May 19, 2006
Kenny in Cannes, Update #1
PREMIERE's film critic is at the Cannes Film Festival, covering the Cote d'Azur in search of the fest's best. In his first installment, he parses The Da Vinci Code, Fast Food Nation, The Wind that Shakes the Barley, and more.

By Glenn Kenny

The Wind that Shakes the Barley

Greetings from the sunny Cote d'Azur, and apologies for not sending them sooner. Suffice it to say that French hotel tech guys have very limited experience with Macs. Also, the laptop ate my Wi-Fi card. No, seriously.

Minor glitches (entirely of my own making) aside, I'm getting into the Festival groove and enjoying the circus-like atmosphere, motley and absurd and seductive all at once. You've heard all about it a million times anyway, so... Movies. I'll begin with the bad news. A couple of events had me pondering an unpleasant theme, that of — to put it delicately— fecal matter. There's already been plenty written elsewhere of Ron Howard's tepid thriller The Da Vinci Code (which I am told is based on a somewhat popular novel). But no, I'm not going to come down hard on the movie itself, which is best appreciated as a loose remake of Kevin Smith's Dogma. I will merely note that the premiere's after-party has already become the stuff of Cannes legend, as gaining entry to said party was apparently a competition involving how much fecal matter one was willing to ingest in order to rub shoulders with Howard, star Tom Hanks, et. al. I dropped out of the contest after the first round and got a real dinner.

Fecal matter also features, quite literally, in Richard Linklater's eagerly awaited Fast Food Nation, a fictionalization of Eric Schlosser's provocative best-seller. As Schlosser's book details, the meat in fast-food burgers is frequently rife with the stuff, as marketing exec Greg Kinnear discovers to his relative discomfort in the film. This ambitious competition selection is, alas, a stellar example of the old "road to hell" adage, and now that I think of it, even that is giving it too much credit. The picture's star studded cast (Ethan Hawke! Bruce Willis! Wilmer freakin' Valderama!) mostly mouth a bunch of talking points whose themes go way beyond gustatory matters (rather like the dreaded Crash, only, believe it or not, less artful), and by the time Avril Lavigne shows up, the movie is giving off a stench of Check-Out-Me-And-My-Cool-PETA-Friends self-righteousness conceivably more noxious than anything you'd smell on the killing floor of a mass-meat-packing plant. Linklater saves the movie's visit to one such floor for the movie's end, in a combo sucker-punch/grandstand play that dares you to watch. I say bring it, buddy. I've seen Franju's Le Sang des Betes, Schroeder's Maitresse, Bertolucci's 1900. You can't show me much I haven't seen already, and better done. After the picture, I enjoyed a very tasty spaghetti carbonara. Come and get me, Avril.

For better news, I saw one thoroughly disgusting film that was also brilliant and hilarious, Gyorgy Palfi's corruscatingly funny Taxidermy. It won't really do to call this an allegory, although this Hungarian film has a lot to say about life in that country during Soviet rule. Except in this Hungary, the Olympic event for which the country is best known is speed-eating (bouts of which are followed by equally Olympian episodes of vomiting). The very sharp satire is enlivened by a visual sense informed by Lynch and Gilliam as well as the Eastern European antecedent's you'd expect. Magnificent, provided you can stomach it.

Ken Loach's The Wind That Shakes The Barley, about the struggle of Irish nationists in the 1920s, is solid and often extremely effective, featuring notes of ambiguity that are relatively new to the stolidly leftist director. One of it's main disappointments is how the film eventually gives up on those notes; Loach's commitment to his ideas and ideals, while commendable, eventually leads him to an artistic compromise. In any case, any U.S. citizen befuddled by the fuss over that most recent Ben and Jerry's flavor name needs to see this film regardless.

That's it for now. When next we catch up, I hope to report on the new Almodovar and a sneak peek at Dreamgirls. The fact that Eddie Murphy looks exactly like '70s-era Billy Dee Williams in the promo material gives me very high hopes indeed.