A Hero
Don’t let the now infamous mishap cloud Saturday night’s historic achievement: with the Palme d’Or handed out to Titane, Julia Ducournau is only the second female director to win Cannes’s top prize in the festival’s history, twenty-eight years after Jane Campion did so with The Piano. It’s a towering achievement, whose surprise was spoiled thirty minutes earlier than planned by Jury President Spike Lee, who began the awards ceremony by reading out the big winner, effectively putting the whole Moonlight vs La La Land Oscar debacle to shame. It was an astonishing finale worthy of this very unusual year, and as I type these last words—no longer in a press lounge besieged by paparazzi and fellow journalists, but from the comforts of home—I’m still genuinely baffled by it all.
Running a fest in the midst of a pandemic was no small feat. The obstacles festival director Thierry Frémaux et al faced were far more arduous than what the Venice Biennale had to brace for last September. Pushed back from its traditional mid-May slot to early July, the fest unfolded in a sea resort town crammed with tourists as well as industry people, and for all the cuts on the number of accredited guests (estimates suggest only 50% of the usual intake was invited this year), I can’t pretend I wasn’t a tad concerned with the way the higher echelons dealt with health and safety on the Croisette. I began my first dispatch stating all non-fully-vaccinated attendees would have to take 48 hour COVID tests to access theatres, but that, as it later turned out, was only the case for two venues inside the Palais de Festival. That said, Frémaux took to the stage multiple times through the fest to reassure us that no virus clusters had formed (whether or not that's the case, I’m happy to report that, twelve tests later, I’m still negative).
Given all the herculean challenges, I suspect Cannes 2021 would have gone down in history as a remarkable edition purely by virtue of its actually happening. But the wealth and breadth of the festival’s various slates made this a particularly memorable year, beyond the exceptional circumstances we all had to navigate. Sure, there was no unanimous crowd-pleaser à la Parasite (which only goes to show how rare one such masterpiece is), but there were several other films that provided a great deal to reflect on, unpack, and marvel at, as well as the feeling that the medium, for all the fears and angst of the past two years, is still very much alive and kicking. Main competition aside, I was happy to squeeze in some time to browse through other sections. In the Directors' Fortnight, standouts came in the shape of Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir Part II, Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis’s The Tale of King Crab, and Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman’s Neptune Frost. Few titles in the Un Certain Regard slate moved me quite like winner, Kira Kovalenko’s Unclenching the Fists (honorable mentions go to Arthur Harari’s Onoda: 10000 Nights in the Jungle, and Kogonada’s After Yang, on which I wrote a few days back). And before we get to the main slate, it’s worth highlighting another huge milestone in the festival’s history: for the first time ever, the Palme d’Or, Un Certain Regard Grand Prix, Camera d’Or and Short Film Palme were all won by women: Ducournau, Kovalenko, Antoneta Alamat Kusijanovic (director of Murina, also unveiled in the Directors' Fortnight) and Tang Yi (All the Crows in the World).
Which leads us to the official competition, and Saturday night’s ceremony. Save for a couple of misfires, Nanni Moretti’s Three Floors and Sean Penn’s Flag Day (how on earth could Penn still find a slot among the Palme d’Or hopefuls after his 2016 The Last Face is still a mystery…) the main slate treated us to a robust list. In the end, Nadav Lapid’s Ahed’s Knee and Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria shared a Jury Prize; Ryūsuke Hamaguchi and Takamasa Oe nabbed a Best Script award for their gripping Murakami Haruki adaptation, Drive My Car, while Leos Carax took home the Best Director prize for Annette.
In the acting categories, Renate Reinsve was crowned Best Actress for her turn in Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World, and Caleb Landry Jones won Best Actor for his work in Justin Kurzel’s Nitram, a chronicle of the events leading up to the 1996 Port Arthur massacre, when a lone gunman, Martin Bryant, opened fire in a tourist site in south-eastern Tasmania, killing 35 people—the worst mass shooting in Australia’s history. But Nitram does not show the bloodbath. Instead, what Kurzel and writer Shaun Grant conjure is a portrait of a shooter as a troubled youth, a film that zeroes in on Bryant (Landry Jones) as he shifts from a lonely pariah to a rabid, revenge-seeking killer. Which doesn’t mean Nitram isn’t violent, only that violence is often more implied than made explicit, more psychological than it is physical. We first meet Bryant—never called by his first name, only by the pejorative nickname the film is named after—in an archival interview where the then-teenage boy is asked about a firework accident that left him covered in burns (why Kurzel thought this was important is revealed in the foreboding answer the boy gives a journalist: “I may have learned a lesson, but I’m still playing”).
Nitram
Next we see him, Landry Jones turns him into a flavicomous cherub with shoulder-length hair and a vacant stare. He’s a stunted adolescent: capricious, spoiled, aggressive, disturbed. Yet Nitram spends ample time to tease out the lad’s troubled relationship with his parents, in a manner that seems to suggest his terrifying transformation was spurred by a glacial, unaffectionate mother (Judy Davis) and an overly permissive and meek father (Anthony LaPaglia). Indeed, for good lengths of the film, Landry Jones’s Bryant staggers through Nitram as a young man looking for an affection nobody seems willing to afford him. It’s no surprise he should eventually find it in another outcast, Helen (Essie Davis), a wealthy heiress who essentially morphs into a surrogate mother/best friend, and invites him to move into her rundown mansion and share a roof with her and about a dozen dogs (think of a setting in the vein of Grey Gardens). In real life, following a fatal car accident which Bryant may have been responsible for, Helen ended up bequeathing him her entire fortune. But even the newfound riches couldn’t help the lad from plunging deeper into despair, especially as new tragedies befell his parents, all of which would lead to the atrocities of April 1996.
Does this place us in a better position to “understand” what happened, in the end? I’m not so sure. The truth behind an event of such unspeakable horror will always remain inscrutable, and there’s only a certain amount of explaining Nitram can do. You may argue, as I’m sure the film’s detractors might, that in choosing to concoct a behind-the-scene, often poignant look at Bryant’s life Kurzel ends up stripping him of his devilish aura, mounting what can be mistaken for as an apology. Did the killer need a film like this? Did we? These are all legitimate questions, yet they strike me more as knee-jerk reactions than serious indictments. Kurzel’s bold, daring choice—to avoid painting Bryant as either a pathetic punchbag or a monster—is the film’s greatest gamble and merit. With all its complicated efforts to both humanize and problematize its protagonist, Nitram doesn’t parcel out an apology, but something far more sinister and provocative. It blurs the distance between shooter and audience, triggering that most frightening of questions: what if it could happen to one of us, too?
The film works or fails in the strength of its central performance, and in Landry Jones, Nitram finds an actor capable to incarnate a figure far more complex than an id-propelled, two-dimensional villain. It’s the combination of rage and vulnerability he brings to the role that makes it possible for us to feel for Bryant without never forgetting who we’re dealing with, exactly—a chilling turn that leaves you unsure as to when exactly the lad will erupt, so strong is the wrath that keeps simmering in him, but never detonates until it’s all too late.
A Hero
Browsing through the other winners, Juho Kuosmanen’s Compartment No. 6 shared an ex aequo Grand Prix with Asghar Farhadi’s A Hero. I didn’t manage to watch the former (and can’t wait to catch it wherever it’ll show next), but I did land a last-minute seat for the Farhadi, a few hours before the awards were announced. Calling it a return to form is an understatement; after the flop of its predecessor, the Spain-set, Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz vehicle Everybody Knows—which had opened the festival in 2018—Farhadi’s latest finds him again working in his native Iran, and prodding the same themes of his earlier, finest social melodramas. Much like A Separation, what kicks off as a rather straightforward dilemma gradually snowballs into a moral crisis of life-shattering scale. Here, the conundrum concerns a man, his creditor, and a bag full of gold. Played by Amir Jadidi, our eponymous hero is Rahim, a divorcee who’s spent the last few years in prison after failing to repay a debt to his former father-in-law. As the film opens, he’s just been granted a two-day leave, which he intends to use as a chance to drag himself out of the mess. His new girlfriend Farkhondeh (Sahar Goldust) has found a woman’s handbag on the street containing seventeen gold coins, which may convince his creditor to drop charges against him. As it turns out, the money isn’t quite enough to pay off the debt, which needles Rahim into a moral U-turn: he wants to return the bag—and coins—to the woman they belong to. But once his warden overhears the plan and realizes the putatively noble deed is exactly the kind of publicity the prison needs to divert attention from a tragic accident, Rahim’s decision becomes everyone else’s.
No point in spoiling all the twists the plot takes from this point on; suffice to say that, just as soon as Rahim is thrown under the spotlight and hailed as a beacon of selflessness and rectitude, things begin to crumble. Rumors and doubts spread like wildfire: whose bag is it, really? Did Rahim ever mean to hand it back? Is the whole story a cover-up? Is he a hero, or a fraud? Farhadi has a knack for piling rights on top of wrongs, which injects the film with an edge-of-the-seat tension, leaving you uncertain as to when things will fall apart. When, not if, because by the time Rahim wrestles with one last choice, the man’s public persona is so irreparably compromised to make the disgrace inevitable—but no less shattering. That’s what A Hero nails so well: the constant, relentless blurring and complicating of the moral battleground we’re thrown into. Nobody is perfect here, most certainly not Rahim; for every ethically sound step he takes, there’s a smattering of white lies and other less-than-proper actions that cloud the martyr-like portrait the film crafts at the start. Do we root for him, or for the man he owes money to, Braham (Mohsen Tanabandeh), who lost his savings and daughter’s dowry to help Rahim with a loan shark debt?
Jadidi is terrific, and his performance is A Hero’s crowning glory. He first swaggers out of prison with a wide-eyed smile that brims with hope and optimism; anytime that’s snuffed out, the effects are lacerating. In a society where dissent is highly regimented, criticism of the powers that be must be carefully coded, a strategy Farhadi’s domestic dramas have traditionally relied on. But in A Hero, the jibes thrown at the country’s coercive forces feel more startling than arguably anything the director’s ever packed before. In treating Rahim’s mercurial rise to stardom as a metonym for a whole society and its shapeshifting moral compass, it is not a portrait of an unlikely hero Farhadi paints, but that of an entire country trying to save its face. In a late remark by Braham, the film tips its hand: “they big you up to show this country is paradise,” he hisses to Rahim, minutes before an over-invested warden warns the inmate not to tell journalists he relied on a loan shark, lest he should make everyone else look bad too.
It’s telling that Farhadi’s camera should often glance at children in the midst of Rahim’s most heated arguments with family and foes, hinting at the way future generations will have to grapple with similar quandaries, and forces just as eager to incense and crush you. His only son Siavash suffers from a speech impediment, a stutter that the warden, in a last-minute attempt at rescuing Rahim from social media carnage, thinks would make for a perfect tear-jerking YouTube apology. It’s the film climax, and it leaves Rahim facing a final, character-defining dilemma—a scene of heart-wrenching power the whole film has worked toward. And with that finale my own festival came to an end. I sneaked out of the theatre as credits rolled, and raced back to the press room to watch Ducournau’s triumph as the sun sank behind the Croisette, a historic ending for a historic edition. Luckily, the next one is only ten months away.
See you all next year.