How does film art face the struggle for survival in times of streaming? In Cannes, contributions by Nanni Moretti, Joachim Trier and Todd Haynes will provide possible answers.
Cannes Festival Director Thierry Frémaux has to believe his worries: “We can only hope that this festival edition will be played through to the end,” he said last Thursday during a press dinner. In no case do you want to risk an increase in the number of infections or be accused of carelessness. After pictures of the audience without masks went through the French media, before every performance there is a reminder of the mask requirement. In any case, before each entry into the festival building, vaccination confirmations or PCR tests are checked, which have to be renewed every two days. This exertion naturally silenced the discussion about another patient, the cinema itself.
Two years ago, the offloading of Netflix productions was a big topic here. Now the time would have come for a new definition of the position: How do art and the film industry compare to their competition today? By adapting to the new client or by delimitation? In a return to cinema qualities?
One should perhaps expect an answer from a Cannes veteran like Nanni Moretti. He knew how to fuse political and private matters in films like “Dear Diary”. But his new work “Tre Piani” (“Three Floors”) is only reminiscent of bad television.
Based on a novel by the Israeli author Eshkol Nevo, he tells parallel events from a Roman apartment building. The form of the cross-sectional film comes from the Weimar cinema of the twenties, but when it comes to classics like Gerhard Lamprecht’s “People Among Each Other”, the work is more like a Lindenstrasse marathon:
A family man lets himself be seduced by a minor, while at the same time he falsely suspects her grandfather with dementia of having wronged his own child. A couple of judges, on the other hand, lose faith in their own son who ends up in prison. Threads of action are pursued for years and yet span more than they condense.
What is particularly disturbing about “Tre Piani” is the lack of interest in the social context, Nanni Moretti’s real domain: The only milieu outside of the privileged middle class is a populist mob who set off an arson attack on a former cinema – because aid supplies for refugees are collected there seemingly superimposed scene. It has been twenty years since Moretti won the Palme d’Or with the masterful family drama “My Son’s Room”. His first directorial work based on someone else’s original is sadly superficial.
Joachim Trier’s Danish competition entry “The Worst Person in the World” is even closer to the conventions of streaming television: the twelve chapters in which the tragic self-discovery story of a woman in her twenties is followed looks like the editing of a Netflix series in two hours. And the temptation to switch off is an unusual Cannes experience.
But there is also the opposite experience: Todd Haynes’ documentary “The Velvet Underground” acts like a manifest against the uniformity of so many Netflix or Amazon productions.
Haynes, who, as in his last feature films, also works here with the cameraman Ed Lachman, does not like “talking heads”. He tells the story of what is probably the most influential group of alternative rock of the late sixties with the means of avant-garde film. Andy Warhol’s famous silent portrait films, the “screen tests”, provide the style template – and merge with acoustic interview fragments, some of which are breathtaking in depth.
“The Velvet Underground” is nothing less than the best cinematic image of the time of the New York art, music and film avant-garde of this formative epoch. “How can we succeed in telling the story of this band after the death of the singer Lou Reed?”, He asks himself in conversation and immediately gives the answer: “By always asking ourselves how we can visually correspond to this music.” Todd Haynes also gives the best answer to the question: “Quo vadis, Cinema?”
