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| Singing a Happier Tune in Cannes |
CANNES, France — The applause for Joel and Ethan Coen’s wonderful new film, a comedy in a melancholic key called “Inside Llewyn Davis,” started someplace around the midway mark. Prompted by the hilariously inane “Please Please Mr. Kennedy,” sung by Oscar Isaac, Justin Timberlake and Adam Driver — who play three bearded 1961 folkies warbling and strumming through a space-race ditty — the Cannes audience started to laugh and clap. By the time the film ended, the clapping, laughing and whooping critics at the 66th Cannes Film Festival were over the moon.
Cannes Film Festival
Features, reviews, interviews and news from the 66th Cannes Film Festival.
Q. & A.: Nicolas Winding Refn
Ducking Rain and Competition
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Valery Hache/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Ethan Coen, top left, with Joel Coen at the Cannes festival, where their movie “Inside Llewyn Davis” was presented on Sunday.
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Lionel Cironneau/Associated Press
Fom left, actor Lanshan Luo, director Jia Zhangke, actors Tao Zhao, Jiang Wu and Meng Li pose for photographers as they arrive for the screening of film A Touch of Sin.
What a relief! After days and nights of rain puddling on the red carpet and grim tidings darkening the screens, the Coens delivered both much-needed levity and an expressive, piercing story about artistic struggle. Mr. Isaac, wearing a deadpan expression that wavers between the soulful and soul-sick, plays Llewyn, a New York folk musician groping to find his existential way in the turbulent wake of a tragedy. With his guitar and bitterness, lofty principles and light wallet, Llewyn is barely scraping by, taking low-paying gigs and crashing on couches. His most recent album, which shares the film’s title, has gone nowhere and he’s spiraling after it rapidly.
The movie opens with him performing “Hang Me, Oh Hang Me” in a Greenwich Village nightclub in which the air is thick with smoke and sincerity, his warmly alive tenor offering a touching contrast to the tune’s fatalism. It’s a traditional song that was covered by, among others, the folk revivalist Dave Van Ronk (1936-2002) and appears on his album “Inside Dave Van Ronk.” The as-told-to book by Van Ronk and Elijah Wald, “The Mayor of Macdougal Street: A Memoir,” partly inspired the Coens, who, as they did in “O Brother, Where Art Thou?,” also playfully, sometimes pointedly have drawn on Homer’s “Odyssey.” Soon after Llewyn finishes the song, he steps into an alley and receives a bad beating, the first in many punishments on what proves a long, difficult road.
Set mostly in downtown New York with an occasional trip to the Upper West Side and a lengthy detour to Chicago, the film tracks Llewyn as he tries to be true to himself and his art while scrambling to build a career. The years and fate have not been kind, but then neither has he. He takes more than he gives, borrowing money along with infringing on other people’s beds and their partners. He’s slept with the wife (Carey Mulligan) of his best friend (Mr. Timberlake), an indiscretion that hasn’t stopped Llewyn from either flopping at their apartment or singing with them when the need or maybe just his need arises. His journey — which involves a number of cool cats, including a riff on a jazz man by John Goodman — is humbling, tragic, absurd, revelatory.
“Inside Llewyn Davis,” which is in the main competition, will open in the United States in December, doubtless after making other stops on the festival circuit. It’s the kind of great work that cuts right through the noise, frivolity and cross-branding that at any given moment threaten to overshadow Cannes, and that was exemplified by a news release e-mailed on Sunday: “Taking futuristic dystopian fashion and fun to whole new levels, Lionsgate’s ‘The Hunger Games: Catching Fire’ Capitol Party at Baoli Beach on Saturday evening sponsored by CoverGirl was this year’s hottest event at the Cannes Film Festival.” No word on whether the exploitation movie company, Troma, whose minions have been parading around with “Occupy Cannes” signs, staged a protest.
The contradictions of Cannes were evident on Sunday morning when I sat down with the Chinese director Jia Zhang-ke to talk about his latest feature, “A Touch of Sin.” The interview, one of a number he would conduct that day, took place at the Carlton, an old grand hotel that faces the sea along the promenade here, the Croisette. With its white cake-frosting facade, the 100-year-old hotel is the kind of playground for the rich that you can imagine F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald passing through in between his writing chapters of “Tender Is the Night.” Like almost every building on this stretch, the hotel is covered during the festival with advertising banners for movies, so it’s no surprise that images from “The Great Gatsby” are hanging off it like flags.
Mr. Jia’s film is his finest since his 2006 feature, “Still Life,” and his fourth at Cannes. Divided into largely separate if thematically linked chapters, “A Touch of Sin” is a portrait of contemporary China told through four savagely violent episodes that take place in distinct areas of the country. The incidents — three involve murder or mass murder, and one turns on a suicide — are based on events that were widely reported in China and that Mr. Jia said haunted him. In his fictionalized renditions, a seemingly ordinary man and a woman (a massage-parlor receptionist played by Mr. Jia’s wife and his regular star, Zhao Tao) respond to the pressures of their otherwise unremarkable lives with violence that is at once emotionally, horrifyingly realistic and visually baroque.
Speaking in Mandarin through a translator, Mr. Jia explained that the story’s four locations provided him a lot of visual options. The first section — which features an aggrieved miner walking down a dusty street as lonely as any John Wayne traveled — “is in Shanxi, in the north,” he said, adding that it “is basically the Wild West, it’s very manly, very empty.”
Elsewhere, Mr. Jia picked locations that evoke the landscapes of traditional painting and martial arts films, and that taken together allowed him to “paint the face” of China. His sampling from classical painting, Chinese operas and martial arts cinema suggests that it is a face that in some ways remains much the same, despite the country’s rapid modernization.
“I feel that after centuries, nothing has changed,” Mr. Jia said. “We’re just repeating the same fate.”
“The stories,” he also said, “seem like something that would only happen in a martial arts movie; however, they took place in real life.” He was, he continued, particularly struck by an incident involving a massage-parlor client who hit a receptionist across the face with a wad of money after she refused to serve him sexually. In the movie, the woman, whom Mr. Jia dressed like the heroine of the King Hu film “A Touch of Zen,” absorbs the blows again and again until she doesn’t. The moment she answers violence with violence, the realism gives way to phantasmagoric surrealism as slithering snakes mingle with blood.
“People are pushed over the edge to commit violence,” Mr. Jia said. “I think we should reflect on this, because we are both victims and do people wrong.”
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