I was super surprised when Giorgos Lanthimos’s Dogtooth, one of my favorite movies in Cannes, was selected as the winner of the Un Certain Regard sidebar. Before the prize was announced, very few members of the press had seen it, no one was talking about it, and it was competing against much higher profile films, including the Romanian favorites Police, Adjective and Tales of the Golden Age. The NSFW teaser trailer below the jump (from Twitch, via Living in Cinema) reinforces some of why the film is an unlikely prize winner — mainly, its sense of humor is brattily crude, its aesthetics are ugly-pretty, and though it’s no more bloody than main Competition entry Inglourious Basterds, its commanding melding of genre film and art film is much weirder and more unnerving.

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For Vulture, Dennis Lim allows Cannes juror Asia Argento to plug 42×42, a short film omnibus series with a vodka sponsor that the filmmaker/actress organized with her husband, and then gets to the good stuff: how come a bunch of movies that critics hated won big fancy Cannes awards? Asia, perhaps unsurprisingly, eagerly takes all the credit/blame.

“I was very happy with [Best Director winner] Kinatay,” Argento told Lim, although her subsequent praise of the film sort of seems like an insult: “It felt like the director had no idea how to do it and picked up a camera and was shooting the first movie of history. The 45-minute scene in the car where nothing happens I thought was incredible.” Argento also defended honoring the equally derided Spring Fever with the Best Screenplay prize, even though “the movie was very long.”

So was pissing off critics part of the plan? When Lim told her that both the screenplay and director prizes were booed in the press room, Argento responded, “I know. That’s always a good sign.”

In 2008, The Class won the Palme D’or “out of nowhere” — or so it seemed, as the film hadn’t screened before a large chunk of the press had gone home. Almost as if pulling a bait and switch on journalists who stayed through the final weekend the following year in fear of missing a second Oscar-safe “surprise”, the 2009 Cannes lineup saved not the best for last, but certainly the most balls-out and commercially unviable. The two films I saw on my final day in the South of France were admirably experimental, undeniably gorgeous to look at, obstinately focused on form over narrative, so ambitious as to threaten to render that word meaningless as an adjective, and really fucking hard to watch.

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Though not for lack of trying, I haven’t seen a film worth really writing about in days. This afternoon I check out Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon, about which I’ve heard good things; before I leave I’ll attempt to see the Competition entries from Gaspar Noe, Tsai Ming-Liang and Isabel Coixet. But the end of Cannes 2009 is definitely in sight. The market wraps up today, and the crowds are both thinning and wearing out. I arrived at this morning’s screening of Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus 90 minutes early to find nothing like a crowd in wait; when I walked out of the film after 40 minutes because my eyes ached from rolling so much, it looked like everyone in my half-full row was asleep.

So in lieu of reviews, here’s some gossip and other notes on the past few days:

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What does it take to start a controversy in Cannes? Do you need to show real sex? Will a hand job do it, or does it have to be a blow job? Does the penis necessarily *have* to ejaculate blood? What about self-mutilation? If it’s not of the sexual variety, does it go far enough? How about the disemboweling of animals — is the sight of exposed guts always shocking, or only when the guts belong to a wild beast?

I saw two films in two days literally dripping with graphic sexuality, violence, and the apparent philosophy that explicit depravity is the only way for the filmmaker to get their point across — if either filmmaker even has a point beyond inviting dismay, which has been debated –– and yet only Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist is attracting scandal. With its depiction of forced incest, two explicitly not-fake images of sex acts, liberation via very bloody self-harm and the on-screen disemboweling of a housecat, Greek Un Certain Regard title Dogtooth should by all rights be giving Antichrist’s raspberry to art film seriousness a run for its money –– and maybe it would be, if anyone was paying attention.

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Quentin Tarantino has been a lot of things in his nearly 20-year career (yes, Reservoir Dogs premiered at Sundance 17.5 years ago, and yes, that makes you old), from enfant terrible to Oscar winner to untouchable fanboy icon, but he’s never seemed to strain so hard to just make a Quentin Tarantino Film as he does as writer/director of Inglourious Basterds. An 160 minute farce of historical revision, Basterds unfold in five chapters, all but one featuring a major act of violence padded with lots of footage of people sitting at tables, talking, in four different languages (five if you count Tarantino Speak, that American English dialect clogged with arcane, movie-sourced and invented slang spoken by Bible-quoting hit men and yellow jumpsuited hit women alike). So far so good, right? But the talking is notably lacking in the spark and rhythm that we’ve come to expect from Tarantino, and with a fair four-fifths of the film given over to character exposition and dull chatter, the violent setpieces feel rushed along, devoid of both the poetics of Kill Bill’s fight sequences and the rock n’ roll efficiency of the rest of his filmography.
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As of this writing, no film at Cannes has yet managed to surpass Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist, which premiered three days ago, as the hot topic of conversation. In fact, the chatter began before the movie screened: there was a palpable level of excitement days ago about a main Competition title, in English, from a name-brand auteur, with elements of genre that could potentially up its market value. In fact, for awhile there was talk that Antichrist could be the most accessible film Lars Von Trier has ever made. And then people saw it.

As you may have heard by now, the film stars Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg as a married couple (they’re never named) who lose their only child in a freak accident, which they were present for but failed to stop because they were distracted having operatic sex. After she spends some time in a psychiatric ward dealing with her grief, Dafoe, a therapist, convinces Gainsbourg they should retreat to their house deep in secluded woods (they call it “Eden”) so that he can teach her how to face her fears. The house happened to be where the wife used to go to work on an academic thesis on Gynocide — ie: archaic and semi-mythic violence against women, witch hunting and like practices through which, as Gainsbourg’s character puts it, “nature causes people to do evil things to women” — before her husband dismissed her subject and thereby discouraged her ambition. Feeling as though her own sexuality is responsible for the death of her son, the woman essentially internalizes the texts she’s studied and becomes an embodiment of the “evil” she once dedicated her life to critiquing, manifested mainly through total sexual hysteria. And it’s funny!

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We’re at the halfway point of the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, and as of this writing Jacques Audiard’s Un prophète (A Prophet) is without doubt the press corps’ collective favorite film to screen in competition. Audiard has made an elegantly composed crime epic about an illiterate French Muslim teenager who goes to prison on unmentioned charges (he protests “I didn’t do anything!” after he’s been sentenced, and considering that over half of the French prison population is Muslim, he may not be lying), immediately falls in with the band of Corsican thugs who run the joint and eventually learns how to play various factions against each other to the benefit of his Islamic brethren. It plays like, well, gangbusters to an audience of journalists starved for intelligent, artistically satisfying entertainment. Whether it’ll actually play at all to North American audiences is, at this point, anyone’s guess.

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When Lars von Trier claimed to be suffering from depression two years ago, I assumed the illness was caused by his (then) most recent film, The Boss of it All. Not only did the office comedy fail to make as much noise as his prior features, but it actually earned a lot of favorable reviews. Some even called it (gasp!) enjoyable. For a guy used to polarizing critics with his often controversial and groundbreaking movies, that reception had to be tremendously dissatisfying.

But the filmmaker is back at Cannes this year, and I mean back. His latest movie, Antichrist, is apparently as audacious, shocking and misogynistic as everyone expects von Trier’s work to be. And even though it’s getting a lot of negative reviews, it’s still the talk of the festival this year. No wonder the filmmaker is looking so jolly in photos from Cannes; the attention, both good and bad, must be doing wonders for his mental health.

Nobody from Spout has seen Antichrist yet, unfortunately, but don’t doubt we’re trying. Desperately. And we know you’re looking forward to Karina’s take as much as The Brothers Bloom director Rian Johnson is. Today he Tweeted: “Waiting for @KarinaLongworth to see & review Antichrist the way a drunk man waits for a hint of blessed equilibrium.” She responded that she hopes to prove male reporters wrong in their belief that no woman will like it.

While we wait for her anticipated response, we’ll just have to settle on reading other reviews from around the blogosphere. I’ve highlighted some of my favorites, both positive and negative after the jump:

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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.

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It’s the first true Big Cannes Moment to happen since I arrived in Cannes on Friday: Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist, starring Charlote Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe, screened for the press last night, and immediately word started to spread that the film was intentionally unreleasable, chock full of intense violence, graphic sexuality, unforgivable misogyny … and also beauty. One man’s total debacle is another’s ecstatic vision, but thus far the Antichrist supporters seem to be outnumbered by the offended press. I haven’t seen the film yet — I waited in line for an hour last night, but didn’t get in — but I did watch the press conference. As I passed through the Palais, my attention was drawn over to a bank of monitors when I saw this quote on Matt Dentler’s Twitter stream: “I work for myself,” Von Trier said. “And I am the best film director in the world.”

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Of the three Hong Sang-soo films I’ve now seen, Like You Know It All is by far the most accessible in terms of its surface-level genre. It’s essentially a comedy, one that taps a vein not dissimilar to the Comedy of Un-comfortability that’s so in fashion Stateside, while maintaining a consciousness about ego and the weakness of best intentions in the face of desire that grounds the humor in something hopelessly sad.

The film plays out in two major sections. Ku, a filmmaker, travels to a suburb to be on the jury at a film festival. He’s the most famous guy in town … until his former lackey-turned-star director shows up and attracts the attention of porn star who wants to launch a legit acting career. Ku habitually drinks by night and sleeps through movies by day. One night, he runs into an old friend, who he comically dismisses as “an alcoholic”, and after the friend claims that his new wife is his “soulmate” and salvation, the two end up drunkenly going back to the friend’s house, where Ku manages to offend the “soulmate” before passing out. Later, Ku travels to an island to present a lecture at a university. He hooks up with his former mentor for another long night of drinking, then meets the mentor’s own “soulmate” wife… who happens to be Ku’s ex-girlfriend. All throughout, Ku sits, usually quietly, while his drunk companions expound on the meaning of life and the restorative powers of love. Like You Know it All ultimately plays out like a spoof of the life of an independent filmmaker, with the festival circuit and speaking gigs as pit stops to both pump up the ego, and force crises of conscience.

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When I’m standing in the hot sun for hours on end waiting to get into films at Cannes, my favorite way to pass the time is by flipping through the Market guide reading the terribly-translated synopses of terrible-sounding international B-movies. After a day and a half, I’m only about half way through this year’s guide, but I have an early contender for The Best Cannes Marche Guide Synopsis of 2009. Behold, Hipsters:

This is the story from the fifties of the last century where the group of young people has to fight for the right to be different from all others, listen to some other music, dress differently and, certainly, love. Popular smash hits, the most difficult choreographic items, a dashing plot with many twists, a penetrating love story and luxurious scenery will never leave the audience indifferent.

I literally turned this synopsis into cocktail fodder last night, snarking that the “penetrating love story” bit had to be code for softcore, because after all, penetration is a fairly sure-fire way to combat audience indifference, right? Ha! I announced that I would go to Hipsters‘ sole screening in the market this morning, to bear witness to its horrors with my own eyes, or at least challenge that bit about indifference.

Of course, I didn’t make it; I spent that 90 minutes waiting in line for Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet instead. But after researching it a bit (because what else am I going to do in between screenings — write about the Hong Sangsoo film? Please.), I wish I had gone the Hipsters route.

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In the twelve months since I was last in Cannes, I forgot the difference between “real” Festival screenings, and Marche (market) screenings. Everyone talks about the rigorous rules of Cannes festival screenings — the ceremony of lining up; the draconian stratification of press badges, in which your relative importance is proscribed by the color of the plastic ID card around your neck; the near-ritual standing ovations. What people generally don’t bother talking about, and I had forgotten, is the diametrically opposed informality of the market: the fact that lining up is only required for the hottest tickets (usually those that have already screened once in the festival); that most films play to mostly empty rooms, with badgeholders drifting in and out throughout; and that sometimes things happen that defy any attempt to trainspot the schedule to carefully.

So I arrived at the Star for the 9:45 screening of Kore-eda’s Air Doll twenty minutes early, not realizing that at 9:30, the lights would go down and I’d get a surprise glimpse at a 10-minute extended trailer for Gainsbourg, Je t’aime moi non plus (that, at least, was the title flashed at the end; IMDB calls it, Serge Gainsbourg, vie héroïque), written and directed by French graphic novelist Joann Sfar.

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