Today at the Cannes Film Festival, Israeli cineaste Nadav Lapid and French provocateur François Ozon premiered two more films in competition. Both flicks, Ahed's Knee and Everything Went Fine, have received good notices, intensifying international anticipation. Since most of us can't be at Cannes, we shall distract ourselves with past works from these auteurs. Another notable first screening was Todd Haynes' documentary about The Velvet Underground, featured out of competition. In the Cinema à la Plage section, Jerry Schatzberg's Palme d'Or-winning Scarecrow returned to the festival, while Joanna Hogg's The Souvenir screened for the Director's Fortnight in anticipation of its sequel. Considering all this, let's delve into our 'Cannes at Home' alternative program...
THE KINDERGARTEN TEACHER (2014)
Yoav is five. Yoav is also a poet. Wobbling back and forth, he announces a new creation to anyone near enough to hear it. The words that spew forth feel too mature for such a young child, and yet he seems to come up with them on the fly. The odd phenomenon soon captures the attention of others - a bored nanny, an indifferent father, a kindergarten teacher with poetic aspirations of her own. That last one is the protagonist of Nadav Lapid's first feature to ever screen at Cannes, a character study of nauseating tension. Catching us off-handedly through deceptively casual observation, the film soon holds the audience with a vice grip. It twists and twists, tightening in a perpetual spiral, until its night unbearable. Innocent actions soon turn to toxic intromission. Far from a benign influence who cares for poetic art, the teacher reforms herself into monsters of exploitation, devotion warped out of shape, and despair transformed into obsession. It's an unnerving tale, one that would be told again years later by Sara Colangelo. That remake, the rare example that avoids obsolescence, displaced its Israeli setting to New York and found new ideas along the way. Both pictures are worth your time.
Streaming on Vudu, Kanopy, and MUBI.
UNDER THE SAND (2000)
At an early phase of his career as a feature director, François Ozon wasn't primarily known for understatement or patience. Let's not forget that, in 2002, the French director would release his most overwhelming exercise in pure style, 8 Women. Compared to that flick, Under the Sand is muted, its anomalous melancholia begging the viewer to come closer. Just like the camera, we're guided to find the mysteries of the world in Charlotte Rampling's visage, as she plays a woman dealing with her husband's disappearance. What starts as the understandable denial of a grieving widow gradually becomes something more dangerous, sharper, closer to lunacy than reason. Ozon doesn't deny us lurid pleasure, nor does he run away from eroticism, and yet, this film feels uncomfortably slotted into his oeuvre. Considering his latest projects – about pedophilia, teenage tragedy, and euthanasia – this study of loss and amorous addiction through allegory feels like a prelude to things to come.
Streaming on Kanopy.
VELVET GOLDMINE (1998)
Pulling from anywhere and everywhere – Citizen Kane, Wilde aphorisms, Bowie personae, TV Shakespeare, anti-Thatcherism, Baroque theater, glam couture, queer history, gender theory, rock mythos, and more! – Todd Haynes' Velvet Goldmine is a kaleidoscope of desiring-images rearranged in infinite configurations. This heady exercise synthesizes how art can change and inspire, how it can bend the universe, if only for a single person. It's a hymn to the audience, a poem about the performer, a funeral parade of roses for a lost cosmos of transgression. It's everything, all of the time. Pardon the navel-gazing effusiveness, the floweriness, but Velvet Goldmine is one of my favorite films, so crucial to a personal conception of cinema that it's impossible to imagine a world without it. I've worked in stage shows inspired by it, I'm thinking of working on future projects. I've learned to love rock through it and learned about myself. I've spent hours gazing at its wonders, discovering its mysteries, evangelizing others into the cult of Haynes' odyssey of glitter. For me, ambrosia isn't just a legendary nectar of the gods. It's real, and it's called Velvet Goldmine.
Available to rent on Vudu and Amazon.
THE SOUVENIR (2019)
Looking back at her youth from the prism of maturity, both personal and artistic, Joanna Hogg portrays the love affair between a posh film student and an older man during the 1980s. No matter their beautiful costumes or the cinematography's grainy loveliness, we know that happiness is out of the question for them. She's a child of privilege coming to grips with her ivory tower, a human well of insecurities and creative indecisiveness. He, on the other hand, is almost preternaturally confident, a sneer always at the ready. When you don't like yourself, disdain can be very seductive. In The Souvenir, while the protagonist wishes to overcome such disdain, every rebuke hits like a bullet. To be with someone so sophisticated can be the most inebriating of validations, but it can also be toxic. Slowly, self-image gets eroded, and bonds to other people wither away like dead flowers. So, if you're looking for authenticity in your movie-going misadventures, here you have it. Embossed with gold and stuffed with perfumed silks, The Souvenir is like a gorgeous memento mori of poisonous romance.
Streaming on Amazon Prime Video, Hoopla, and Kanopy. You can also rent it on many different platforms.
SCARECROW (1973)
While the Palme d'Or feels undeserved, it's easy to understand why the Cannes jury of 1973 found much to love in Scarecrow. Jerry Schatzberg's third feature follows in the model of his first directorial efforts, excruciatingly focused on the actors' work above all else. Foregoing the stream-of-consciousness abstraction that made his debut, Puzzle of a Downfall Child, such a fascinating object, the filmmaker pursues a more direct, some might say humble, register. This results in a deliberately distorted structure, anchored by two human sketches played by Al Pacino and Gene Hackman. Drifting along the American landscape, these legendary thespians of New Hollywood Cinema experiment freely with improvisation and tic-ridden physicality. Watching them go wild and free is an interesting enough spectacle, but what persists in the mind aren't their antics. Instead, Scarecrow's stealth MVP is Vilmos Zsigmond. The cinematographer paints these vagabond lives in shades of golden sunsets and the cold mist of dawn, grainy rust, and flushed skin. It's beautiful, but never too much.
Available to rent on several platforms, including Amazon, Google Play, Youtube.
What are your favorite works from this cadre of filmmakers?