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Out of the Blue and Into the Dark
Séamas McSwiney returns to tell the tale of the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, where small dramas brought home big prizes, and Lenny Abrahamson’s Garage was selected for Directors’ Fortnight.
It’s always nice when something unexpected comes out of nowhere and shines a new light in the dark room of our cinematic desires. It can go a long way to compensate for other promised pleasures that finally disappoint. This good news/bad news scenario was pretty much the word on the street in Cannes after two of the first competition films had already flickered their way onto the silver screen of the Palais.
Things got off on the Wong foot with Kar Wai’s festival opener My Blueberry Nights, a piece of chic sentimentaloosh that borrows in a lightweight way from road-movie clichés. Beautifully lit, with some of that artsy off-centre framing that works so well in classy fashion magazines, it is peopled with to-die-for sexy A-listers acting out different shades of hurtin’ sincerity. The self aware observations of Americana only serve to remind us how journeyman cineastes like Antonioni and Wenders startled us with an alien eye view of America in the seventies. Wong didn’t win any prizes, thank god, but he surely got promoted to the ad agency top ten of perfume commercials directors.
After that sinful serving of sugary pie, social grime replaced romanticised sheen as the next film initially seemed to be a penance served in some sort of low-security East European gulag. It’s near the end of the communist era in Romania. A slightly shaky camera frames the banal goings on in an overcrowded university dormitory. So far, so brown rice with a side order of yesterday’s polenta. Still, though the chatter is mundane, it clips along with a casual efficiency and, though their circumstances contribute to make the characters less than telegenic, the nuances in their personalities filter through. The story soon kicks in, revealing that the more together girl is doing the loyal thing as she helps organise an illegal abortion for her careless friend. It’s a pathetic story where things start out seeming normal but are then revealed to be actually quite bad, before getting sordidly worse before the film ends. That, as they say in Hollywood, is the story arc. Yet, in spite of its unappealing subject, grubby context and nihilistic slide, it is a brilliant taut-ful cinematic journey that feels to be about a lot of stuff, from the consequences of history right down to how helping your friends can sometimes fuck up your life. As for its politics, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days manages to be both pro-choice and anti-abortion, in ways that speak to most feeling people, while offering facile arguments for the blinkered brigades at both extremes of this enduring moral divide. The director’s name is Cristian Mungiu and he wrote the first draft of his screenplay only last July. His first feature, Occident, played in Cannes Directors’ Fortnight in 2002.
The full article is printed in Film Ireland 117.
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