Wednesday 20 May 2015

Notes from #Cannes2015 - No 1: In Praise of the Artist as a More Mature Man


When I got my invitation to the Cannes Premiere of Gus van Sant’s Sea of Trees, I announced this news to my Facebook friends with the words: ‘The only way I could be more excited about this is if I had made the film myself.’ As it turns out, I quite possibly could have made the film myself.
Before you jump to to any conclusions: this is neither me saying I’m as good or as experienced a filmmaker as Gus van Sant (that would be manifestly preposterous), nor am I insinuating that the film is so bad that even a comparatively inexperienced filmmaker as I could have made it. What I am suggesting is that Gus van Sant makes his films in exactly the way he chooses and he so often makes choices that I can so much relate to that the film that I saw on Saturday was one about which I felt: I could imagine myself making a film just like that.
Of course, I didn’t know this as I was getting ready for the Red Carpet Gala at the Grand Théâtre du Lumière. So imagine my surprise when on my Facebook thread posts started appearing which claimed that Sea of Trees had been ‘booed at its premiere’. The premiere hadn’t even happened yet. As it transpires – and as has been widely, by and large gleefully and very often inaccurately reported – the film was apparently booed at a press screening, which wasn’t in the programme, the day before the premiere. (Quite often a film gets shown officially at Cannes once before the premiere, on the same morning. That was also the case for Sea of Trees, and I don’t know what kind of reception it got on that occasion.) 
What I do know, because I was there, is that at the actual premiere itself, by now of course already overshadowed by the response of some of those people who had attended the press screening, it received a standing ovation. One of moderate length, by Cannes standards, it is true, but still, a standing ovation. This alone does not prove or disprove anything other than that facts are easily held to ransom for the sake of a ‘good’ story. (It was fascinating to see that the story in question mostly ran along the lines of: “McConaughey’s Movie Booed at Cannes Premiere”, attributing the work to its leading actor, rather than its director, which was strange and a little ironic, considering that most of the opprobrium was aimed at the work of the director, and to quite some extent also the in this instance admittedly a bit hapless writer, Chris Sparling.)
Now I don't know who gets invited to press screenings, but their title fairly suggests it is mainly the ‘critics’. I am not a great fan of the ‘critics’. Not when they’re being ‘critics’, at any rate. When they’re just being normal humans, they can be as delightful and charming as any other human being I’ve ever met (though it is also true to say that some of the most miserable and dispirited human beings I have ever encountered happened to have been ‘critics’, but I’m not sure you can entirely blame them for that: they are ‘critics’, after all...)
No matter how lovely and adorable the ‘critics’ can be when they’re just being human, give them a laptop and a show or a play or a book or a symphony or any piece of art at all they don’t like and they can turn into the most viciously vitriolic creatures known to man, woman or transgender person. (I’m hoping for their own sake that children don’t know any ‘critics’, at least not in their chosen capacity.) And they then start saying things and behaving in ways that no sane person would ever say or do to another. I have witnessed this, so I know from experience. And while I can’t know, obviously, who booed Gus van Sant’s film at its press screening, I shouldn’t be surprised to learn that it was in fact some of the ‘critics’ there, or those who consider themselves such.
Who would do that? Who would possess the arrogance and self-satisfied delusion and rudeness to sit there, at the invitation of a director or writer or producer, experience their work and then boo? Apparently this is not entirely unheard of in Cannes. But seriously? Who are these people. And more to the point: who do they think they are?
Leaving aside for the moment the inconsequential question whether or not the film is any ‘good’ (who’s to say what is ‘bad’ and what ‘good’ in the first place?), it completely confounds me that there are people out there who will arrive at a screening room with a set of expectations as to what they’re about to see, and when those expectations aren’t met, feel at liberty to abuse the creators of the work. Matthew McConaughey has since expressed himself unfazed by this type of behaviour and gone on record as saying that people have the right to boo as much as to ovate. I disagree. I’m pretty much with Lars von Trier here, who I’m fairly certain once told reporters, when they were being rude to him at a press conference, that they were his guests, and if they didn’t like his work they could simply leave. As far as I’m concerned, going to a film screening and then booing the film because you don’t like it is like going round someone’s house, tasting the food that’s been cooked for you, deciding it wasn’t what you wanted and then sticking your finger down your throat and vomiting on the carpet. It takes a particularly deranged kind of mind to think of this as acceptable conduct.
Irrespective though of who booed and who didn’t, and when they did so or did not, what is clear is that some ‘critics’ – and yes, the adverted commas continue to be deliberate, and, I fear, necessary if you hold that the word derives from and ought to refer to a detailed, in-depth analysis, a critique – hated the film and poured out their bile over it. I don’t ordinarily read film reviews, because they are essentially one person’s opinion, and I do have a mind of my own which I am capable of making up by myself, or leave open, just as I please, but in this case, out of curiosity, I made an exception and the cliché that springs to mind is ‘field day’. One that the ‘critics’ were having. And why? As far as I can tell, in the majority because Gus van Sant hasn’t given them what they are used to from him, on the one hand, and to quite some extent because they simply didn’t understand what he was giving them, on the other.
So what did Gus van Sant give us, with Sea of Trees. Well, I’m clearly not about to give you a ‘critique’, because that would turn me into the thing I would least wish to be when it comes to creative work of any kind, but I am happy to tell you that Gus van Sant is growing into a different phase of his life. And, possibly to do with his age, possibly to do with what interests him as a filmmaker, possibly to do with reasons that neither he is nor we can be aware of, he has chosen to give us a slow, meditative, quiet exploration of loss, of connection, and of the meaning of life. In doing so, he has gone allegorical and, dare I say it, philosophical; spiritual even. This seems to irk some people in magnitude of reverse order, with the spiritual element inviting particularly harsh invective: one of the more self-righteous reviewers in all seriousness accusing him of being "anti-science" and "anti-rational", as if it were a film’s duty to be either scientific or rational, just because you are.
I haven’t administered the damage to my soul that reading more than a few of these rants by necessity would inflict, but none of the ones I have read seem to latch on to the most basic premise. One that is not explicit, but that is surely clear. You can’t take what happens in this film literally. Spoiler alert here in case this is meant to come as a surprise, but: the man whom Conaughey’s character, Arthur Brennan, meets in the forest, Takumi Nakamura (played by Ken Watanabe) is not real. He’s a metaphor. He’s in his mind. Put there by his wife before she died. If you watch this film to the end and never grasp the idea that you’re not in a realistic drama, but in a cinematic play on themes of the subconscious, then of course you’ll be left scratching your head. None of it compels and little makes sense if you treat this as a piece of naturalism. All of it does if you look at it as essentially symbolic.
But of course, you have to allow a man to do this: you have to say to yourself, Gus van Sant is not ticking any of the boxes I’m holding up for him. He’s not funny, quirky, charming with this. Not even all that inventive, perhaps. The script feels heavier-handed than I would hope to write it myself. But he’s growing up. He’s trying something else. He’s engaging with big, lonely questions, such as: how well can I know someone really, even if I’m married to them? Do things run deeper than we can see or tell? Is there a way to communicate beneath and beyond the measurable, the code. 
Does he do it the way I would like him to do it? Well, who am I to say? He’s an artist. He’s maturing. Is the work flawless in my eye? Of course not. Neither is Hamlet. Nor the Mona Lisa. Are there beautiful, worthwhile things about it? Absolutely. Has somebody made a genuine attempt at creating something of value. Indeed.
So, for someone to sit there and boo at this, or for someone to tear into it with, not glee in fact, but hateful spite, that to me takes an unimaginably impoverished mind. Peter Bradshaw (whom I have quoted, above, very briefly) in the Guardian gives Sea of Trees ‘one out of five stars.’ Setting aside the crassness that is inherent in the notion that you could sum up or express the value of a literary or theatrical or cinematic work with a ‘star rating’, and therefore the complete depletion of any credibility as a differentiated expert anyone who deploys such ratings could possibly claim, the sole purpose surely of doing so in such a mean-spirited manner could be to inflict injury. The ‘critic’ making himself feel better at the expense of the artist. Getting off on it. That is not ‘criticism’, let alone insightful ‘critique’, it’s a wholly self-gratifying way of making yourself feel important. So the person who does that, in doing so, by definition reduces themselves to being nothing much more than a great masturbator.
I recommend you watch Sea of Trees. Don’t expect anything. Let it do its work on you. Maybe you’ll like it, maybe you won’t. I really rather loved it. I make films, and I want to make more films, just like that: films that maybe you won’t immediately get. That perhaps take a second or third viewing to appreciate the point of. That really annoy the ‘critics’. I think if you consider yourself an artist, at any point in your life, then that is exactly what you are there for. To do the things they say you cannot do. Hail Gus van Sant. Don’t worry about the ‘critics’. They’re already doing to themselves what you want to say to them go do…
Sea of Trees on IMDb: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3450900/