I saw three films today at the Cannes Film Festival, each a resounding bust. Okay, one —Yorgos Lanthimos‘ The Lobster, a dryly amusing Bunuelian parlor piece about societal oppression — felt partially successful, or at least intriguing for the first 45 minutes to an hour, but the second hour disassembled. The truth is that I was bored and hating on it almost from the get-go. I was even thinking about bailing as it went along but I figured “c’mon, be a pro, stick it out.” And I did. I never wanted to quit Woody Allen‘s Irrational Man or Gus Van Sant‘s The Sea of Trees but there was never the slightest doubt that they weren’t cooking or coming together either.
I know when a flick is really laying it down and dealing exceptional cards, which Lászlo Nemes‘ Son of Saul did in spades Thursday night. The all-but-universal consensus is that Saul is the shit, but today’s trio all felt like wipe-outs. To me, at least. There were some Irrational fans and a fair-sized contingent of Lobster lovers, to be fair, but I think they were being kind or talking themselves into their own private lathers or something. For me the absorption just didn’t kick in.
The Van Sant film, which ended around 9 pm tonight, was initially greeted with one or two souls applauding, but this was immediately followed by a chorus of boos, loud and sustained for a good five or six seconds. I wasn’t feeling the hate as much as lethargy and disappointment, which began to manifest fairly early. The symphonic, rotely soothing score by Mason Bates (i.e., the kind of music that tells the audience “you’ll be okay, this is a film about caring and compassion, no rude shocks in store”) told me right away that Trees would be one of Van Sant’s Finding Forrester-like films — an initially solemn, ultimately feel-good drama about “redemption” and rediscovering the joy and necessity of embracing the struggle rather than dying by your own hand blah blah.
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