For all the talk about how this was a mediocre year at the Cannes Film Festival, I think I personally saw a higher ratio of good to garbage than is my festival norm. Maybe I’m being Pollyanna-ish; maybe I just went in with lower expectations. Regardless: though certainly I saw films too mediocre to merit mention, it seemed like every day brought at least one new movie that deserved to have the living hell championed out of it. The following list is thus not ranked necessarily by absolute quality, but by how fervently I feel the need to shout the praises of the film in question––in some cases, in opposition to overwhelming derision or indifference.
1. Everything is Fine (above) — This French-Canadian drama, about a suicide pact between four teenage friends and the enigmatic boy left behind, was the true undiscovered gem of this year’s Market. Both cautiously romantic and devastatingly sad, its greatest achievement is the way in which it naturalisticaly depicts a teenager’s personal tragedies (those legitimately large and those that just seem that way) without condescension nor nostalgia. As far as I know, it left the Marche without any form of U.S. distribution.
2. Frontier of Dawn –– It wasn’t the most maligned film in competition––nothing could top the press corps’ universal disdain for Wim Wenders’ The Palermo Shooting––but Philippe Garrel’s richly-layered story of the ultimate doomed romance may have been the most misunderstood. Those who complain of the supernatural turn taken by Garrel’s epic in its third half (and, particularly, the silent-era effects used to achieve it) mostly refuse to engage with the film on its own terms. See my full review here.
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La Vie Moderne, playing here on the Un Certain Regard sidebar, is the third documentary portrait of a group of rural French dairy farmers that Raymond Depardon has made this decade, and as such, comparisons between Depardon’s overall project and Michael Apted’s 7 Up series are not unapt. But where Apted’s seven films across forty years have come to define a changing Britain through the personal evolutions of a single generation, Depardon paints a portrait of a region and a way of life that seems on the verge of almost certain collapse due to nothing more than the natural passage of time and collision of generations. Taking on the triple role of interviewer, cameraman and narrator, the filmmaker’s affection for and rapport with his subjects is obvious, his tenacious patience a welcome contrast to the aggression employed by so many self-referential documentarians.
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