Editor’s note: Roy Anker attended the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, and his reflections on that gathering will appear in the September/October issue of Books & Culture. In the meantime, here are his top five picks from the festival.
The Tree of Life. This hotly awaited new film by American writer-director Terence Malick won the big prize at Cannes. It is a cinematic landmark that in style and substance goes where few films have. And it is a rapturous, profoundly Christian film in which Malick sets forth in clear form the vision that has informed the later part of his career (though lots of critics still don’t get it). With an epigraph from Job, Malick offers a theodicy within a vision of cosmic history. Go at first chance, and then go again.
The Kid with a Bike. This film by the celebrated Dardenne Brothers of Belgium shared the runner-up prize at Cannes. Deeply influenced in style and theme by the legendary French Roman Catholic filmmaker Robert Bresson, the story follows a 12-year-old boy’s search for the father who has abandoned him. While always simple, the Dardennes’ stories of parents and children (L’Enfant, The Son), twice winning the big prize at Cannes, are also deeply moving and full of religious resonance.
The Footnote. From Israeli writer-director Joseph Cedar, a tragicomedy, or maybe comic tragedy, about two scholars, father and son, both amply competitive, caught within the academic politics of Talmud scholarship. The story slowly gathers weight as the full brunt of those politics, and the contention between father and son, gather steam to a daunting end. Look for the film in North America this fall.
Restless. From director Gus Van Zant (Milk, Good Will Hunting), Restless stars young Mia Wasikowska (Jane Eyre) as a teenaged cancer patient facing death. She finds an unlikely friend in troubled young Enoch (Henry Hopper, son of the late Dennis), who hangs out at funerals. Though a bit gooey, the film does a grand job showing the thrill of simply being alive, which is a pretty good gig even when death speeds and parents die in accidents.
Melancholia. From controversial (and Roman Catholic) Danish writer-director Lars von Trier (Breaking the Waves, Anti-Christ), Melancholia depicts, first, the depression of a bride (Kirsten Dunst) who implodes during her fancy wedding and, second, the seeming end of the world. Clearly not an upper, but von Trier movingly sketches the interior of emotional collapse and darkness, a condition with which he himself is amply familiar.
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