The third day of the festival, second day of competition screeners, brought with it our first big Cannes stinker of the year, as well as a potential prize magnet. Starting with the catastrophe, Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire's Black Flies, which stars Sean Penn, incurred the wrath of many a critic. In more positive news, Chinese documentarian Wang Bing presented the first part of a tetralogy project (Youth or Spring are the alternate English language titles), a three-hour-plus epic of observational cinema concerning the lives of young laborers in China's garment industry. Could this be a significant contender for end-of-the-festival honors?
For the Cannes at Home project, let's consider how these two auteurs have dedicated much of their careers to depicting violence – Sauvaire the brutality of war and combat, Wang the horrors of exploitation. With that in mind, our films for today (both available to stream) are Johnny Mad Dog and Bitter Money…
JOHNNY MAD DOG (2008) Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire
Adapted from Emmanuel Dongala's novel of the same name, Johnny Mad Dog considers the fates of child soldiers in an unnamed West African nation. It's nearly plotless, moving with the rebel army as they attack villages and recruit new members, forcing them to kill their parents as a rite of passage. The titular figure is the squadron's leader, a teenager himself, who commands his men – really boys – in their terrorizing actions, beads, and crucifixes wrapped around his person in a mockery of sainthood. That's far from the only notable costume of the bunch, each fighter adorned in bizarre fashions to match their warring names.
Butterfly, for instance, wears fairy wings into battle, while another member steals a wedding gown from a slain victim to parade around in, the hooped skirt decomposing as the film advances through its waves of senseless violence. Such stylistic touches are drops in an ocean of audiovisual invention, the brutality of the on-screen actions matched by the formalistic boldness in the film's construction. Sauvaire taps into the youthful energy of his characters, their coked-out state working like a gateway for some frenzied subjectivity that's nothing short of terrifying. If Johnny Mad Dog untethers from realism in its odyssey, it veers straight toward an oneiric path, becoming an outright nightmare worthy of horror cinema.
You feel the pulsating energy in your gut, each cut and camera movement, each florid gesture, another gulp of intoxicating liquid ready to dissolve your perception of truth, of order, of right and wrong. The cast of unknown actors, many of them former child soldiers, intensifies the impressiveness of the exercise, while Sauvaire's tonal equilibriums keep the picture from falling into ungainly romantics. There are no heroes or villains in the moral universe of Johnny Mad Dog, only suffering, misery shared between those killed and those who do the killing. It's a daring experiment, violently vivid and upsetting to the nth degree. When the end credits finally manifest, you feel pulverized, utterly destroyed.
Johnny Mad Dog is currently streaming on AMC+ and DirecTV. You can also find the film, available to rent and purchase, on Apple TV.
BITTER MONEY (2016) Wang Bing
In terms of theme and subject, Bitter Money isn't too unlike the first Wang Bing title vying for the Palme d'Or. Like Youth, it concerns the fate of Chinese workers, many of whom leave the country's rural areas searching for new opportunities in urban and industrial centers. Sadly, at their destination, there's no bright hope awaiting them. Instead, they find a bottomless pit of labor violence in the garment-making business, oppressive forces twisting their misery into a living hell. The director sensationalizes nothing, finding these harsh realities through passive observation. Some might even accuse him of being too hands-off when dealing with certain happenings.
Reflect on the moment when the fly-on-the-wall approach sours into ethical murkiness when total inaction rings a wail of potential complicity. As the pressures of professional abuse bear down on his subjects, familial relations rot before our eyes, couples' devotion turned to hatred and public brawl. Shouldn't someone do something? The answer will depend on the viewer, but the sense of powerlessness will surely infect anyone who regards Bitter Money. Whether you think the passivity is wrongheaded or are resigned to its necessity, such scenes leave you with a sense of suffocation.
You'll be gasping for air, release, any respite from the pain shining on the screen across two and a half hours. These miserable proclamations suggest a punitive viewing experience with little to no variation, but Wang Bing is a master at making the unendurable somehow tolerable. He does this through exquisite filmmaking, crystalizing the poetry hiding within the lives portrayed, be it the repetitive dance of industrial work or the contrast between a dark village and the constant buzzing lights of a city at night. There's great elegance in how the camera examines and dissects, a marriage between big-screen lyricism and a documentarian's commitment to frankness, to naked truth.
Bitter Money is streaming on OVID. Alternatively, you can rent it through Apple TV and Amazon Prime Video.
Are you familiar with the cinemas of Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire and Wang Bing? If so, are you excited about their new works or dreading them?