Rarely did we come across a near-jackpot so early at Cannes Film Festival, where expectation is too unrealistic for any movie to match. But Alain Guiraudie’s “Rester Vertical” (or “Staying Vertical”, mark the erotic undertone of the title) came close. Two years ago, Guiraudie scored a cult favourite with a homo-homicide drama “Stranger By the Lake”, saturated with a sense of danger and exposed flesh, and this year he’s been upgraded to the main competition with another classification-defying “Rester Vertical”, which features a bisexual screenwriter, a family shepherds, a lot of vagina shots (in close up) and a pack of howling wolves in a moonlit French prairie. Plus the strangest, saddest sodomy scene in memory. In short, a weird, tantalising, improbably touching gems.
Rarely did we come across a near-jackpot so early at Cannes Film Festival, where expectation is too unrealistic for any movie to match. But Alain Guiraudie’s “Rester Vertical” (or “Staying Vertical”, mark the erotic undertone of the title) came close. Two years ago, Guiraudie scored a cult favourite with a homo-homicide drama “Stranger By the Lake”, saturated with a sense of danger and exposed flesh, and this year he’s been upgraded to the main competition with another classification-defying “Rester Vertical”, which features a bisexual screenwriter, a family shepherds, a lot of vagina shots (in close up) and a pack of howling wolves in a moonlit French prairie. Plus the strangest, saddest sodomy scene in memory. In short, a weird, tantalising, improbably touching gems.
What is it all about? It’s not easy to sum up , though soon we’ll find out because I’m sure one of the film festivals in Thailand will do us all the service of showing it – and I’m sure “Rester Vertical” will end up in many of the year’s best-of lists. Rester Vertical is about Leo (Damien Bonnard), a movie scriptwriter who drives out to the countryside one day, for no apparent reason, where he meets and fathers a child with a shepherdess he just met. It is a lonesome, wind-swept, wolf-infested landscape, a place of natural beauty and menace, especially at night. But to describe what’s going on in the film is moot. To attempt it, Leo tries to pick up a young man in the village – one of the best pick-up lines ever, “do you ever consider a career in the movies?” he asks the sexy, sinister youth – and later he will have a strange relationship with an old man, two old men actually, as well as a canoe trip to a healer in the woods. Again, a sense of hidden danger permeates the film, though we can’t exactly tell there it comes from, and the film has a wonderful fluidity – in the plot, the sexuality of the characters, and the collapsing frontiers of things and meaning – before Leo has a final encounter with the fear that makes him come to term with the condition of his life.
The film, I’d attempt to say, is about a man besieged: by desire, by masculinity, by the banal necessity of money, by the joy and worries of love, and by mortality. In Guiraudie’s world, a wolf prowls the perimeter of existence, and eve sex is at once an act of kindness and of murder. Those who fear that Guiraudie’s promotion to Cannes’ elite competition would be a reason for him to compromise, fear not: this strange and funny film is as subversive as anything he’s done before.
Life, politics, family – what weighty words! – play out in another black comedy from Romania: “Sieranevada” by Cristi Puiu is another early competition title that will bore many and mesmerise others. The Romanian New Wave has proved a lasting force, with two Romanian films in competition this year, and “Sieranevada” continues the investigation of social hypocrisy and ideological follies of the post-Ceausescu years. Technically, this is very impressive: the whole film is set in an apartment, during a memorial service of a late patriarch, and involves at least 10 characters who weave in and out of the scene, through the house’s many rooms, in an organic, effortless choreography of movement, argument, motive and domestic quarrels.
The social circumstance is hinted at, vaguely and yet more than enough: the story takes place just days after the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, whose resonance is felt in this Bucharest household. Europe – actually, the world – is gripped by doubt, uncertainty, and the steadfastness of the old belief in the face of continual flux of the new, conspiratorial ideas. In this household, there’s a die-hard communist, a conspiracy theorist, a progressive soldier, a conservative type, and a bunch of pseudo-liberals, all of them couched under the shadow of the dead father figure. “Sieranevada” is almost three-hour-long, and while it will test the patience of many, its giddy humour shows a perfect Eastern European sensibility that puts forth laughter at the most critical moment.
These two competition title raises the spirit of Cannes attendants that 2016 should be good year for world cinema. Keep our fingers crossed!
This source first appeared on Bangkok Post Lifestyle.