L’Avventura
September 8th, 2007
Granted, I came to this movie from a radically different angle from the crowd who first saw and booed it at the Cannes Film Festival in 1960, but in retrospect, it takes some effort to understand their confusion and upset. Yes, L’Avventura isn’t The Bourne Ultimatum, pacing and plotting are leisurely and oblique, but the film isn’t anywhere near as forbidding as contemporary audiences seemed to think or Camille Paglia recently suggested.
Far from being non-narrative or dull, L’Avventura is loaded with tension. The black and white cinematography is gorgeous and deliberate, and even on the surface, the mystery of Anna (Lea Massari), who disappears on a cruise to a volcanic island, is intriguing. The questionable relationship that develops between Anna’s caddish fiancé Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) and her best friend Claudia (Monica Vitti) is ripe with complex undercurrents of desire, guilt, and despair. And if that’s not enough, you can ponder Antonioni’s masterful play with audience expectations, moral judgments, and narrative/cinematic conventions. If Paglia remembers L’Avventura as “plotless,” what does she make of Apichatpong Weerasethakul or Inland Empire?
L’avventura. Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960. *****
L’Enfant
November 18th, 2006
L’Enfant won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, but it’s going on our worst-of-year list. The set up is interesting enough: a homeless teenager leaves the hospital with a newborn, and her small-time crook boyfriend decides that it would be a good idea to sell the baby for a handful of cash. The technical term for this kind of a man is “raging asshole,” and instead of giving us the mother’s story, the film’s focuses on him as he tries to steal enough money to buy back the child, avoid the cops, and dig himself into an ever-deeper hole. It would have been a challenge to make this character even borderline likable, but the Dardennes don’t even try. The amount of callousness, stupidity, and ignorance on display is overwhelming, and in the unearned final scene, we’re suddenly asked to embrace the babymonger’s unlikely redemption. This is the kind of preposterous fake-gritty hokum that gives art house film a bad name–call it the Crash of Cannes.
L’Enfant. Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, 2005. *
[tags]film, dardenne brothers, belgium, cannes, palme d’or, baby, fathers, 1 star, crooks, suffering, asshole, gritty[/tags]
