Cannes Dispatch: Late Style, New Memories

Fallen Leaves (Aki Kaurismäki). 

What do we mean by “late films”? For Theodor Adorno, the maturity of late works of art did not resemble the kind one finds in fruit: “they are, for the most part, not round, but furrowed, even ravaged.” Granted, Adorno was writing about Beethoven, but this idea of contrarian lateness still survives in debates around the term’s use in cinema. Intransigent and confrontational, late films are both a summation of a filmmaker’s oeuvre and a stripping down of their style. They’re masterful distillations of decades of craft, sheared, in a senescent bid for simplicity, until whatever’s left is honed and impenetrable to the point of alienation.

I was thinking of this on my last days in Cannes, as the festival kept yielding new works by august masters: Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s About Dry Grasses, Marco Bellocchio’s Kidnapped, Catherine Breillat’s Last Summer, Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days… But it was only while watching Aki Kaurismäki’s latest that the definition began to feel astringent. Of course, at 66, Kaurismäki is still a long way from retirement, yet his luminous Fallen Leaves nonetheless sponges something of those late-film qualities. It’s a comprehensive overview of the major themes of Kaurismäki's oeuvre and a distillation of his lapidary style, but its lateness does not feel hermetic or oppositional. Quite the opposite.

A parable of working-class uselessness and replaceability, Fallen Leaves harks back to the director's Proletariat Trilogy. Like the outcasts of Shadows in Paradise (1986), Ariel (1988), and The Match Factory Girl (1990), Ansa (Alma Pöysti) and Holappa (Jussi Vatanen) are two lovable losers eking out a living through a roundelay of menial jobs. They first cross paths at a karaoke bar (another irreplaceable setting for Kaurismäki, as foundational to the director’s imagination as the woods are to fairy tales), then lose contact, then bump into each other again, a tentative romance that’s offset by his heavy drinking and the professional setbacks that befall them both as they drift in and out of unemployment. It’s an immensely depressing backdrop, but Kaurismäki directs their struggles with a mix of austerity and candor that yanks Fallen Leaves from abject miserabilism and keeps matters fleet throughout. Stripped to their bones, all of his films are about survival: people who live an inch or two above the poverty line, who undergo all manner of financial, physical, and spiritual humiliations, and none of them should so much as crack a smile. That they unfailingly manage is a testament to the expertly calibrated sort of black comedy the director has perfected through decades of work, which here scintillates in its purest form.

Kaurismäki is one of the few living filmmakers whose style is so unique as to make any given shot instantly recognizable; aside from the deadpan humor, perhaps the most distinctive element in Fallen Leaves is the economy of its mise-en-scène. The small apartment Anna has inherited from her mother in the outskirts of town is sparsely furnished, painted in pastel colors, and dotted with a handful of appliances that look exhumed from a world several decades older, even as they’re all somewhat synced to the present (take her 1940s radio, for one, sputtering news of Russian air strikes on Mariupol, one of many war bulletins that score Ansa’s routine). But the ascetic compositions only heighten the intensity of feelings. Another paradox of Kaurismäki’s cinema: even as his films are almost always crafted as a series of static tableaux (here again, the filmmaker teams up with cinematographer Timo Salminen), the still shots all crackle with a sense of tempestuous emotions perpetually at play. There are moments in Fallen Leaves when the alienation its lovelorn characters succumb to is so vivid the screen seems to shiver. Time and again, Kaurismäki turns to long shots of a city in ruins, with excavators pecking at rubble like famished raptors, and gloomy hangouts with exotic names (California Pub, Buenos Aires Bar…). But the cityscape slowly accrues an ineffable, lambent grace; poised somewhere between despondency and hope, Kaurismäki conjures a cinematic urbanism of belittling power while transcending its isolation.

Close Your Eyes (Víctor Erice).

The only other Cannes title that could rival the poignancy of Kaurismäki’s latest, in my book, was Víctor Erice’s shatteringly melancholic Close Your Eyes, another “late film” that stood as a summation of a filmmaker’s whole career. Close Your Eyes was inexplicably slotted not in the official competition, but in the Cannes Premieres sidebar, and Erice made the news for boycotting his own premiere, a decision he explained in a candid letter to Spanish daily El País, where he revealed he only found out about the snub the day the festival’s program was announced a month back (the Directors' Fortnight had reportedly offered to host Erice’s as its opening film, but the filmmaker could not accept as he was still waiting on Cannes artistic director Thierry Fremaux to confirm his slot on the main slate). I understand that, to any outsider, all of this is likely going to sound like eye-rolling festival politics, but the film’s exclusion from the main program was nothing short of baffling. The premiere was an event unto itself: Close Your Eyes is only the 82-year-old Spaniard’s fourth feature, and his first in a whopping thirty-one years. It was also, in retrospect, one of the festival’s strongest titles.

Written by Erice and Michel Gaztambide, Close Your Eyes, in its simplest terms, is the story of a disappearance and the investigation that followed it. It centers on Miguel Garay (Manolo Soto), a novelist and former filmmaker whose second feature came to an abrupt halt once the lead went missing. Titled La Mirada del Adiós (The Farewell Gaze), Miguel’s project was a riff on Orson Welles’s Mr. Arkadin and The Immortal Story. It kicked off in 1947, in a luscious castle in the outskirts of Paris, where the owner, an affluent man with Welles’s own baritone and sinisterly charming aura, hired a gumshoe to travel to Shanghai and bring back his only daughter, just so that she could look at him one last time. The detective was played by Julio Arenas (Jose Coronado), a brooding thespian prone to bouts of depression and heavy drinking who vanished mid-shoot, leaving behind a pair of shoes by a steep cliff from which authorities assumed he’d jumped. The body, however, was never found. Close Your Eyes begins with Miguel’s unfinished film, the first few minutes of which Erice shows before shuttling us several years into the future; next we see him, Miguel is sitting with the producer of a TV show looking to shed light on Julio’s disappearance. Thus begins Miguel’s own trip down memory lane, a journey that sees him reunite with old acquaintances and lovers, and ends with a most extraordinary rendezvous.

The title of Miguel’s aborted project offers an apt précis of Erice’s own; Close Your Eyes is a tale of farewells, a “late film” in what’s possibly the most literal sense of the term: a director revisiting old ghosts for what may very well be the last time he gets to point the camera at someone. It is soaked in melancholy, nowhere more vividly than in an early rendezvous between Miguel and Julio’s daughter Ana, played by Ana Torrent, the same actress who—forty years ago, aged six—starred as the lead in Erice’s 1973 masterpiece, The Spirit of the Beehive. Erice grants her a monologue that cinematographer Valentín Álvarez shoots in close-up, her face filling the frame almost in its entirety. It’s a scene that, like so many others in Close Your Eyes, doesn’t register as a reunion so much as a goodbye. Yet the film steers clear from cheap treacle and works its way toward an astonishingly invigorating finale. If Kaurismäki lacquers his improbable romance with a myriad of movie posters—some as decor, others as commentary (like a shot of Holappa and Ansa meeting under the watchful gaze of David Lean’s Brief Encounter)—Erice picks fewer, subtler clues, none more revealing than a late nod to Carl Theodor Dreyer, whom one of Miguel’s old collaborators hails as the last director able to yield miracles through film. In an age when the words “a love letter to cinema” have basically turned into ubiquitous, hollow marketing fodder, Close Your Eyes is electrifying proof of the life-affirming and life-preserving power of the medium. This isn’t cinema as escapism; it’s cinema as a memory machine, bearing witness to what André Bazin had called the mummy complex: an embalming of time and space. In a film haunted by recollections and their impermanence, Miguel and Erice wield the camera as a life elixir. For all its nostalgia, Close Your Eyes is the story of a resurrection, and a homage to an art form that can still, per Bazin, “snatch our bodily appearance from the flow of time,” and “stow it away neatly, so to speak, in the hold of life.”

La Chimera (Alice Rohrwacher).

This idea of cinema as a memory machine is also a good way of thinking about Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera. Rohrwacher’s films are all excavations: set in anachronistic corners of her native Italy, what unites tales as disparate as Corpo Celeste (2011), The Wonders (2014), and Happy as Lazzaro (2018) is their shared interest in exhuming storied histories. To venture into them is to reckon with insular worlds where past and present often coexist, and this new film sees Rohrwacher's archaeological flair at its most explicit. Set in a small hamlet in central Italy in the early 1980s, La Chimera tracks an English tombarolo—gravedigger—as he raids Etruscan tombs to sell their contents to powerful and largely invisible antique buyers. The director has cited the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice as the film’s ur-text, and Arthur (Josh O’Connor) shuffles into La Chimera as a heartbroken stand-in for the Ancient Greek bard. His lover Beniamina has long since disappeared in circumstances Rohrwacher’s script leaves deliberately ambiguous, and the loss imbues Arthur’s search for secret graves with a restless desperation that sets him apart from fellow tombaroli (where some went for the money, a grave-digger explains early on, the Englishman “was looking for a door to the afterlife”). Hardly as transparently innocent and benign a figure as the Holy Fool from Lazzaro, Arthur nonetheless shares with him a spiritual connection with the ancient turf. Clutching a bifurcated stick like a divining rod, he tiptoes around the hills as a dowser, “feeling” the energies radiating from the soil.

La Chimera closes a trilogy about that uncanny relationship between people and land. The first two installments, The Wonders and Lazzaro, matched a wholly inhabited naturalism with a flair for the folkloric that turned them into unassuming fables; their otherworldly beauty owes as much to Hélène Louvart’s grainy and vibrant cinematography as to the writer-director’s ability to wed neorealism with fantastical elements. How strange, then, that La Chimera should feel much more literal and heavy-handed. To be clear, it’s not like Rohrwacher was ever immune from expansive gestures or the occasional on-the-nose associations. But her beguilingly gentle approach managed to smuggle those in, rescuing her films from the twee sentimentalism they would sometimes court. In La Chimera, ideas and images are surprisingly more straightforward, almost didactic. Rohrwacher wants to posit her tombaroli as hapless victims of a much larger and powerful ring of antique smugglers; plausible or not, the point isn’t suggested so much as shouted by Rohrwacher’s sister and actress Alba in a late cameo that sees her hiss at Arthur’s gang (“You’re all just cogs in the wheel!”), before the director cuts to a shot of an actual engine, lest you didn’t get it, chugging and whirring underneath them. That superfluous juxtaposition is only one of other instances where the film doesn’t seem to trust the power of its more perturbing thoughts—moments that run counter to the ethereal and easygoing idiom the director’s honed over the years. All that said, La Chimera remains a film of astonishing textural pleasures. Louvart and Rohrwacher have a way of making their tales look like ancient artifacts, and this one too is filled with shots that shimmer with the beauty of things that have never been seen before. At its most entrancing, La Chimera makes the tombaroli’s wide-eyed awe contagious, holding its breath with Arthur as he unveils new treasures, and inviting us to do the same. 

Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell (Pham Thien An).

I left Cannes feeling like I barely caught a glimpse of all that the festival had to offer beyond the main competition, yet the sidebars this year seemed strangely lackluster. Aside from the traditionally hit-and-miss Un Certain Regard, the Directors' Fortnight also felt underwhelming. Under the aegis of newly appointed artistic director Julien Rejl, the section chose to spotlight fewer established names in exchange for younger, ostensibly bolder voices. It’s a laudable pivot, yet it made for a patchier menu. Save for a few standouts—Sean Price Williams’s The Sweet East as well as Pierre Creton’s Un Prince and Joanna Arnow’s The Feeling that the Time for Doing Something Has Passed, judiciously dissected by my fellow Cannes dispatchers Daniel Kasman and Lawrence Garcia a few days back—the Fortnight proved a mixed bag. But a late highlight came in the shape of Pham Thien An’s Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell, a Vietnam-set reverie that nods to the trancelike magic of Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Tsai Ming-liang without parroting their style. The story is easy to sum up, though it wends its way into a realm that defies facile explanations. Thien (Le Phong Vu) is a twentysomething who leaves Saigon to return to his native village after his sister-in-law dies in an accident, leaving behind her five-year-old son Dao. Dao’s father, Thien’s older brother, abandoned his boy and his wife years prior, so the homecoming turns into a chance for Thien to both attend the funeral and look for his sibling. Straightforward enough, but Pham, who wrote and cut the film, fills it with all kinds of increasingly surreal detours, swelling Cocoon Shell into a meandering and mystifying three-hour journey.

Shot by Dinh Duy Hung, the film trades in long, uninterrupted takes, the camera never entirely static but panning or tracking ever so slowly to follow Thien in his bustling Saigon hangouts and verdant native turf. Some of the choreographies behind these unflinching sequences are nothing short of transfixing, yet even at its most technically sophisticated, Cocoon Shell never feels like an exercise in preening showmanship. Its long takes are integral to the sort of trance Pham routinely conjures, a state of heightened sensitivity that graces the most unassuming objects—an alarm clock, a vase—with a sense of magic. As for those almost imperceptible tracking shots, in a film so concerned with memory, they register as incursions from the future, a camera traveling through time as much as space. But perhaps the film’s greatest charm lies in its permeability. Watching Cocoon Shell, I had a sense that every shot, every camera movement was engineered to let the frame open up to the mysterious world Thien traverses, and welcome all kinds of apparitions—including a cockfight at dawn, a massage scene that echoes one from Tsai’s Days, and a rendezvous with a Vietnam War veteran that ends with Thien poking at the man’s scarred abdomen in a shot that directly invokes Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of Saint Thomas.

I can’t pretend Cocoon Shell held me in its spell throughout. That nod to Caravaggio, however improbable, is only one of numerous other instances when the film engages with Christian iconography. Religious symbols abound, as do chats about faith and the hereafter, exchanges that sometimes threaten to dip into speechifying, and seldom carry the same disquieting allure of Pham’s visuals. All the same, this remains a fulminating film, a mesmeric odyssey from a director with a supreme command over his craft—all the more astounding considering this is Pham’s debut feature, for which he won this year’s Caméra d’Or. It is also, of the Cannes entries that strove for a sense of transcendence, among the very few I saw that reached it. At once languorous and enigmatic, Cocoon Shell was a cleansing experience, a film I know will watch over me for a long while.