Cannes at Home: Big Names Before Their Big Break

by Cláudio Alves

Did the film student who directed PASSION dream he'd one day be a Palme d'Or frontrunner?

The 79th Cannes Film Festival continues to unfold on the French Riviera, and things aren’t looking great for Fremaux and his team of programmers. Some of the most acclaimed titles are premiering in parallel sections, while the Main Competition keeps delivering mixed stuff or provoking outright negative reactions. Asghar Farhadi has probably never received worse notices than the ones he’s getting for Parallel Tales, and even something like Pawel Pawlikowski’s Fatherland, which looked like a slam-dunk triumph going by pre-fest expectations, is struggling to gather the sort of universal critical praise most had predicted for it. Our own Elisa Giudicci loves it, but the consensus isn’t there yet. And let’s not even discuss Marie Kreutzer’s Gentle Monster, whose every element seems to be open for savage criticism apart from Léa Seydoux’s performance. Well, at least, we have Ryusuke Hamaguchi, whose All of a Sudden has inspired a fair amount of “masterpiece,” even though a few naysayers also have showered it with such epitaphs as “long, slow, boring.”

With that in mind, let’s look away from lackluster new works and consider these directors’ pasts, before their big breaks. Think Pawlikowski before Ida and his drift away from British cinema, Farhadi before A Separation and his European misadventures, Hamaguchi before Happy Hour and Drive My Car and the Oscar, Kreutzer before Corsage…

LAST RESORT (2000) Pawel Pawlikowski 

Pawel Pawlikowski’s filmography traces his life’s journey. It mirrors the experiences of a Polish man born under Soviet rule to a physician father and a dancer mother, who, when he was a teenager, escaped into the West in his matriarch’s company, resettling in the UK before a German sojourn and studies in philosophy, literature. The artist creates his work in reflection of himself. That shouldn’t be too surprising, though it might come off as such to those who are only familiar with Ida and Cold War. At the beginning, he wasn’t even entertaining the storytelling models of narrative film. The man’s career started in non-fiction. Often at the service of the BBC, Pawlikowski oft regarded the tricky relationship between East and West as Europe redefined itself after the Soviet Union’s collapse.

Indeed, his jump into narrative feature filmmaking owes a great deal to a documentarian’s sensibility, situating itself closer to the then-nascent conventions of European social realist cinema rather than his more recent historiographies in silvery black-and-white. You’d be forgiven for imagining Last Resort in conversation, if not outright derivation, with the works of Loach and Leigh, the Dardennes, perhaps even those Dogme 95 radicals. Small in scale and ambition, this might be the closest the director ever came to autofiction, telling the story of a woman traveling from Russia to the UK in the company of her son.

She plans to marry an Englishman but, when her fiancé fails to pick them up at the airport, the pair declares they’re seeking asylum and is relocated to Stonehaven – real-life Margate. Once upon a time, the place was a seaside resort, but time has been unforgiving. What remains is a purgatory-like space of eternal transience, the ghost of former joys where refugees now wait to know their fate. Between peeling tropical wallpaper and creaky Ferris wheels, mother and child wait. The film waits with them, portraying a system of asylum that leaves people unmoored and with few avenues for self-sustenance that don’t, in some way, break the law.

The Polish auteur, DP Ryszard Lenczewski, and editor David Charap convey this situation as a state-instated trap with audiovisual strategies that seldom fall into sensationalism or exploitation, even when the characters fall prey to such fates at the hands of others. Last Resort remains observational, almost detached, as when the camera contemplates its actors deliberately out of focus, letting the landscape impose itself on them, looming, foreboding. At times, one might yearn for a tad more dramatic propulsion, or one more grace that doesn’t involve the sweet chemistry between Dina Korzun and Paddy Considine, as our leading lady refugee and the arcade manager who extends her the only olive branch in an unforgiving world.

Last Resort is streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

FIREWORKS WEDNESDAY (2006) Asghar Farhadi 

Judging by international critical acclaim and sheer visibility, one would assume that 2011’s A Separation marked a colossal leap in Asghar Farhadi’s artistic evolution. And yet, by the time that picture swept the Berlinale like no project before or since, the Iranian director had already been at it for nearly a decade, with three features to his name and a Silver Bear for About Elly. In fact, I’d go even further back than that 2009 drama with shades of L’Avventura in order to find Farhadi’s first masterpiece. That would be Fireworks Wednesday, which had its world premiere at the 2006 Fajr International Film Festival but would have to wait until 2016 and the promise of Farhadi’s second Oscar before it even got a stateside release. 

The story it tells is compact, concentrating many of what would come to be accepted as the director’s preferred themes and dramatic strategies within the space of a single day in its characters’ lives. It begins with Rouhi, a young, lower-class bride-to-be who works for a cleaning company. On the Wednesday before Nowruz, when Iran celebrates its New Year with fire and folly, she’s hired to help a middle-class family clean their apartment and pack for a trip to Dubai. However, pandemonium has taken possession of the Samiei household. At first, the only suggestion of turmoil comes from a broken window the patriarch punched through the previous night, but secrets hurry to reveal themselves. 

What follows is a miniature melodrama, as Mozhdeh acts upon suspicion that her husband, Morteza, is having an affair with their divorced neighbor, Simin. Rouhi is present for it all, acting as witness and audience guide, as well as a tool that each of the other players use in their infighting. Funnily enough, it triggered memories of a day and night in high school, when I was made privy to the collapsing relationship of two schoolmates I didn’t particularly like but was bound to for those hours. This all may sound soap-opera-adjacent, but Fireworks Wednesday is much more sophisticated than that description could imply. A lot of it comes from Farhadi’s screenplay, written in collaboration with Many Haghighi and overflowing with humanistic touches. 

You’ll find as many small graces in this spiral of domestic distrust as you will see sharp observations of Iranian social structures, intersections of gender-based oppression and class conflict, parallel lives stratified by wealth, joy ruined by shame. I must mention moments like Rouhi’s introduction, her chador getting stuck in the wheel of her fiancé’s motorcycle. Or a small comedy of snobbishness around a locked gate. Or the background celebrations that manifest in the hideous miracle of a sound mix bursting at the seams with juxtapositions of off-screen action. There’s so much life here, so much happening in every scene, every frame, so that this potential chamber piece never feels closed into itself. Instead, it seems like just one thread of a wider tapestry we’re never allowed to see in its totality.

Like those comments about Fireworks Wednesday’s sonic landscape might suggest, Farhadi’s directorial acumen is even more noteworthy than his writing. Take the set, which is incredibly rich and charged with dramaturgical intent. It transforms from scene to scene as more stuff gets veiled in plastic, or packed away, curtains stored, carpets rolled up against the wall. Slowly, and with some steps back along the way, a home becomes a ghost of itself, echoing the family it houses. Farhadi’s penchant for turning domestic spaces into personified corollaries of their inhabitants would continue to flourish in subsequent works. Think about all the scenes staged around that windowed door in A Separation, or the symbolic cracks littering The Salesman’s walls. 

And yet, this volatile home never feels like a dress rehearsal or workshop for its more celebrated successors. If anything, Farhadi’s relative greenness means there’s a willingness to experiment with bold gestures that would feel out of place in his later oeuvre. The way a smiling wedding portrait intrudes upon several scenes, never the focus of a composition yet impossible to ignore, strikes a note of unexpected black-hearted irony. Jump cuts induce a sort of staccato stop and start to Hedie Tehrani’s urgent movement when Mozdeh prepares an escape or changes her plan of attack mid-gesture. The contrast between such hiccupping rhythms and the patience with which Farhadi builds a climax over a lingering look between Tehrani and Taraneh Alidoosti’s Rouhi is nothing short of sublime.

I could describe a nearly endless array of such moments and studied contrasts all throughout Fireworks Wednesday. An elevator’s steady descent and following rise make for a fascinating purview from which to observe domestic violence made public, the smooth movement of machinery against the messiness of the couple’s strife. On another occasion, the quiet contemplation of a woman walking down the street lulls one into a sense of security that’s then broken by the cruelty of two young men on a motorcycle. It’s so startling you’re almost left in tears, just like the actress on screen. All in all, the shock of watching this gem on the same day the Parallel Tales’ reviews dropped certainly made me yearn for Farhadi’s Halcyon days, before he took his cinema beyond the Iranian milieu where it shines brightest.

Fireworks Wednesday is streaming on Fandor, Hoopla, and Plex. You can also rent or purchase it on Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV.

PASSION (2008) Ryusuke Hamaguchi

Young filmmakers can sometimes wear their influences a tad too conspicuously for comfort. Even masters like Ryusuke Hamaguchi can fall prey to it, though this phenomenon need not inspire instant distaste from viewers. When contextualized in a retrospective exercise, for instance, the clarity of inspiration can feel instructive in how to perceive an artist’s journey into themselves, into an art that is uniquely their own. Long before Drive My Car or even Happy Hour, Hamaguchi directed Passion as the thesis project with which he finished his master's degree at the Tokyo University of the Arts. Studying under the tutelage of Kiyoshi Kurosawa might have inspired some deference to that master, but Hamaguchi’s references appear more Western. 

Surely, there’s something very Rohmerian about this story of not-so-young people contemplating their place in the world as they leave their twenties behind and embrace the dreaded thirties. It’s a time of commitments and new responsibilities, as exemplified by Tomoyo and Kaho announcing their engagements to their friend group. Instead of effusive joyfulness, the declaration inspires awkward tensions to flourish within the crowd. Across the following days, like something out of the Moral Tales or Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, couples collapse and reconfigure, partners switch, confessions are made, and hidden passions come to the surface.

In the end, the status quo is recuperated, as if by some miracle of Dreyer or de Oliveira, and Passion draws a circle that’s as structurally tidy as it is emotionally devastating. But the execution of said text doesn’t seem to owe so much to these aforementioned artists. Hamaguchi’s audiovisual imaginings are more clearly tied to Cassavetes. An early sequence with three friends running through the night, ending in an otherwise deserted bus, can’t help but inspire comparisons to Husbands. Whereas scenes of carefully escalating chaos over drinks at home bring about the memory of Faces, mayhap Shadows.

It’s the close-up heavy moments around a table, broken into fleeting reaction shots, that most invoked the ghost of Cassavetes, however. Especially because there’s very little like it in Hamaguchi’s last decade of cinematic triumphs. The bend toward Antonioni closer to the film’s conclusion is a great deal more recognizable as the Japanese director’s design, even though an eleven-minute-long take over an industrial vista couldn’t be more referential of Red Desert if it actively copied Carlo Di Palma’s rust and ash color scheme. I wager it’s how self-assured Hamaguchi already appears when executing marathon-length one-shot scenes, managing to make them feel eminently cinematic when they could precipitate accusations of staginess.

The young director’s skill with mise-en-scène and decoupage, not to mention the incredible screenplay or his strength with actors, is enough to save Passion from the sad fate these analogies to other masters of cinema could entail. Hamaguchi doesn’t always have the resources to execute his ideas with the polish of later works, of course. Beautiful though it may be, Passion is still a student film. Multiple times, scenes constructed exclusively with static shots are disrupted by a sudden circular movement that stumbles through the place, a low-budget handheld solution to a problem best suited for a tracking shot or the Steadicam. Oh well, they are minor drawbacks when everything is considered.

Passion is streaming on Film Movement, Kanopy, and MUBI. You can also rent or purchase it on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, Plex and Fandango at Home.

THE GROUND BENEATH MY FEET (2019) Marie Kreutzer

Lola has made a home in the hell of neoliberal corporate life and she’s quite comfortable with her place within it. Feeling safer and more at ease in the transient non-place of hotel rooms, she’s an expert at cold-blooded negotiations and tends to tackle sensitive subjects with the disaffected bluntness of an executive terminator. Even the woman’s carnality seems predicated on her professional identity, as she’s been sleeping with her boss, Elise. The indulgence of an affair isn’t allowed in Lola’s life, as all the pleasure she draws from their connection appears to pull back to her business acumen. In bed, they even wear their office-ready patent leather pumps, as if fetishizing themselves as corporate worker bees.

The Ground Beneath My Feet could simply follow its protagonist’s routine, and it’d already be quite the unsettling piece of cinema. Marie Kreutzer’s ambitions behind the camera are a bit loftier than that, however. Almost as soon as we’re introduced to Lola’s state of being, we’re made to witness its incontrovertible upheaval. As it happens, her sister has just attempted suicide and has been forcibly interned. Not that Lola is willing to accept the truth, trying to rationalize that the other woman must have taken over one hundred pills by accident. After all, this personal crisis can’t interfere with her upcoming business trip to Germany. It simply can’t.

Reading about the project, I came to expect a character drama with political undertones. What I got was an outright horror movie. In this scenario, Lola is both the victim of a haunting and the maximum personification of the story’s implied evils. Actress Valerie Pachner certainly plays her as such, collaborating with Leena Koppe’s bloodless lensing to present herself as a reptilian entity before the camera. If her unblinking stare wasn’t enough, there’s an almost robotic quality to her resolute unwillingness to show any shred of vulnerability. As a consequence, it’s only when the mechanism malfunctions that Lola starts to seem human or, at least, vaguely personable for those who watch her come undone. 

As much as I admire the rigorous formalism of these devices and the actorly synergy with them, it’s difficult not to feel how much Kreutzer is judging her protagonist, verging on cruelty. The approach has its merits and demerits. It makes for a flagellant piece of sociopolitical commentary on central Europe’s neoliberal economics, tinged with terror. Sadly, it also makes for a bit of a punitive watch, with the taste of moralism souring the place and a base-level curiosity about who the protagonist might be beyond what she evidently represents in the bigger picture. Or, in other words, The Ground Beneath My Feet works better as a political statement with genre elements than any sort of drama. These modes of storytelling aren’t incompatible, but Kreuger can’t quite find a way to make them share the same space without diminishing one to benefit the other. 

The Ground Beneath My Feet is streaming on Kanopy and the Strand Releasing streaming platform. You can also rent or purchase it on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV and Fandango at Home.

Do you prefer these directors’ early works or is their post-breakthrough efforts where it’s at? Sound off in the comments.