Festivalgoers have identified this year's program as a return to auteur
filmmaking after a considerable spell of more commercially geared movies,
and there's no auteur more worth watchng these days than Mike Leigh, whose
long and underrecognized career got a major boost when the phenomenal
"Naked" debuted at Cannes three years ago. Masterpieces are often followed
by lesser works, of course, so I kept my expectations for this year's
"Secrets & Lies" in check even after colleagues told me it
was
the best
picture of the opening weekend. I caught up with it yesterday afternoon and
found it a worthy successor to "Naked" in every way.
On some levels it's quite different from its predecessor, focusing on
people so beaten down by the social systems around them--from the economic
system, which keeps them in ruthlessly subordinated and exploited
positions, to the family system, which binds them in interconnected webs of
deception and denial referred to by the title--that it's hard to connect
then with David Thewlis's ferocious Johnny, who fought such traps with
every fiber of his sick yet seductive being. Yet the picture's links with
"Naked" and all of Leigh's other major films are also clear, as the
filmmaker studies the specimens under his microscope with an extraordinary
mixture of clinical detachment and heartfelt compassion. The strength and
depth of the acting make it obvious that he developed the movie in his
usual way, crystallizing the screenplay in collaboration with the
performers during a long period of brainstorming and improvisation. Watch
them during one of the group scenes--a birthday party near the end, for
instance--and you'll see how Leigh keeps his camera at a sufficient
distance to capture not just personal behaviors but the interconnections
between characters (and performers) that grow more intricate and nuanced as
the action proceeds. It's this sort of directorial and performative
subtlety that gives an amazing degree of emotional vitality to the
basically simple plot about a young black woman's first contacts with her
biological mother and the white, working-class family she never knew she
had.
Like every movie, "Secrets & Lies" has flaws--too much
sobbing
away during
the big emotional scenes, at least one key moment in the plot (the very
first encounter between mother and daughter) that seems insufficiently
thought out, a touch of triteness to aspects of the male character who
seems to be Leigh's paradigm for innate decency and dignity. But these are
quibbles. "Secrets & Lies" is a profoundly humane film that should induce
most of Hollywood's craftspersons to hand their heads in shame for the
comparative superficiality of their accomplishments.
An obvious exception to that last statement is Robert
Altman, whose "Kansas
City" is better than most of my Cannes cronies recognize. In scale, it
falls between large-canvas Altman pictures like "Nashville" and "Short
Cuts" on one hand and intimate excursions like "3 Women" and some of his
theater-based movies on the other. In substance it's a neo-noir with an
uninspired story, but what makes it work is the luxurious impact of
Altman's visual style, here steeped in richly colored deep-focus
cinematography that's a pleasure to watch no mater what the story happens
to be up to at any given moment.
Nor do I share the cynical view that Altman's notion of the picture as an
attempt at cinematic jazz--which he pitched to me during a morning
interview session with him and Jennifer Jason Leigh, his admirable star--is
just an effort to dodge the alleged shortcomings of Leigh's performance.
Jazz has always provided an accurate metaphor for Altman's best filmmaking,
which is based on his orchestration of improvisatory riffs into (when they
work properly) masterful ensemble articulations. Also fascinating to ponder
are the links betwen his methods and those of Leigh, another auteur with a
productively collaborative bent. "Kansas City" deserves more credit than
it's been getting here.
There's less to say about Lucian Pintilie's new drama, "Too Late," which
also has a midway position in its director's aesthetic, between the
rambunctious ramblings of "The Oak" and the old-fashioned narrativuity of
"An Unforgettable Summer," which forgettably screened here a year ago. Set
in and around a proliferating mine that's evidently symbolic of Rumania's
complexities in recent years, it builds toward a suspense sequence that
almost makes up in dramatic momentum what it lacks in metaphoric
originality. (I far prefer the metaphorical edge-of-your-seat stuff at the
end of Mircea Daneliuc's ferocious "Jacob" back in 1988.) Pintilie knows
filmmaking, but he hasn't yet convinced me of the consistency of his
talent.
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