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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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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