Regard From Cannes

Midway through the 63rd Cannes Film Festival it was clear that the action this year (even more than in the past) was to be found in the main event's less prestigious shadow, the section with the untranslatable moniker, "Un Certain Regard."

Tournee, winner of multiple prizes at the just-concluded Cannes Film Festival

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More About

• Manoel de Oliveira
• Cannes Film Festival
• Cristi Puiu
• Arts, Entertainment, and Media
• Film Awards

The main competition was largely a haven for familiarity, mediocrity and what the French critics disparagingly call "qualité." Warmly received films included Mike Leigh's middling, unfortunately titled Another Year and Bertrand Tavernier's old-fashioned costume drama, The Princess of Montpensier. Although not without their pleasures, Mathieu Amalric's faux-Cassavetes burlesque pageant, Tournée, and Takeshi Kitano's yakuza slapstick, Outrage, are lightweights.

That the "Regard" is to be taken seriously was signaled by its opening movie, Manoel de Oliveira's latest, The Strange Case of Angelica. The most existential of filmmakers, as well as the oldest, at 101, de Oliveira has been making his last film for 20 years. At once avant and retro, as funny and peculiar as its title promises, Angelica is yet another unique sign-off — a serene and sublime meditation on the essence of the motion-picture medium and the nature of eternity. Like Vertigo and Solaris, it's a variation of the Orpheus myth: A young, Jewish photographer is taken with a beautiful Portuguese maiden, whose beatifically smiling corpse he is hired to shoot. Falling in love, he imagines that his camera brings her back to life. Ultimately, the increasingly obsessed photographer joins his subject in death.

The Strange Case of Angelica is a comedy in the droll, intentionally stilted, highly deliberate yet anecdotal manner de Oliveira has perfected over the past several decades. The story's meaning is the pleasure of the tale — a story told for its own sake, its narrative advanced with the expertise of a chess master pushing his pawns. Like most great avant-garde movies, Angelica is programmatically anachronistic — the special effects would have seemed primitive to Georges Méliès back in 1901.

The sight of 101-year-old de Oliveira vigorously strolling La Croisette with his 90-something missus was nearly as impressive as the film's serenely playful statement on mortality. On the other hand, Jean-Luc Godard's last-minute decision to snub the festival (out of solidarity with Greece!) made his presence all the more tangible, especially as his "Regard" entry, the dense, often visually ravishing but only partially successful essay Film Socialisme ends with the words "NO COMMENT." (Before the fest, Godard had condensed his movie into a four-and-a-half-minute YouTube preview.)

Other gems in the "Regard": the two Romanian films, Radu Muntean's Tuesday, After Christmas and Cristi Puiu's Aurora. The new Romanian cinema (one hesitates to call it "New Wave" because so many of its aesthetic premises can be traced back to Italian neorealism and its successors) is a cinema founded on long takes, real time and the primacy of actors. Technical virtuosity aside, the triumph of movies like The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and Police, Adjective has been the application of these devices to create a new sort of narrative tension.

Tuesday, After Christmas — a movie about a man who is only interesting in his desire to leave his wife and child for a younger woman — is a succession of scenes in which, almost always living a lie, the hero interacts at length with each of the women in turn. The movie's turning point brings all three together (in a dentist's office, no less, where the child is being fitted for braces) with one member of the triangle still oblivious to the triangle's existence. This sequence is topped by the subsequent 10-minute take, in which the husband drops the bomb on his wife and the truth is revealed, just in time for Christmas. (Were the movie in competition, the jury might well have handed Mirela Oprisor the Best Actress Award at the end of the screening.)

If Tuesday, After Christmas synthesizes the gains of previous Romanian films, imbuing an ordinary story with extraordinary dramatic tension, Aurora pushes the Romanian style into new territory. A test for admirers of Puiu's now-canonical Death of Mr. Lazarescu (discovered five years ago in the "Regard"), Aurora is a murder mystery in which the killer's identity is known but his motives are enigmatic. Béla Tarr did something similar with his epic, opaque Georges Simenon adaptation The Man From London, but Puiu's observational style does not offer the same visual pleasure as Tarr's sumptuous hyperrealism; here, the movie is a continuous search for meaning, with the viewer under constant pressure to puzzle out just what the heck is going on.

The movie's premise is absurdist, although only occasionally (and unexpectedly) humorous. For Aurora's first hour, a lanky, unhappy-looking man haunts the outskirts of Bucharest, making cryptic phone calls, spying on children, getting medicine from a woman who seems to be his girlfriend, crossing and recrossing railroad tracks, and moving his belongings from his mother's flat to an apartment he claims to be renovating (and vice versa). The compositions are typically underlit or obstructed; the movie's characteristic shot has the action glimpsed through (or hidden by) a half-open door. Abruptly, this distractive, furtive fellow purchases a gun. Have we been watching a madman, an assassin, a Romanian Travis Bickle? That Puiu stays resolutely outside his protagonist is all the more fascinating in that he plays the role himself.