CANNES, FRANCE—A one-two punch of violence followed by sex has this year’s Cannes Film Festival off to a rousing start.
Usually the fest likes to ease into things, often presenting less challenging fare on opening day to give jet-lagged critics a break.
There’s no such pampering this year. The first two films to screen in the Palme d’Or competition, Amat Escalante’s drug wars drama Heli and François Ozon’s carnal character study Jeune & Jolie (Young & Beautiful), have provoked strong reactions and serious discussion for their portrayals of human vice at its most base level.
For Heli, which brutally depicts the pain of a Mexican family caught in that country’s vicious war among drug cartels, this means graphic display of almost unspeakable violence against people and animals.
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The Internet is already buzzing about the two most appalling scenes in the film, so let’s get them out of the way: a man is tortured in various ways that include having his genitals doused with gasoline and set ablaze. The camera doesn’t look away, and neither do the three young boys who are participating in the torture, while also playing a video game on a nearby TV.
Another horrific moment comes when a young girl’s fluffy white puppy, bearing the endearing name Cookie, has its neck snapped by a thug in the midst of a home invasion that may or may not be a state-sanctioned drug raid.
These are by no means the only awful moments in the film, which also features the gang rape and impregnation of a 12-year-old girl that is mercifully not seen.
Heli is at times almost unwatchable — the puppy slaying alone provoked several walkouts from Wednesday night’s Debussy Theatre screening — but it’s not gratuitous horror.
On the contrary, director Escalante wants the world to see exactly what is happening to his home country. His depictions of unchecked gang violence and ineffectual and corrupt police “are part of daily life for Mexicans,” as he explains in the production notes for the film, which is titled for a young auto worker, played by Armando Espitia, whose family is dragged into gangland terror.
“This kind of behaviour in human beings makes me deeply sad,” says Escalante, an associate of Carlos Reygadas, last year’s Best Director winner at Cannes.
“By filming it, I’m not trying to impress, but to convey the sadness that comes out of such acts.”
Heli is eye-searing stuff, and it wasn’t lost on critics that while we were watching this horror show of depravity and poverty in the Debussy, right next door in the Grand Théâtre Lumière the glittering and weightless fripperies of Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby were screening to a black-tie crowd.
But film festivals are all about such cultural collisions, and another came Thursday morning with the world premiere of François Ozon’s latest film Jeune & Jolie (Young & Beautiful), the story of a 17-year-old French call girl. The theme this time was sex, and plenty of it.
A sort of Belle de Jour for the digital era, it stars model/actress Marina Vacth in a potentially breakout performance as Isabelle, a strikingly beautiful girl from an affluent family who decides for no apparent reason to become a call girl.
The film is broken into four sections marked by the seasons. It begins with the summer in which Isabelle loses her virginity and follows through the rise and fall of her career as a hotel hooker earning between 300 and 500 euros per trick.
You don’t have to wait too long for the sex: the film has barely started before Vacth removes her bikini top on the beach, unaware that she’s being spied on through binoculars by her peeping Tom of a younger brother.
And there’s a lot more on view when Isabelle starts up her sex trade, with carnal scenes that skirt the boundary between soft and hard porn. She’s not doing this for fun or even for the money, so what exactly motivates her? Trying to figure Isabelle out keeps the viewer engaged, and Vacth’s acting justifies her being almost continually in the frame.
Ozon’s fascination with women has long been a trademark of his films, several of which have competed for the Palme in festivals past.
But with Jeune & Jolie he’stelling a more layered story, one that feels more honest to the female view of sex. The film begins with a male gaze but it ends with a woman’s, surely no accident.
Then there’s The Bling Ring, Sofia Coppola’s new film that premiered Thursday as the opener for Un Certain Regard, the Cannes sidebar that features films bearing “a certain look,” and that also has its own competition.
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Many pundits had thought it odd that Coppola wasn’t placed in the Palme competition, where she has been before. But then we saw The Bling Ring, which chronicles the “based on true events” story of Hollywood high schoolers who stole nearly $3 million worth of clothes, jewelry and other valuables from the unlocked homes of such celebrities as Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Orlando Bloom and Megan Fox in 2008 and 2009, before cops finally stopped their crime spree. Mystery solved!
Coppola’s account wobbles between factual account, dramatic invention and straight satire, and while it takes a few good jabs at society’s obsession with celebrities and consumerism, none of the blows carry any weight. The only thing we really learn is that celebrities have a lot of stuff and they’re far too trusting.
The undistinguished cast has just one standout, and that’s Emma Watson, who plays one of the most vacuous of the juvenile thieves. We know her best as the brainy Hermione from the Harry Potter movies, and it’s clear she can do brainless equally well.
Critical opinions are mixed about The Bling Ring, which opens next month in commercial theatres. Some scribes praise it for the very shallowness that left me cold, especially the “Oh my God!” dialogue.
I much prefer Coppola’s more thoughtful takes on culture and alienation, as seen in her earlier films Somewhere and Lost in Translation. But at Cannes, as at any film festival, it’s easy to find a differing opinion.
Follow on Twitter: @peterhowellfilm
