Though I could not make it to the Cannes Film Festival this year, the distributers of these films in the festival sent me their films which I’ve reviewed below.
Make a note of the name Shipei Wen. It is my firm belief that this Chinese director is going to be a major player in the world of cinema. Are You Lonesome Tonight? Is quite simply one of the most astounding and impressive film debuts that I have ever seen. On the surface it is both a thriller and a love story. A young man called Xue Ming (Eddie Pang) goes to prison. The year is 1997, the year that China reclaimed Hong Kong. We see in flashbacks that he has accidentally run over a man. He feels guilt and determines to find out more about that man. Working as an AC repairman, he visits the house where his widow Liang Ma (Sylvia Chang) lives on the pretext of fixing her AC. We notice that the lady friends who have come to offer their condolences are all wearing black, but Liang is not. Is she not mourning the loss of her husband? Who was he? When Xue delves into Liang husband’s past, he discovers a labyrinth of crime and deceit which even throw doubts into whether it was he who killed the husband.
The main theme of the film though is guilt and redemption and, as the film’s title suggests, it explores it through loneliness and lonely people. The feeling of loneliness, isolation and rejection that exists within both Xue and Liang, becomes a point of attraction between them. However, what really is impressive about Are You Lonesome Tonight? is not so much its theme and narrative. It seems that Shipei Wen has been preparing a long time for tis film by watching numerous films by the masters and absorbing all the elements which made those film stand out. He has mastered the use of camera, light, sound, music, editing and how all these elements should be used in making a movie. The look of the film reminds one of the those seventies thrillers shot by Gordon Willis, such as Klute (1971) and The Parallax View (1974). Shipei Wen knows when to use natural sound and when to use music. In some scenes the background is only natural sounds: trains passing, phone ringing, clock ticking, rain pouring, birds chirping, radio. The music he uses in other scenes appears made-to-fit for that specific scene. Each music is different in style. He uses bleak, washed out colours for most of the interior scenes, adding red when they involve death and danger.
His use of romantic old songs in violent scenes is reminiscent of Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here (2017). A chaotic scene in a police station recalls the asylum in Sam Fuller’s Shock Corridor (1963). Shipei Wen also uses Quentin Tarantino’s trademark feature of showing an event multiple times from the viewpoint of different characters. All these different styles and elements are seamlessly put together in a film which warrants and deserves multiple viewings.
Grade: A
The Uruguayan director Manolo Nieto’s The Employer and the Employee, showing at the Directors’ Week at Cannes is about the class system. Rodrigo (Nahuel Perez Biscayart from Persian Lessons) is a young businessman who together with his father are farm owners. He is young, well off, with a beautiful wife. His only worry is the health of their small baby who may have an ailment and tests are being carried out to determine this. The film opens in a room lit in red, with a woman holding what looks like a red bundle and talking to it. It could be a scene from a horror film but it is in fact a nurse holding Rodrigo’s baby to see if she sees any signs of the mysterious syndrome.
Rodrigo needs help on his farm. He goes to an old man who has been working for his father for two decades. The man says that he is too old for labour work and instead recommends his son Carlos (Cristian Borges) to assist Rodrigo. Carlos has a wife and a new born baby and needs money. Nieto uses this relationship to examine the class difference. We see this in the attitude of Rodrigo’s party guests to Carlos who is also helping out serving drinks. When, later, Carlos’s wife also starts working at the house, the relationship between her and Rodrigo’s wife is also used to depict the employer/employee attitudes. When Carlos is riding a horse belonging to his masters, they are more concerned about the well being of the horse than its rider.
Nieto also prescribes to the saying that the haves get more lucky breaks than have nots. When Rodrigo is smoking and carrying weed in his car and is stopped by the police, he somehow gets off. The mysterious baby syndrome also turns out to be a false alarm. Carlos, on the other hand, is not so lucky.
There have been many films exploring class differences. The Employer and the Employee is a worthwhile addition to this branch of social drama, It does not bring any new ideas or innovations but is very well acted and directed.
Grade: B
Returning to Reims / Fragments
Didier Eribon’s 2009 memoir, Returning to Reims, was both an autobiography about being raised in a working class family, and a probing examination of the social classes in France. Jean-Gabriel Periot in his remarkable film Returning to Reims / Fragments has used snippets from countless archive material and old movies in an astonishingly coherent way to construct a video book of Eribon’s memoir. Periot by using the text from Eribon’s memoir and the device of having a woman (Adele Haenel from Portrait of a Lady on Fire) narrating telling the story of her parents, provides a pictorial social history of the French working class.
Throughout the film, there is also special emphasis on the role of women in French society throughout the years. We see the narrator’s grandmother having her hair shaved after the end of WWII for the alleged crime of having a relationship with a German officer. The mother works as an au pair for a rich industrialist and is sexually harassed by her employer. We see women, mostly young girls, working in fish factories. They have 11-12 hour shifts with “their feet in water, hands in ice”. They needed these jobs for their hand-to-mouth existence. Abortion was rife in those days, mainly because of the poverty. The film cites the case of a woman of 36 who had 20 abortions. Wives were expected to do the cooking and cleaning while their husbands went for drinking in bars with their pals. As we hear from the narrator, “as a working woman ages, her body reveals the truth of the existence of classes.”
When discussing her father, the narrator focuses on his education, or lack of. The working class kids generally left school at 14 because after not it was not obligatory for them to continue their education. They found menial and blue collar jobs in factories, mines, etc. Meanwhile, the upper class children continued their higher education and mingling was avoided between those requiring basic education for manual labour and those from privileged classes as this could “corrupt” the workers. The assembly line factory workers were forced to work in inhuman conditions, with a ten-minute toilet break in the morning and afternoon.
In the latter part of the film, Periot focuses on the rise of the National Front in France. We hear that the far right’s seizure of votes from former communists was made possible by the deep-seated racism within the white working class in the sixties and seventies.
Returning to Reims / Fragments serves as a very valuable pictorial social history of the French working class. Jean-Gabriel Periot has shown amazing skill going though hundreds of hours of material to select the right snippets from which he has constructed this very unusual and absolutely fascinating documentary.
Grade: A-
In her documentary H6, the Chinese director Ye Ye has shown a side of Chinese life which we rarely see. Using a hospital in Shanghai as a microcosm of Chinese society, in particular their working class, underclass and poor, we follow the fate of a few families in need of treatment. A couple who are farmers and make around $1500 a year, are asked to pay around $15,000 for an operation on the husband who has a head injury caused by falling. Since the insurance doesn’t cover it, they are forced to sell their house to go ahead with the operation.
The family of a little girl who has been hit by a bus cannot afford the hospital fees and the bus company is only offering a meagre compensation which is well short of the hospital costs.
An old man, walking with crutches, has to struggle with getting on and changing several buses to make it to Shanghai from his town. He has made the effort because for an operation on his leg in his town he had to wait 50 days to sign up, another 20 days to get a hospital bed and after all that, they botched up the operation.
A Chinese man keeps singing to his daughter to maintain her spirit.
Families of patients who have travelled from outside Shanghai, cannot afford to stay in hotels and are either crammed around 20 to a hospital dormitory or sleep on cardboards on the floor.
The only time Ye Ye resorts to music is when showing the hospital workers packing prescriptions into baskets in an assembly line manner. We see the miserable lives of these people against the background of Shanghai skyline filled with modern skyscrapers. This is certainly miles apart from the ideals of the Chinese Communist Party.
These are truly heart breaking and distressing. Such scenes are also definitely not confined to China and we’ve all witnessed similar scenes or seen them depicted in movies showing lives in Third World countries, but to have such misery in the world’s second economic power, is very disturbing and shameful. The only criticism I have is that the film goes on too long, almost two hours, well after it has hammered home its messages. It outstays its welcome and tests the resolve of the audience to see more details of these people’s lives.
Grade: B+
The first image that we see of the eponymous protagonist of Tony Gatliff’s film is in a bull fighting arena. When a matador refuses to face the bull, because he’s just seen a cat which to him means bad luck, Tom Medina, sporting a hat which never seems to leave his head, jumps into the arena and faces the bull. Tom is obsessed with bulls. He also has a recurring nightmare where a heavily illuminated white bull comes menacingly towards him.
Because of his antics in the bull ring, Tom is arrested and the court sends him to do supervised work in stables run by a man called Ulysse who is regularly sent young offenders by court. Tom Medina is always clowning around. He rebels against authority, refusing to conform. Gradually a father-son like relationship develops between Ulysse (Slimane Dazi) and Tom Medina (David Murgia). The other characters in the story include Ulysse’s daughter Stella (Karoline Rose Sun) who plays guitar and sings rock songs and has a following on the social media and Suzanne (Suzanne Aubert), an activist who is voluntarily clearing plastic bottles from rivers and lakes and strikes up a relationship with Tom. The only relationship which the script allows to develop with any conviction is that between Ulysse and Tom. Stella has very little to contribute to the story and the relationship between Tom and Suzanne is under developed.
Tony Gatliff has stated that Tom Medina has autobiographical elements and the inspiration for the film was an educator who helped him when he was on the streets in Paris after fleeing Algeria.
Tom Medina is about people on the periphery of life. Those who do not conform and are often misunderstood or not understood. Tom Medina is a troublemaker but he is also a troubled person. How much one takes to the film largely depends on whether we find Tom’s goofing around annoying or necessary to define his characterization. Since Tony Gatliff provides very little background for Tom, it is difficult to sympathize with his antics. I believe a little more background detail and a stronger narrative would have helped the film and elevated it from good to great.
Grade: B
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