(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
I visit the Cannes Film Festival for the twelfth time, and a rented bicycle is the best means of access through streets in perpetual traffic jams, where dark limousines try to make their way through the human ocean. There is a lot on the program a regular festival day, with shows starting early in the morning – and if you are lucky enough to get a ticket to tonight's gala, you have to put on your outfit. Certainly a bit comical on a bike. The rewards are the great experiences the white canvas can provide when choosing the presumptive best of 5000 contemporary films, and that Cannes can offer cinderella dramas where an unknown Burma filmmaker might hit the red carpet with this year's hit. It is also a good thing to see people fighting on their dry fists to get tickets to what in Norway are called "narrow" films, and how much partying and glamor is created around them – well helped by the "photographic corps" dressed in black and white, nicely positioned on either side of the red carpet with competing length of lenses. But this year I also saw some ladies there for the first time. With a different dress code, and much smaller lenses.
Caregiving. Perhaps a sign that the women are increasingly entering the festival, where the selections have long had a high smoking factor. In 2012, there were no female directors in the main competition – oddly enough, since almost 50 percent of what is made in France has female directors. This year there are three women, and many of the films in this year's selection have good women roles – even Mad Max has taken a superhero into his universe. The genre span cannot be criticized: Some films provide experiences of "the good novel", others are like watching a gladiatorial fight, others like being dragged into a journalistic depth report.
opening film The têtoo loud (or Head high) by Emanuelle Beart probably the most towards the last, but is certainly a daring and more than worthy opening film – although it did sound somewhat dissonant in some jewels on the way out. IN Heads up Brilliant Catherine Deneuve plays the referee who meets an obviously caring boy for the first time as a six-year-old, but must give in to the young mother's insistence on keeping him. We follow him from court to court, where the boy becomes more and more outspoken, until the judge sends him to prison as a juvenile delinquent. The film creates an ambivalence towards all the characters, and is in touch with the real stories in a way reminiscent of the 1968 generation films – while keeping in mind the massive failure of care that was the backbone of the two Charlie Hebdo killers, and which many urban dwellers are experiencing.
The dramatic, multi-faceted female characters that Hitchcock was so good at – where did they come from?
Furious. At the very opposite end is the fantasy universe Mad Max, a modern gladiator movie with so much violence and action that it actually gets a bit sleepy – despite the movie costing a billion dollars. A violent staging of a dystopia where the earth is almost empty of drinking water, and a merciless despot controls it all. The protagonist Mad Max, after surviving all kinds of trials, manages to break free and start the rebellion against him. I wake up when Furiosa, played by Charlize Theron, emerges as his equal in both driving and fighting. Funny enough, they also meet a group of surviving old fighting women in the desert, with the world's last herbs in their handbag – perhaps a greeting to Jane Campion's TV series Top of the Lake. But every clip oozes testosterone without experiencing any real conflict, or relationships one gets involved in. And it's a bit suspicious when such a movie is devoid of moral dilemmas – with Valhalla myths as good entertainment for anyone with warfare as a profession, whether they are IS soldiers or some of ours. On the way out, I feel like a coward as I let myself be stopped by a security guard when I want to take a shortcut into the "Palais des film". Why don't I just kick / whistle / spell jump them down?
Multifaceted. To see Japanese An, meaning "beans" (the ones you eat, that is), was like coming home again. Presented in the side program Uncertain regard with Naomi Kawase's quiet and very poetic storytelling style. A depressed, overworked pancake salesman is visited by an old lady who wants to work for him. She thinks the bean stew in the pancakes is not up to par, and shows how to make it – and that one must also keep in mind the prayer life and what it cost them to come to his pots. The pancake seller hires her, and the shop is booming. Until someone looks at her hands that she has had "Hansen's disease", which leprosy is called internationally. In Japan, leprosy had to live in isolation long after it was no longer contagious. But the story is about more than this, and had so many layers that I felt more than satisfied long after.
So did Ida Panahandeh's debut film Nahid, where an Iranian woman has been divorced from her slubbert man on condition that she does not remarry – then she loses the care of the XNUMX-year-old son. This is a film with so many layers and undertones that you hold your breath waiting for how it will end. It is built on a true story, but lifted by a poetic imagery and a protagonist who is not idealized, but also lies and makes it difficult for them, and where the families of the two also have a villain role in how they want them young people return to their enclosed, traditional existence.
In the background. An interesting counterpart was the Hollywood movie Carol by Todd Haynes, starring Cate Blanchett. Here is an American 50s lady from a wealthy environment who wants divorce. She falls in love with a young saleswoman – something her husband uses against her. Here, too, the child becomes the throwing ball in a power play that the man can control, and where the lesbian relationship renders the woman unjustified. But it's not primarily the plot this movie scores on – rather, it's the amazing re-creation of a 1950s world with much of what we associate with the United States for good and bad: the shops with the fabulous Christmas shows, the dream of freedom to travel where one wants to love who one wants to become one. But then it is the money power and the pietistic ideals that are astonishingly reminiscent of what was presented in the Iranian film. Also in the beautiful Carol there are possible female actors who pull the strings behind – like the man's mother – without becoming dramatic characters. Here are plenty of actor achievements that will surely be rewarded, although the characters are in many ways the "victims" of the drama and conflicts inflicted on them, where they will only do their best in an increasingly impossible situation.
Equality? For the dramatic, multi-faceted female characters that Hitchcock was so good at – where did they come from? It is impossible to overlook that many of the female directors are better at promoting these, while the male has an inclination to idealize and to blame simple, male antagonists for everything wrong. A kick this year was therefore to see the French classic The panic (The panic) from 1946 – a newly restored film that is probably both the mother of Hitchcock and the modern horror drama: Here a kind-hearted, clumsy doctor falls victim to a bisexual alliance after falling in love with a woman he observes from the window opposite, and who he will save from an unscrupulous killer. The woman instead chooses to stay with the killer, and gets the mob to pursue him who would be her benefactor.
As women gain more power, it is time for the dark sides to be exposed as well. The satire magazine Charlie Hebdo had a cover this week in which they characterized a more than full Catherine Deneuve wrapped in pink, commenting: "Suspicious object observed on the Croisette!" She had the very flattering front page presented for the first time at the press conference. And how does she handle it? By praising them for doing their job. The hat off. It must well be said to be equality in practice.
At least we would like that to be the case – but French newspapers like Liberation are critical of this year's competition because so many of the small European countries, including Norway, have made films with French-American casting and English as their main language.
Kvamme is a documentary filmmaker.
