Tag: Cannes Film Festival

The Natural History of Destruction

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM CANNES!

The Natural History of Destruction asks a simple question: is bombing civilian populations justified in the name of war? It seems to be the only question in the film, asked again and again and again, as Sergei Loznitsa shows us endless images of the mechanics, banality and brutality of war: leaving endless, merciless destruction in its wake in search of a bigger cause. Ostensibly about the allied bombing of Germany — which is estimated to have killed between 350,000 to 635,000 people while crippling the country’s armaments production — the film’s timely premiere resonates in the current moment, with Russia’s campaign of terror demolishing cities in Ukraine as this review is being written.

Created exclusively with archive footage courtesy of both British and German collections, Loznitsa’s latest is a WW2 film that feels contemporaneous, mixing black-and-white observational footage with painstaking re-recordings to show us the total dehumanisation of war.

We start with sketches of everyday German life, people out and about in town, heading to biergartens and cafes, singing songs and going to work. Evening arrives, the picture zooms out and these scenes are reduced to momentary lights in the ground, strikingly light up by the advent of cluster-bombs.

I didn’t just see Rostock, Lübeck, Cologne and Berlin while watching this film. I saw Mariupol, Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia. Further back, it evokes NATO campaigns in Baghdad and Belgrade, or Putin’s levelling of Grozny, all committed in the name of the “greater good”. No matter who is waging war and who is on the so-called right side of history, the final effects are the same: dead people, flattened buildings, the complete vanquishing of hope and humanity.

Occasionally the silent-film-like images are punctuated by speeches. One British army official asks the German population to simply leave the cities and camp out in the countryside, a simplistic solution that betrays the reality of living in a country during the war. He goes on to say that although a campaign of bombing on this scale has never been tried before, it will make an “interesting experiment.”

And while war historians might agree that the bombing itself was justified in that it ground German production to its knees, allowing Soviet Union and American forces to sweep in and take Berlin, absolutists can claim the moral high ground: no victory could possibly be worth this much death and destruction. But Loznitsa avoids any editorial process — no talking heads, no narration, no moral grandstanding — and allows us to come to our own conclusions; starting debates instead of finishing them.

It’s this complexity, as well as seeking the humanity in a people that overwhelmingly supported the Nazis, that make him a complex figure. Only recently was he kicked out of the Ukrainian film academy for his ties to Russia and for speaking out against a widespread boycott, while at the same time, many of his fiction films have also been accused of Russophobia. In my view, this controversy is probably the sign of an independent filmmaker.

One thing you can say about Loznitsa is that he’s both a deep thinker and a prolific filmmaker (this is his third documentary in two years). Nonetheless, clocking in at just under 110 minutes long, his images are exhaustive and enervating, at once deeply terrifying and rather monotonous. His documentaries, like Victory Day, which stretched to over an hour despite only having enough material to justify a 20-minute short, has the habit of just making the same point over and over again. While the intention is to conclusively batter home the horrors of aerial warfare, the length and duration of certain images, which repeat themselves without revealing any new layers, struck me as unnecessary. The deeply-felt moral question the film raises is a highly important one, making it even more disappointing the finished product makes this such an alienating picture to sit through.

The Natural History of Destruction plays in the Official Selection as a Special Screening at Cannes. No UK release date yet.

Sick of Myself

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

Move over, The Worst Person in The World (Joachim Trier, 2021). From the same beautiful city of Oslo comes the genuine worst person in the world: Signe (Kristine Kujath Thorp), a woman so self-involved, so breathlessly shameless, so incredibly terrible, you can’t help but root for her to succeed.

That’s the thing with narcissist conmen, stretching from Tom Ripley to Jordan Belfort to the gang of Ocean’s 11 (Steven Soderbergh, 2001): they can get away with anything, because ultimately they seem so charming. While Signe, with beach-blonde hair, darting, nervous eyes, and a mischievous look, has little of the smoothness of traditional conmen, she shares that same compelling desire to rise above her station and to have the whole world know her name. She’s awful and hilarious in equal measure.

Early on at a flat party — after escaping a fancy restaurant with a $2300 bottle of wine with her artist boyfriend Thomas (Eirik Sæther) — she tells someone that “narcissists are the ones that make it.” The rest of the film somewhat tests that premise, as she shamelessly competes with her boyfriend to be the centre of everyone’s attention. Individual sequences, including a faked nut allergy, pretending someone’s dead and goading a dog into biting her are handled with an excellent sense of cringe comic timing, making me laugh while holding my fingers over my eyes.

I won’t explain the scheme that makes up the centrepiece of the movie, but it is wonderfully perverse, the kind of move that tips the film into outright psychopathy. While there’s a lot of recent films out there — like the ultimately dull I Care a Lot (J Blakeson, 2020) or that Anna Delvey miniseries that was completely unwatchable — that sees women scamming with the best of the men, this one is unafraid to make its hero a complete mess while keeping the story itself relatively believable. By rooting the story within a naturalist setting, the con just keeps getting longer and longer, until the boundaries between reality and fantasy almost seem to collapse within themselves.

Actually boasting the same producers as Worst Person, it has a similar milieu, pretty yet unassuming cast and pastel-like colours. This is by far the more satisfying watch however because it takes the same millennial self-centredness and pushes it to its absolute extremes, making fun of media trends in diversity, victim narratives, and girl-boss stories all at the same time, tied together by a lived-in, effortless performance from Thorp.

Some bends into fantastical ideation, albeit diverting once or twice, get tiresome, repeating some of the worst excesses of the previous film. While there is nothing as misguided as Worst Person’s drug sequence, certain moments could’ve easily been cut out for a more leaner, punchier experience, in line with more successfully-executed Axiom (Jöns Jönsson, 2022).

Is there a reason why scammers across both genders seem to be having a renaissance at the moment? Perhaps one could tie it to the way even everyday parts of life seem to be becoming more and more unattainable, let alone glittering mansions and worldwide fame. Sick of Myself doesn’t seem to say that you shouldn’t be a scammer, but that you should come up with a foolproof plan. Knowing the tropes and playing with them brilliantly, this fine film shows off the difficulties of trying too hard. After all, cool people never have to try that hard. Signe doesn’t know that. She’s a loser. But she’s easy to love. This worst person deserves the world.

Sick of Myself played in Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. It was out in the UK in October as part of the BFI London Film Festival. In cinemas on Friday, April 21st (2023). On BFI Player and also on Curzon Home Cinema on Monday, July 3rd

The Woodcutter Story

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

To say Finnish cinema is deadpan is a bit like saying water is wet. It’s not only a part of the national character, it is the default mode of expression for so many of their films; viewing the world from a slightly askew, whimsical and neatly framed angle. The Woodcutter Story at first feels like it could occupy the same world as Aki Kaurismäki: emotionless-seeming characters sat in dingy bars, weird dancing and an endlessly optimistic hero within a deeply cynical world. Unlike Kaurismäki however, I sensed little life between the frames while watching this slow, un-engaging story.

Our idiot, in the classical, literary sense, is Pepe (Jarkko Lahti), who, as the name of the film suggests, works as a woodcutter somewhere deep in the Finnish forest. Snow is everywhere in this film, caught in gorgeous widescreen images that seem to almost subsume the film’s characters. He’s not the kind of person to worry about his fate; when a convoy of sleek, black cars turns up and the suits start firing everyone in favour of building a new mine, he seems to be the only worker who thinks there has to be a good reason for such capitalist greed. The rest of the film tests his worldview against a world that is slowly fading from view.

Director Mikko Myllylahti, following up his screenplay for The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki with his first feature behind the camera, uses this catastrophic event to explore the nuances of this small village and its weird inhabitants. Violence, betrayal and plain strangeness occur one after the other, all told in a similarly reserved, slow style, bringing to mind Twin Peaks and its own collection of oddball townsfolk, or the Coen Brother’s Fargo (1996). The similarities to television are not unwarranted as The Woodcutter Story has an episodic and shoddy feel, Pepe tasked with being mostly a bystander to all the bizarre goings-ons, including unnecessary forays into science-fiction, revenge thriller and a tale-of-the-workers.

Not once did I feel like it cohered into something urgent, either philosophically, narratively or emotionally. Pepe is an inherently reactionary character, which would be fine if his resilience against catastrophe had a sense of purpose or a clear through-line; instead he encounters this series of unfortunate events with a variance of contrasting reactions, stemming from hopelessness to guilelessness to nothingness, making him frankly uninteresting to follow for the space of 100 minutes.

Compositionally, Myllylahti has a great eye for compelling frames, whether it’s capturing oppressive interiors or showing off the beauty of the countryside, showing characters at the front of the frame while the world around them feels too big for their small needs. Nonetheless, there are times when the film could’ve opted for a more direct, urgent mode of filmmaking instead of trying to keep an ironic distance throughout. Perhaps there’s some dream-logic I missed that ties it all together. I’m not going to spend my time trying to find out.

The Woodcutter Story played in Critic’s Week at the Cannes Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. It is out in the UK in October as part of the 66th BFI London Film Festival.