I remember a fairly stormy visit to Cannes by the Finnish Aki Kaurismäki. It was when accompanying The man without a past in 2002, award-winning. The mastery and irony of his work let themselves be eclipsed on the Croisette by his antics and drunkenness as a guy lying on the red carpet, throwing his cell phone in front of the journalists’ floor, smoking in a press conference in defiance of prohibitions.
You don’t have to strip naked in Cannes to electrify the cameras, even if it helps to stand out. This badly licked and dissident bear allergic to the winds of political correctness masters more muscular methods. This does not prevent his works from giving off a poetry à la Prévert, a situational humor à la Tati. The human being is adorned with disparate tinsel. Especially here…
Under the parade of this king of entertainment, his cinema exudes a tenderness dedicated to humans on the margins coupled with an admiration for the great filmmakers of the past, masters in his unsurpassable eyes. Long accustomed to the Cannes race, he had not been welcomed to the Palace since 2011 with Le Havre. We are delighted to find him.
His film in competition, Dead leaves, presented on Monday, is a tribute to the admirable eponymous song by Jacques Prévert and Joseph Kosma (sung in Finnish) but also to Charlie Chaplin, whose protective shadow floats everywhere. Hats off also to filmmakers Yasujiro Ozu and Robert Bresson. He no longer shows off, Kaurismäki, leans on love and solidarity, in his eyes the only hopes of redemption in a lost world.
This simple story of the guy who meets a girl during the 1970s is savored in melancholic comedy with performances often close to mime. Force fixed shots give distance to this thunderbolt between two solitaries dropped by the system in Helsinki. They meet at the cinema, lose each other, find each other again, swept away like leaves in the autumn wind, without knowing the other’s name. The man (Jussi Vatanen) gets thoroughly drunk, the woman (Alma Pöysti) has seen her father and her brother die of the “damned drink”. She backs up, he has an accident. This is the reunion! The words are rare, the effusions absent but the caustic replies. The camera stares at these moving bodies in kitsch settings. Between karaoke, odd jobs, worker mutual aid, the era is reborn through its rock songs, zombie films or the New Wave. This film is drunk like a fresh wine with a touch of acidity. Kaurismäki has had the very tender misfortune this year, in great need of clinging to the shipwrecked buoy. His blues touches us as much as yesterday. More perhaps, as the planet loses its footing.
Eating, yes, but why?
There’s nothing like cinema to shed light on our social excesses by using irony to help messages get through. Nutritional deviations, for example, from anorexia to overeating, are not fictitious. Here they are treated by the Austrian Jessica Hausner – whose Little Joe was awarded here in 2019 — almost like a fable.
Club Zero tackles people’s relationship to food behind closed doors at an elite school for teenagers. The nutrition teacher (Mia Wasikowska) displays radical theories and has an influence on the students. In his opinion and that of the members of his secret club, excess food harms the body and the mind, enriches multinationals and contributes to air pollution. And it would be better not to swallow anything, in the end.
This stylized film with international distribution, in game of distancing, is seen camped in an undetermined country. The teaching temple becomes a scene of confrontation between worried parents, blind management and undernourished teenagers struggling with family conflicts. Work on the influence, nourished with deadpan humor, absurd meetings and collective fasting, Club Zero could content itself with denouncing the heresy of a blind sect infiltrated between the walls of a school. But real societal problems are raised there. We really eat too much in countries of opulence. In contrast, anorexia wreaks havoc on young people. This comical, theatrical, disembodied dystopian docudrama, with overly perfect framing, arouses the uneasiness of the spectator who suddenly questions his own relationship to food. Jessica Hausner rocked us. It was the goal. Not with a major film, rather an excellent satire baked and well au gratin. Perverse effect: we left the Palais des Festivals with hunger in our stomachs, but it didn’t last long…
Odile Tremblay is the guest of the Cannes Film Festival.