WORLDVIEW

Milos Stehlik's Commentaries

Cannes Film Festival: Flanders by Bruno Dumont and Babel by Alejandro González Iñárritu

(Transcript)
Originally broadcast May 23, 2006 ]

	Milos Stehlik

Listen to Milos Stehlik's Commentary

Midway through the Cannes Film Festival here, it was clear that so far, there were no clear winners. Perhaps the top runner for the Palme d’Or, the top prize, was Almodovar’s Volver. Penelope Cruz had her face covered with tears at the opening when the film received a very long ovation from the audience. But while almost everyone was positive about the film, hardly anyone was truly enthusiastic, and everyone seemed to be waiting for THE film to really get behind.

One big hope arrived, and was quickly dashed, with the world premiere of the new film by Bruno Dumont, Flanders. Dumont won here in Cannes with his L’Humanite a few years ago, and was quickly embraced as a director to watch after his bleak vision of life in a northern French town, Life of Jesus.

Flanders is set in the farm country of Dumont’s native Flanders. As in his previous films, and in his feature set in America, 29 Palms, Flanders spends much time focusing on a visceral depiction of the landscape. The film’s somewhat marginal characters are a 20-something-year-old Demester and his childhood friend Barbe, with whom he takes walks, and has occasional, quick sex. Barbe is kind of a tramp, and gets pregnant with Blondel, shortly before Demester and other young men his age leave for a war. Although never named, we assume this war is probably in Afghanistan. The soldiers are a part of a small 6-man unit. The killing and cruelty are indiscriminate. The soldiers rape a woman they find in a lonely house, brutally shoot a sniper who is a kid, murder a seemingly innocent man riding his donkey. Their brutality does not save them from being killed. At the end, only Demester and Blondel are left. When Blondel is shot in the legs, Demester leaves him to be executed, and escapes alone.

As in his previous films, Dumont uses non-professional actors who, he says, “never contemplate what they are doing. They do, they act, they never think about who they are. When I film a face, I want the viewer to feel what the character is experiencing. Nothing is expressed in words. The face is expression. The camera becomes a probe. On the screen, there is a sort of alchemy between the viewer and the hero. The viewer is directly connected to his brain and his raw emotions. When my characters speak, they only say what is necessary.”

This is all true, and it is undeniable that the technique is original and reveals the emotional life of characters which would otherwise remain hidden from an audience’s view. But the concept of Flanders is too thin, and the psychological framework of the characters remains too much out of our view. Toward the end of the film, Barbe gets committed to a mental institution for a period of time. We learn her mother had similar problems. But how or why this is connected to either her character or to the overall structure or theme of the film remains out of our reach.

But the knockout punch was delivered here this afternoon with the premiere of Babel, the new, demanding, two and a half hour film from Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu. Inarritu’s extraordinarily ambitious feature features a very diverse group of actors and non-actors and was shot on three continents–in the U.S. and Mexico, in Morocco and Tokyo, Japan. There are three stories which eventually tenuously interlock. Inarittu continually shifts between the three stories and the first astonishment is that the intensity of the film never lets up for a second.

Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, are an American couple grieving from the sudden death of a child, on a tour of Morocco. Blanchett is seriously injured when she is hit with a bullet fired by a young Moroccan boy showing off his shooting prowess. The rifle was left in Morocco by a Japanese hunter whose wife committed suicide and who has a psychologically damaged teenage daughter. Blanchett and Pitt’s other two children, left behind in California in the care of their longtime Mexican nanny, end up stranded in the Mexican desert.

What brings all of these varied plots together are not the narrative strands but the theme of broken human connections. All of the characters live in an inner exile.

Inarritu is brilliant visually and I think the world’s greatest master of sound in film. His complex, layered editing, visually and aurally, create a powerful river of sound and images, as complex as a symphony by Bruckner.

The screening of Babel here in Cannes gave everyone what they were looking for: a cinematic fix for the sensually deprived addicts.

This is Milos Stehlik for Chicago Public Radio’s Worldview.

Worldview film contributor Milos Stehlik is the director of Facets Multimedia.

Click here to read more transcripts.