Between Leviathan and Princess Grace

In Cannes, they watched 3D from Godard, horrified by the war in Ukraine and remembered about a woman who fascinated de Gaulle

The Hungarian director Cornel Mundruzo shot the film “White God”, whose main character - the dog - suffers from human cruelty. Cannes, May 2014 /Photo: Regis Duvignau /Reuters

On Saturday, May 24, when this number The New Times has already gone into a printing house, awards were awarded to the 67th Cannes Festival on the Cote d'Azur. So, opening this article, the reader already knows whether our forecasts have come true about who will win and who will remain unnoticed*. And after the jury appreciated the work of filmmakers, it is always easier to evaluate the work of the jury ...

However, already in the last days of the festival it was obvious what this contest would be remembered for, what it looks like and not like the previous ones.

Inexorable dejavu

The Cannes program is famous not only in the quality of the paintings, but also with the sarcastic grace of the schedule. The films are selected and arranged so that the viewer is tormented by the elusive dejavu-wait, I have just seen the same pedophile (Michael ”and“ Polyss ”in the 2011 competition), the same burning genitals (“ Elijah ”and“ Printing of sin ”at the 2013 festival), the same limousine in which the main character rides (“ Cosmopolis ”Kronenberg and Cosmopolis and Kronenberg. "Holy Motors" of Carax in 2012). However, by the end of the festival, this dejavu may turn out to be a joke of Clowned in life and at the work of the art director of the Cannes festival Thierry Fremo, and maybe a full-fledged cinema trend.

This year, in Cannes, according to tradition, there are a lot of rhymes - from serious (in competitive and out -of -competition programs of at least five movie bogiographs) to stupid. For example, in the in the morning the film of the Brothers Luke and Jean-Pierre Dardenov “Two days, one night” The villain calls Dumon, and in the picture of Bennett Miller “The Fox Hunter”, which is shown in a few hours, Dupont.

In the anti-utopia of Hungarian Cornel Mundruzo “White God” from the program “Special Gazhing” the main character-the dog-suffers from human cruelty, and in “Farewell, speech” Jean-Luke Godard-from human idiocy.

The 83-year-old master Hodar, I must say, does not just hold on to well done, he is in the best of decades in the last couple of decades: his new picture is a heartbreaking funny and smart comedy about pseudo-intellectuals, which even sit in the unit in the Roden pose. What is shown by the eyes of a resoner - dogs. At the same time, the viewer’s eyes are in a serious danger to burst - Hodar, who is amused with new technologies, shot a movie in 3D: In some episodes for the left eye, one picture on the screen, for the right - the other. In the meantime, both are open, it is impossible to understand anything at all.

In the film, a regulars of Cannes and the stars of European theatrical festivals of Mundruzu tells an even more sad story: we find ourselves in Budapest of the near future, where a raid at the state level is declared on foreign dogs. The main character, Metis Sharpei and Labrador, raises the dog uprising. Shots with dogs that captured the city shocked the jury so that the “White God” turned out to be almost the main contender for the prize of the “Special Glash”.

Nicole Kidman dances at the opening ceremony of the Cannes festival. May 14, 2014 /Photo: Regis Duvignau /Reuters

From Saint Loran to Fetisov

Perhaps the main trend of Cannes-2014, which to some extent contradicts the collectivist-ideological morality affirmed in today's Russia, is a biography, a genre that allocates the value of each specific person with its merits and shortcomings in contrast to any social mainstream. The festival of candy out -of -competition melodrama "Grace, Princess Monaco" was opened. The heart-rending story of how Princess Monaco (performed by Nicole Kidman) fascinated the French president de Gaulle, who intended to almost annex Monte Carlo, neither the critics nor the princely family of the microscopic state-they did not appear on the red carpet.

One of the first in the competition was shown “Mr. Turner” Mike Lee - the story of a great English artist, who was offended in the best, including religious, feelings of the crowd invented impressionism - more than a century before his official appearance. “Turner” is a film about a brilliant non -conformist who does not care about the ideas of others about the beautiful: he sculpts the beautiful himself, not aesthetically grunted on the canvas, so that the paint is better smeared. The hero is an unpleasant unshaven fat man, expressing a grunt, puff, and a snot. Garbage from which beauty is born, a spit that turned into a rough, but from that no less blind eye of the sun, are the subjects of the study of Mike Lee, one of the main leftists of British cinema. And this study is definitely useful to Russian lovers of pure, traditional, idealistic art - for a better understanding of the feelings and goals of artists encroaching on social morality.

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The author of "Maidan" Sergei Loznitsa refused to answer questions of the Russian media

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The Terner was followed by another Bayopic-Saint-Loran Bertran Bonello, in which the title designer-legend, while still young, but already suffering from imaginary unrealism, takes off on the Parisian streets of boys, hallucinates and fights over the famous Russian collection.

The documentary “Red Army” of American Geib of Polish can also be classified by a number of peculiar ZhZL. It tells how the magnificent five hockey CSKA - Fetisov, Larion, Kasatons, Krutov and Makarov interacts after the victorious eighties in extremely unequal conditions: some have a biography in America and work in the sports committee, and others have a worthy old age. Vyacheslav Fetisov, in fact, being the main character of the tape, behaves in places, to put it mildly, impolite: the question of the interviewer’s journalist with a royal wave of his hand is stopped, they say, I say on a mobile; Allows yourself to be quasiumoristic replicas like "Well, let's work, they are used to not to do a damn thing in his America." The Masculine Putin official, of course, remains an outstanding athlete - you just have to get distracted by the frames, where he virtually in the other to virtually drives the washers into the American and Canadian gates. But it is difficult to get rid of the feeling that one is connected with the other: even having left the arena, our hero continues to exist in space, where the right of strong acts exclusively. And this, by golly, makes you think about whether the sport is so good and whether to prefer his physical education.

Jean-Pierre and Luke Dardenna with the heroine of their film “Two Days, One Night” Marion Cotillard /Photo: Benoit Tessier /Reuters

Fatal passions

The question of the impact of professional sports on the degradation of personality is also raised in one of the best competitive films-“The Lis Hunter” by the American director Bennett Miller, who once shot the Oscar-winning biography of Truman Capote. Brothers, Olympic Wrestling Champions Mark and Dave Schulz, seduced by an unimaginable fee, go almost to the service of the pretentious billionaire John Dupone. Born in a family, where a fox is historically considered to be a sport, Dupon from childhood adores a marginal free -handed struggle. Everything is fine: an aristocratic billionaire mother has a herd of horses, his son has a team of fighters, which he also encourages sugar in the form of checks with many zeros. But adoration and money are not enough. It is impossible to buy the title of trainer of the national team, especially if any type of training prefer coquetrilation of cocaine with players ...

This truly terrible film about the horrors of feudal consciousness, which feels great in the 20th century, ends with a real crime of passion: a billionaire Dupont goes crazy and kills the older brother of his beloved fighter, Dave Schults, for which he goes to prison for many years.

The richness of the rich for his own toy turned out to be no less fatal than the love of a romantic poet for a depressive aristocrat in the “crazy love” of Jessica Hauser, or a passion, erupted between the Hollywood star and the Monak prince in “Grace, Princess Monaco”: people uncontrollable, any variety of intraspecific chauvinism.

Cursed choice

One of the noticeable films at the festival was the hymn of humanism, the sleeping, perhaps the main European authors of the beginning of the millennium - Belgian brothers Dardenn.

“Two days, one night” - really two days of life of an ordinary office inhabitant performed by Marion Cotillard. Her bosses, finding himself in constrained financial conditions, raises the question as follows: either Sandra (as the name of the heroine) remains at work and then her colleagues lose their annual bonuses, or Sandra is fired and saved bonuses are paid. On this occasion, voting is held, and almost all Sandra’s colleagues choose money: the girl on the phone reports dismissal. But they immediately offer a saving straw: on Monday, a second vote will be held, and she will be given a chance - to persuade her colleagues over the weekend to change the decision and thereby save her ...

To what extent a person is ready to reach and how he does not want it, how he tries to be kind and how he doesn’t succeed - this is about this and other varieties of moral choice in the film. Lonely, unhappy and virtually without skin - this appears Homo sapiens, which lives in a liberal society. He has no money, and often - and conscience. But he has freedom of choice - the only thing, perhaps, is a thing that is really worth fighting for.

Another film, which was talked about and argued at the festival, was the documentary "Maidan" of the Russian director Sergei Loznitsa, shown outside the competition. This is a chronicle of the last Ukrainian revolution from December 2013 to February 2014.

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They say that Minister Medinsky at the last moment changed his mind to go to Cannes for the premiere of Leviathan

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At his own press conference, Loznitsa refused to answer questions from the Russian media-the director made such a decision in connection with the events in Ukraine. He also drew the attention of journalists that his colleague is Ukrainian director Oleg Sentsov ** in prison on charges of preparing a terrorist attack in Crimea.

But, of course, Andrei Zvyagintsev, shown in the competition in the most honorable way - one of the latter, was the most anticipated Russian film in Cannes. The picture tells the story of the auto mechanic Nikolai (it was played by Alexei Serebryakov), who lives in a house with a view of the picturesque bay on the shores of the Barents Sea (Kola Peninsula) - the local mayor wants to take the house and land. The worst of the possible finals crown the story - after the homeowner is put in jail, we observe a detailed prayer in the local church, during which the corrupt father manages to praise power and kick Pussy Riot.

So mercilessly, like Zavegintsev in Leviathan, perhaps no one, and even for the money of the Ministry of Culture, has not been expressed about Russian reality in recent years.

They say that Minister Medinsky changed his mind to go to the premiere of Leviathan in Cannes at the last moment. And he did the right thing. The familiar Swedish distributor, going up to the author of these lines at a party, said that the progressive public was preparing to shout to him a loud “Buu” - right at the show of a film full of obscene vocabulary and financially supported by people who have just adopted the law on the inadmissibility of living speech in the cinema.