Cannes at Home: Day 11 – A Tale of Two Realisms

by Cláudio Alves

Well, it's over. Another festival ends, and so does another edition of the Cannes at Home series. I've watched many a great film this past week and hope you have enjoyed the ride. To finish things off, it's time to consider the last two filmmakers to present their latest works at the Croisette. Alice Rohrwacher dazzled away with her La Chimera, starring a scruffy-looking Italian-speaking Josh O'Connor, and Ken Loach's The Old Oak proved as divisive as all his late-career films have been. 

This last Cannes at Home dispatch looks at these auteurs' greatest pictures, titles that crystalize the two distinct forms of realism each work within. There's Rohrwacher's magical spin on Italian neorealism with Happy as Lazzaro and Ken Loach's perpetuation of the kitchen-sink tradition of British social realism in Kes…

HAPPY AS LAZZARO (2018) Alice Rohrwacher

There's nothing like a Rohrwacher sun. Though she's only been active for the past decade and change, the Tuscan director has consolidated a series of stylistic mannerisms that define her style. A propensity for grainy celluloid and natural lighting feels especially vital, often obtained through collaborations with French cinematographer Hélène Louvart. Their 16mm lensings feel lush to the point where they detach from common conceptions of filmed reality, blackened edges invoking the sense of archaic form while saturated colors aim for something beyond the mundane. This is never more apparent than when Helios comes to play.

In Happy as Lazzaro, that is especially felt, for the film's bifurcated structure is predicated on many things, including the change of light that happens halfway through. At first, our setting shall be pseudo-feudalism, where workers live as if inside a pastoral painting bound by sharecropping duties on a tobacco farm. The quasi-aristocratic family De Luna holds power over the farmhands, keeping them in an out-of-time state that Rohrwacher's camera indulges. Only the intrusion of electrical lighting reveals we're nearer to our time than Ermanno Olmi's nineteenth-century peasants. 

By daylight, the fields are a verdant ocean and a Renaissance frame around our angelic hero, the Cherub-like Lazzaro, played by newcomer Adriano Tardiolo. His innocence shall be the pivot around which Rohrwacher plays her cinematic games, extracting the impossible from his mystical presence, crowning him with celestial beams in moments of hard work. As the air fills with dust, an industrial snowstorm without snow, Lazzaro looks supernatural, Louvart invoking magic before any true magic manifests. When it does, it happens as a temporal break, a too-long sleep that brings our angel to a future present where the bucolic halo is gone, the sun turned dull, sky grey. 

Is happiness lost or regained? In the days of yore, Lazzaro seemed happy even as fellow farmers abused his helpfulness while they were used by their lords. It's a cosmos defined by cycles of exploitation, and even when unjust orders are disrupted, a joyful conclusion remains out of reach. Yet, even when touched by a wolf and gifted youthful permanence, his smile remains, waking up to a new order, a miracle presented in most un-miraculous terms. Rohrwacher thus articulates a political cinema on the run from fury and cynicism, singing a song of sincerity, sublime, and, yes, magical. It's neorealism reborn!

Lazzaro doesn't bring celestial light back into the world, nor should he revert to what was before. But there's an attempt made. There's a rejection of capital tyranny in a radical escape back into an idyll that never was. Appealing to religious imagery and a gentle tone, Rohrwacher elaborates a soft parable, often able to induce bursts of transcendence. Oddly enough, it's not by day that the biggest of these marvels occurs. It's at sunless night when Lazzaro and his makeshift family are denied the gift of church music. As they walk away, the music abandons those who gatekeep it and follows the dispossessed into the dark. It floats on the breeze, running from broken humanity on a pilgrimage toward the kinder unknown. Mayhap it goes in search of warm daybreak, the Rohrwacher sun of our dreams.

Happy as Lazzaro is streaming exclusively on Netflix.

KES (1969) Ken Loach

In Portugal, we have a popular expression to emphasize how sad something can be. We say it'll even make the cobblestones cry. Those words echoed through my mind as I confronted Ken Loach's Kes, his second theatrically-released feature and most immortal classic. But, please don't think the film is a punitive watch. On the contrary, it's different from those titles made to be endured rather than engaged with since here Loach combines his career-long project with a lyricism he's rarely tried since. Grasping at allegory, the director remains faithful to his duties as a chronicler of the working class, tempering terse didacticism with bold poetry that can take one by surprise.

Kes is a literary adaptation, bringing Barry Hines' A Kestrel for a Knave to the big screen, dispensing with its fanciful structure while maintaining the book's sharp critique of unjust class prejudice. Dispensing with a flashback-heavy structure to instead focus on linear storytelling, Loach details the life of Billy Casper, a dispossessed teen living in South Yorkshire. His community marked by the coal industry, our young protagonist is a miner's son though his father is long gone, leaving a single mother to take care of two boys. Jud is the eldest, a belligerent bully, always ready to abuse his half-brother before leaving for work at the local mine.

He's not alone in his treatment of Billy since everyone the teen encounters seem keen on humiliating him. A veritable punching bag, he's the sort of boy from whom nobody expects nothing, not even himself, passing through life as a non-entity that's safer ignored than acknowledged. At school, he suffers the long-term consequences of a British education system predicated on segregation by class, pre-judging every pupil through almost caste-like divisions. The disgruntled headmaster seems actively resentful of his wards, as if instructing those he's been conditioned to disregard is beneath him. 

And so goes Billy's miserable existence until the day he finds a kestrel on a nearby field. A closet animal lover, he's instantly besotted by the elegant bird, making it his mission to train her. After being turned down at the library, he purloins a book on falconry from the nearby secondhand shop and teaches himself the art, dedicating every spare minute to his winged friend. As photographed by Chris Menges, the interactions between boy and bird are interludes of remarkable grace. The camera comes close to the animal, perceiving its potential cuteness while giving it the benefit of majesty. A noble creature, Kes is granting us and Billy the privilege of her presence.

The bond forged goes beyond the narrative limits, becoming a sense of unity between the pair and the celluloid gaze, their audience. Like Billy, we regard the never-to-be-tamed avian as a respite from surrounding bleakness. Even when perceiving them together in a crowd, long focus makes it look like they're floating through the world, sharp and tightly knit amid waves of blurry movement. By such modest flourishes, Loach achieves a rare combination of galvanizing power and beautiful sentiment, crying out for the right to basic dignity while also delineating the path through which someone discovers themselves.

Though Kes' ending is famously devastating, that wasn't the point my waterworks turned on. That would be a classroom-set monologue when Billy is asked to discuss his falconry pursuits. In gradual gesture, we're led to witness how a boy realizes he's more than an exploitable body, an arc of growing awareness about one's interiority and how painful that process can be when the world is unkind, unconcerned, perhaps even hostile. Billy's description of Kes' first free flight might well be the most incredible moment in Loach's filmography, overflowing with such passion you swear you can see Billy becoming a person of uncharted depths in real-time. All in one, the performance of a lifetime by young David Bradley. 

As with every Ken Loach joint, the sublime and the frustratingly imperfect are intersected. In recent years, his filmmaking methodology has been questioned, and the decision to really cane the boys in a pivotal scene is at odds with the director's humanistic streak. Furthermore, even at the time, the preservation of authentic Yorkshire accents caused polemic, inciting a redubbing as a capitulation to international markets. There are matters of editing that feel more televisual than cinematic, blunt symbolism like young men fist-fighting atop coal, and what bothers Loach the most – Jud, the domineering older brother.

The cineaste has claimed he regrets the character's unrelenting brutality, wishing he had dramatized the man's struggles as an exploited miner. While contrition is understandable, one shouldn't regard Kes in individualist terms. After all, the story works as social portraiture unencumbered by the need for heroes or villains. Loach's cinema, including Kes, revolts against notions that put the onus of blame on the person rather than the context in which they survive. Moreover, Jud remains a haunting specter, a terrifying look into who Billy might become when his entire life seems to have been decided by others. If one should leave the film wanting to change the world, it's not just for the kestrel-loving boy. It's for the likes of Jud too.

Kes is streaming on Tubi and Kanopy. You can also find it on Apple TV and Amazon Video, available to rent and purchase.

What are your final wishes (not predictions) for the Cannes closing ceremony? It's only a few hours away.

Comments

[thevoid99]

Kes is an awesome film. Definitely one of the reasons why Ken Loach is one of the best.