With Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist being branded as a debacle and other highly-anticipated auteur premieres drawing shrugs (Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock) and measured praise (Jane Campion’s Bright Star), the rest of the press and industry chattering classes have settled on Jacques Audiard’s undeniably well-made crime drama A Prophet as 2009’s sole breakout thus far. I walked out thinking it’s fine for what it is, but not much more. In the hours since exiting that two-and-a-half hour examination of spiritual and socio-economic transcendence via criminal calculation, I’ve gone back and forth between pondering a potential political subtext, and wondering if said pondering was more than the actual primary text required; I’m not yet ready to render a verdict, but I’ll let you know when I am.

Meanwhile, I spent much of my second full day in Cannes thinking about a Directors’ Fortnight double feature I caught the night before: Like You Know it All, the latest ode to drunken paralysis and hungover confusion by Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo (see my review here); and Go Get Some Rosemary, the second Fortnight feature in as many years from Red Bucket Films and their 20-something progenitors, New York-based brothers Josh and Benny Safdie. Both films are (at least) semi-autobiographical portraits of men who work in film but languish on the far margins of what we think of as “the industry”; both use humor to ingratiate us into the worldviews of protagonists who, at best, display a thought process that’s skewed, and at worse, exhibit behavior that cannot be excused. Where the former may depend on a familiarity with the director’s previous work to complete the joke, the latter’s blend of slapstick and surrealism in what should be super-serious situations helps to crystalize the Safdie style sketched out in last year’s The Pleasure of Being Robbed. Fueled by a go-for-broke lead performance by Frownland filmmaker Ronnie Bronstein, the Safdies’ follow-up should win over at least a few skeptics who failed to see the charm in their debut.

The film’s opening scene gives a fair sense of the tone to come. Lenny (Bronstein) buys a hot dog and then attempts to climb over a fence into a park. He falls and drops his hot dog, and, cracking up laughing at himself, puts the meat back in the bun and continues through the park, eating and laughing. Set mainly over a rocky two week period in which 30-something fuck-up Lenny has custody of his two young sons, Go Get Some Rosemary plays out in vignettes, in which Lenny tries to barrel through the day and fails with increasingly dire consequences. You watch his ill-advised problem solving in horror (it gets a lot worse than eating a dirty hot dog), but, somehow laugh with him and become invested in wanting him to do better, even as his desperate, impulse-guided self-absorbtion seems to evolve into pure insanity.
Though the filmmakers still have a ways to go in terms of equaling their energy, enthusiasm and imagination with technical consistency (there are moments in this film where the wobbly hand-held camera absolutely works to plant us in the middle of a scene and convey the mood of total chaos, and there are other moments where I wanted to reach out and grab the image just to keep it from moving),  Rosemary is a step up from Pleasure both visually and narratively. Shot by Josh Safdie and Brett Jutkiewicz on 16mm film, in one scene Rosemary ups the ante on the arts-and-crafts dream logic of Pleasure’s climax, and elsewhere applies a kind of hyper-verite. Though comparisons to filmmakers from John Cassavetes to Lodge Kerrigan could probably apply, the Safdies seeming to take the greatest inspiration from the anarchic spirit of late-20th century New York legend, reinvigorating the notion of the city as a place where anything could happen. On some level, the movie may even be an unassuming period piece — there’s no overt indication that it takes place in anything but the present day, but I don’t recall seeing a cell phone or a hybrid car, and if the Safdies were consciously setting the story in the pre-Giuliani days of their youth, the depiction of New York as a wonderful/horrible playground full of creeps (one amusingly played by a famously off-kilter, Cannes-beloved American director) and creepy-crawlies would fit.
Certainly, the Fortnight seems to have planted the responsibility of restoring indie New York street cinema on the brothers’ narrow shoulders. Olivier Père, the section’s artistic director, said as much in his introduction to Rosemary’s Saturday night premiere, calling the Safdies “a kind of symbol for us … you will see tonight we have plenty of reason for hope in American indie film, and New York film.” Hope is all well and good, but considering that the last Safdie feature followed up their Fortnight closing night premiere by screening in New York for barely a week, I just hope that New Yorkers will eventually have a way to judge this new work for themselves.