This year`s Cannes Film Festival proved a session oddly dominated by the elderly, the dying and the disappeared.
Among the senior directors presenting films that seem likely to count among their final works, were the Japanese Akira Kurosawa (80) with
”Dreams,” Federico Fellini of Italy (70) with ”The Voice of the Moon,”
and Portugal`s Manoel De Oliveira (82) with ”No, or The Vain Glory of Command.”
Three other features evoked vanished filmmakers: Clint Eastwood`s film-a- clef ”White Hunter, Black Heart” with its thinly disguised portrait of John Huston; Karpo Godina`s ”Artificial Paradise,” a strange and haunting evocation of a period in the life of the late German director Fritz Lang; and Jose Luis Guerin`s inspired but uneven ”Innisfree,” a meditation on the Ireland portrayed in John Ford`s ”The Quiet Man.”
And finally, two films took elderly characters as their central figures-Giuseppe Tornatore`s ”Stanno Tutti Bene” with Marcello Mastroianni and Bertrand Tavernier`s ”Daddy Nostalgie” with Dirk Bogarde-focusing particularly on their relationship with the succeeding generation,
relationships defined by regret, misunderstanding and anger.
It is easy for the film lover of 1990 to identify with the abandoned children of Tornatore and Tavernier films. The great figures of the medium-the fathers-are either absent or infirm, and there is no one in the currently empowered generation to take their place. Kurosawa`s ”Dreams,” for example, was produced by Steven Spielberg and features an appearance by Martin Scorsese (as Vincent Van Gogh!). These two men are perhaps the two leading figures of the current establishment (one commercially and the other artistically), yet they make their contribution to Kurosawa like dutiful children, indulging the old man in one last folly. Rather than struggle to overturn their elders- as each new generation of artists has traditionally done-the directors of the current generation meekly offer homage, quietly acknowledging their subservience.
”Dreams,” which will be released this fall in the U.S. by Warner Brothers, is unmistakably an old man`s film, for better and for worse. It is the work of someone with nothing left to prove, who seems almost cosmically indifferent to the reactions his film might provoke or the possibility of its recovering its costs.
The picture appears to be a very private act of confession and expiation, in which Kurosawa, using the surrealist format of the dream sequence as a kind of alibi/smokescreen, addresses his specific failures as an artist, leader of men and conscientious citizen of the world. The cumulative feeling, one of almost paralyzing guilt, is quite the opposite of the wisdom and serenity one expects in valedictory films (for example, Jean Renoir`s sublime ”Petit Theatre,” which ”Dreams” in other respects strongly resembles). Kurosawa is not going quietly; the film is prickly and stubborn.
Fellini`s ”The Voice of the Moon” is, on the other hand, soft and vague to the point of incomprehensibility. Based on a novel by Italian author Ermanno Cavazzoni, the film strings together a series of enigmatic anecdotes involving the wide-eyed ”lunatic” Ivo Salvini (the appealing Roberto Benigni, last seen on these shores in ”Down by Law”) and Gonella, the cynical prefect of a small village (Paolo Villagio, wearing Fellini`s trademark hat and paunch).
Much of the movie consists of the familiar railing against the modern world (sign of the old man`s movie at its worst) that has cramped Fellini`s work since ”City of Women,” and it displays an appalling lack of
imagination-for example, a long sequence set at a discotheque where it is established that big band music is definitely superior to punk rock. And what is not bluntly didactic seems hopelessly obscure, legible only to the Maestro himself .
Still, as photographed by the great Tonino Delli Colli and designed by Dante Ferreti, ”The Voice of the Moon” functions beautifully as a study in cinematic lighting and its emotional nuances, ranging from the haunting artificial night of a Cinecitta soundstage to the aggressive fluorescent glare of the discotheque. At the film`s climax, when a group of bumptious villagers succeeds in capturing the moon and tying it up in an abandoned factory, the gold-silver glow of the humiliated sphere is both stunning and unbearably sad; alas, when the moon speaks, it is only to deliver a feeble punch line.
At 83, Portugal`s Manoel de Oliveira was the oldest member of Cannes`
senior troika, but it is no empty cliche to say that, in terms of his creative vigor and originality, he also is the youngest. An epic of Portuguese history recounted through a dense modernist style, ”No” is the most spectacular and probably the most expensive avant garde film ever made, if one does not count D.W. Griffith`s ”Intolerance,” which Oliveira`s movie sometimes resembles.
Using Portugal`s tragic colonial war in Angola as a framework, Oliveira moves back and forth between four key moments in Portuguese history-those defeats and disappointments that kept his country from ever really entering the world stage. The stories are recounted by the leader of a jungle patrol who, in the course of the film, is wounded and dies on April 25, 1974, the day of Portugal`s anti-fascist revolution.
Opening his film with a slow, circular camera movement around an ancient, spreading tree, Oliveira places ”No” under the sign of permanence and natural tranquility; the tree embodies time, age and history as an unruffled continuum, unaffected by the military adventures that consume the characters. The starkness and clarity of that symbolic tree define the film`s pared-back aesthetic: All is clean, strong, and forcefully drawn, seemingly without a single wasted shot or gesture.
Oliveira is a genuine master, having inspired a school of filmmaking followers in Portugal, which ensures that his influence will continue to be felt long after his retirement (itself by no means imminent). The yearning for a similar sort of authority figure, for a teacher or a guide, seemed to be behind the large number of films in Cannes this year that took directors as their subjects-eulogizing them, analyzing them and finally mythologizing them. At a time when directors find it virtually impossible to mount personal projects, it isn`t surprising that the charismatic filmmakers of the past should emerge as heroes and role models.
Where Eastwood`s ”White Hunter, Black Heart” plays out a tortured love- hate relationship with its subject, the extravagant John Huston, Karpo Godina`s oddball Yugoslavian feature ”Artificial Paradise” adapts a distant, analytical tone, inventing an imaginary episode in the life of director Fritz Lang on the basis of thin biographical data and ”clues” planted in such films as ”Metropolis” and ”The Woman in the Moon.”
Godina`s conceit-that Lang discovered the cinema during the summer he spent as a young German officer stationed in a Slovenian village-is played out in a forest of allusions, through images and situations that echo back and forth through Lang`s later work. Though Godina respects the ultimate mystery of artistic creation, he powerfully suggests the ways in which Lang`s films were shaped by his personality, experience and fantasies, to a degree no longer possible in the corporate film world of the 1990s.
”Innisfree,” by the young Spanish filmmaker Jose Luis Guerin, is an even less likely project-a largely staged documentary about the Irish village where John Ford shot ”The Quiet Man” in 1951. Cutting between shots from Ford`s idealized, Technicolor vision of 40 years ago (itself a strange tribute to/denial of a country his parents had fled in dire poverty) and images of the touristy Innisfree of today, Guerin establishes a poignant contrast of past and present, fiction and fact, desire and reality. One of the movie`s most effective moments is a montage of Innisfree schoolchildren recounting the plot of ”The Quiet Man” from memory, as if it were the region`s most profoundly rooted folktale. Perhaps, in 1990, it is.
Movies are barely mentioned in Giuseppe Tornatore`s Italian ”Stanno Tutti Bene” (”Everybody`s Fine”) and Bertrand Tavernier`s French ”Daddy Nostalgie” (the expected American title, when the film is released this fall, will be ”These Foolish Things”). And yet, given the inclinations of their directors, it`s hard to read either without feeling a reference to the state of the art. Here are two fathers, played by legendary actors (respectively, Marcello Mastroianni and Dirk Bogarde), whose last attempts to get close to their children are marked by misunderstanding and resentment.
Tornatore, the director of last year`s sleeper hit ”Cinema Paradiso,”
has again concocted a syrupy fable that draws upon (and cheapens) the sentimental traditions of the popular Italian cinema. Mastroianni is an elderly Sicilian (disfigured by a pair of magnifying glasses that expand his eyes to an ”E.T.” dimension) who tours the mainland, dropping in for surprise visits with each of his widely dispersed children. It quickly becomes clear that, contrary to the title, ”nobody`s fine”-all the kids having succumbed to the twin pressures of urbanism and modernism and forgotten their honest, rural roots. Though Tornatore is only in his 30s, he has made the oldest old man`s film in Cannes-cranky, suspicious, thoroughly reactionary.
Tavernier`s film is quite the opposite-hopeful where Tornatore is cheaply pessimistic, dramatically open where Tornatore is calculated and narrow. In
”Daddy Nostalgie,” a Parisian woman (Jane Birkin) is summoned to the Cote d`Azur when her British father (Bogarde) has a heart attack; during the subsequent weeks she struggles to get close to him at last, while acting as a mediator between him and her volatile, resentful French mother (Odette Laure). The death of the father is a subject Tavernier has treated before, notably in ”A Sunday in the Country” and (metaphorically) ”Round Midnight,” though never with the depth of feeling he discovers here. That Tavernier`s own father, the writer Rene Tavernier, died during the editing of the film contributes to but does not explain its extraordinary emotional power; one feels instead that this is one of those rare times when the line of an artist`s life perfectly intersects the arc of his creativity.
Birkin and Bogarde, British performers who were both forced abroad to find their most satisfying roles, achieve a perfect sense of complicity; the film exists in what is not and cannot be spoken between them, in an anger too deep to ever be expressed. ”Daddy Nostalgie” expresses, through Bogarde and his character, a profound love for the cinema of the past. But it also preserves, in the sense of involvement and enjoyment Tavernier brings to the filming of each scene, a passionate belief in cinema`s present tense.
