged” by it and, it seems, is subject to some sort of moral demand. Her puzzlement at why this should be so only grows when she turns to what she calls in her concluding chapter “The Passion of the Material.” There she considers religious films, seeking—though deeply moved by them—to evacuate any metaphysical dimension from the moments of ecstasy and communion found in Babette’s Feast, Diary of a Country Priest, and American Beauty. For Sobchack, whatever sacredness anyone sees in those films lies in film style and derives from one’s own egoless apprehension of some other something that is not us. The notion that the stories themselves might have something to do with the “religious” response to them, or that some metaphysical something beyond humankind might actually impinge on human consciousness, waving a flag of sorts in moments of perceptual clarity, never seriously enters as a possibility. Throughout, Sobchack mercilessly overtheorizes to elude any sort of religious category and, finally, to dodge any sort of transcendent anything, no matter its “charge” or “passion.”
A sounder approach comes from novelist-cum-art critic John Updike in a recent essay on the distinctive character of American art. [2] Updike begins by noting early British complaints about over-precision in the work of colonial painter John Singleton Copley, whose penchant for literal exactness (Copley’s pictures were too “liney,” his critics said) was ill-suited to atmospherics preferred by European tastes. And there, as if to say what does one expect, Updike invokes Jonathan Edwards in reverence for the glory of the ordinary, for “the clarity of ‘things.'” As Edwards wrote, “The manifestations God makes of Himself in His works are the principal manifestation of His perfection, and the declaration and teachings of His word are to lead to these.” From Copley to Winslow Homer and beyond, Updike concludes, American artists have displayed a “bias toward the empirical” and, in a wonderful phrase, “toward the evidential object in the numinous fullness of its being.” For Updike himself, that posture is nothing new. In an essay from the 1960s, “The Dogwood Tree: A Boyhood,” he attested, in a signal phrase for his whole career, to “a tireless goodness in things at rest.” With slight modification that notion provides a succinct coda for the films talked about here. A curious sort of luminousness inheres in all things, in objects to be sure but infinitely more in the mystery of palpable selves. Indeed.
The same preoccupation lies at the center of the haunting work of American filmmaker Terrence Malick, especially in The Thin Red Line (1998), where he goes so far as to describe what he is after visually and experientially in his films. During the battle for Guadalcanal, infantryman Witt (James Caviezel), one among a host of characters, wrestles long and hard, Melville-like, to grasp the nature of the universe. And where does his strenuous questioning lead him? To pay heed, in grateful adoration, to “all things shining,” and that despite the war all about. So fierce, then, is the divine presence in the radiant, palpable world in which we find ourselves, body and soul, and in all that shines before us in “numinous fullness,” shining, constant, and pressing. Though one surely does not have to go to Cannes to sit in the dark to know that, it was good to be reminded.
Roy Anker is professor of English at Calvin College. He is the author of Catching Light: Looking for God in the Movies (Eerdmans).
1. Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Univ. of California Press, 2004).
2. John Updike, “‘The Clarity of Things,'” The New York Review of Books, June 26, 2008, pp. 12-16.
Copyright © 2008 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
