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[COLUMN] Darren’s Cannes Diary, Day Seven - VR Festival, New Cronenberg, and the Trump Biopic | by Darren Mooney
🕑 Added 2024-05-21 13:19:31 +0000 UTC
As the festival enters its second week, Cannes slows down a little bit. There’s less pressure in this second half. Most of the biggest premieres have wrapped up, and some of the press and industry guests have started to funnel home. As such, there’s a bit less pressure to see everything as urgently, and a bit more time to explore the experience of the festival.
I began the day with a journey out of the center of Cannes to the Cineum for a second viewing of Kevin Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga (★★★☆☆). This is partially because last night’s premiere was a last-minute ticket, and partially because it was screening in IMAX. Dublin has two IMAX screens, but neither are top of the line, so it felt like a good opportunity to see Horizon in a format that felt particularly suited to it – complete with popcorn and soft drink.
Horizon is certainly a film the benefits from being seen in that particular format. It is also the kind of film the benefits from a rewatch, as returning to the film tends to enhance its strengths and makes its weaknesses less glaring. On a second viewing, knowing that the film doesn’t really have an actual story, it’s easier to just appreciate the visuals and mood of the project, to bask in the imagery on-screen and appreciate the craftsmanship on display. Horizon looks good on a screen that big.
That said, there was another reason to braze the journey out from the center of the town into the Cineum. As we’ve covered in earlier diary entries, there’s a tendency to reduce Cannes to nothing but a list of films screening. In reality, it’s an industry festival that has a number of diverse and interesting strands. There’s always something to explore and experience outside the main competition: Critics’ Week, Directors’ Fortnight, Marché du Film, and so on.
This year, Cannes is running an “Immersive Competition”, looking specifically at virtual reality installations. It’s a pretty cool idea for a film festival, given how new virtual reality storytelling is, and the weird space in which it exists between video games and traditional cinematic narratives. Many of the projects in competition are a few years old, but it seemed like a part of the festival that merited some exploration. Conveniently enough, it was taking place by the Cineum.
These immersive experiences tend to be short-form, so it’s worth just briefly running through each of them. However, there were also certain commonalities to the three experiences that I got the opportunity to enjoy. The first is that the medium is obviously still young and so the language is still being developed. A lot of the basic language of film doesn’t translate directly to virtual reality, particularly as it relates to the use of editing to control the audience’s perspective.
It’s difficult to cut a virtual reality experience like a feature film, because sharp transitions between scenes are particularly disorienting in virtual reality. As a result, the default mode of transition is a slow and definite fade to – and then from – black. This imposes certain limits on what a storyteller can do to move between ideas. There’s also the simple fact that giving the audience free movement makes it harder to control and focus their gaze than projecting on a screen and using edits or inserts.
The other question is one of interactivity. These installations blur the boundaries between films and video games, and there seems to be an expectation of audience interaction to them. However, the paradox is that many of these interactive moments don’t serve to draw the audience deeper into the story, but instead to knock them out of it. It’s strange to hear a narrator just pause awkwardly while the player orients themselves in a virtual space to touch some virtual object.
The most promising of the entries on display was Jorge Tereso and Fernando Maldonado’s Gloomy Eyes (★★★★☆), a Tim-Burton-esque fairytale that takes place in the midst of a zombie apocalypse. It works because it completely avoids interactivity in favor of simple immersion. It also comes up with a clever mode of scene transition by guiding the player’s view to a new section of the display where the new scene begins. It’s the most assured of the projects that I got to experience.
Eliza McNitt's Spheres (★★★☆☆) is a solid execution of the concept, albeit one that falls prey to a number of the aforementioned issues. An exploration of interstellar phenomena produced by Darren Aronofsky, Spheres unfolds against a black backdrop, which makes scene transitions a bit easier than they might otherwise be. It is an approach that manages to neatly sidestep some of the more mechanical challenges facing storytelling in this still-young format.
That said, Spheres clumsily stumbles into the difficulty of organically incorporating interactive elements into such an immersive audio-visual experience. Once or twice in each segment, the narrators clumsily solicit audience participation, as if to make sure the viewer is still awake. It is quite distracting to feel like you’re letting Millie Bobbi Brown or Jessica Chastain down because you can’t catch enough light beams as they whizz by.
That said, Ioana Mischie’s Human Violins (★★☆☆☆) feels like a cautionary tale, demonstrating how the worst tendencies of prestige cinema can be amplified in this new format. Based on a true story, Human Violins offers an account of the Jewish musicians at Auschwitz. It is, to put it frankly, quite surreal to sit through an immersive story about the Holocaust that ends with the sharp-edged “Unreal Engine” logo.
There is probably a debate to be had outside the confines of a sleep-addled festival diary about the merits of recreating something like a concentration camp in virtual reality. On the one hand, there is something to be said for the immersive power of empathy, of inviting the audience to imagine – even in the broadest possible terms – the brutality and the barbarity of such experiences. It is a way of helping to memorialize something that needs to be remembered, in a very tangible and tactile way.
At the same time, there are longstanding legitimate criticisms of these sorts of awards-friendly productions tackling such subject matter, which tend to bend the narrative towards warm-hearted human triumph to avoid upsetting or traumatizing the audience. Human Violins goes somewhat further, by inviting the audience to participate in such an attempt to wring triumph from tragedy. “Touch the strings and liberate Alma,” the narrator (Cabiria Morgenstern) instructs the audience. It feels like it trivializes and minimizes the real horror that the experience seeks to recreate.
It was interesting to visit these installations on the same day that director David Cronenberg premiered his latest movie, The Shrouds (★★★★☆). The Shrouds deals with vaguely similar ideas, focusing on a new technology developed by Karsh (Vincent Cassel). The eponymous “shrouds” are incredibly detailed sensory devices that can be wrapped around a dead body, feeding live information to the next of kin’s phone and the subject’s tombstone.
This technological advance allows the living to carry the dead with them. Indeed, one of the pioneering subjects of this technology is Karsh’s deceased wife, Becca (Diane Kruger). Karsh developed the shroud that envelops Becca, the graveyard in which she is buried and the restaurant overlooking that graveyard. There is something just a little bit Edgar Allen Poe about all this, to the point that Karsh even brings a blind date (Jennifer Dale) to the grave on their first encounter.
Generously, one might describe The Shrouds as unfocused. It is more a collection of ideas than a coherent unified narrative. It grapples with a host of contemporary anxieties: conspiracy theory, deep fakes, fears of Russian and Chinese intervention in western powers, capitalism, and the rise of anti-Semitism. Indeed, allowing for Cronenberg’s short At the Suicide of the Last Jew in the World in the Last Cinema in the World, The Shrouds is Cronenberg’s most explicitly Jewish feature film.
These fears never express themselves in a literal way. After all, Cronenberg’s movies are often driven by the sublimated horror of a nightmare. Becca cannot be cremated because she is Jewish, so her body must decompose. Karsh himself is ethnically Jewish, but religiously atheistic. A desecration of Karsh’s graveyard evokes the vandalism of Jewish cemeteries. As Cronenberg’s camera pans down a toppled tombstone, it focuses on the Star of David.
Karsh repeatedly evokes “the Doctors’ Plot”, an infamously antisemitic conspiracy theory. There is also something specifically Jewish about the idea of the living carrying the dead with them in ways that aren’t entirely rational. Like Karsh, Cronenberg defines himself as a Jewish atheist, having a complicated relationship to the faith. Cronenberg’s wife of nearly 40 years, Carolyn Zeifman, passed away seven years ago, about the same amount of time that Karsh has been living without Becca.
As the white-haired and sneakers-wearing Karsh, Cassel bears more than a slight resemblance to the Toronto-based auteur. It is the sort of flattering self-glow-up that directors occasionally engage in, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert Pattison feeling like movie-star-ified versions of Christopher Nolan in Inception or TENET. This is not accidental. At one point, Becca’s sister Terry (also Krueger) prompts Karsh, “Tell me about this body thing. You’ve been obsessed for years.”
Cronenberg is one of the defining directors of body horror. Although he drifted away from that genre in the 21st century, he recently returned with Crimes of the Future. In some ways, the body horror of The Shrouds is purely existential. The most horrifying thing that a director so obsessed with the tangibility and tactility of the human body can imagine is the abstraction of the body, the rendering of it as a digital reconstruction or an image, the erosion and decay of it.
Karsh is haunted by dreams of Becca as she is consumed by illness, her body being eaten away and taken apart. Every time he remembers her, there is less of her; a mastectomy, a broken bone, an amputation. Now, through the camera, he can watch a representation of the body he once knew intimately slip away from him in real time, the very idea of the tangible person fading away into nothing. This is the abstract logic of the nightmare, albeit a more intimate and personal one than Cronenberg usually allows.
To be fair, The Shrouds is about more than just a man grieving the loss of his wife, although it’s interesting that this provides a thematic connection between The Shrouds, Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, and Paul Schrader’s Oh, Canada. In a more abstract sense, The Shrouds is about the body horror of a world that no longer needs bodies at all, a world moving into digital and conceptual spaces. After all, Karsh isn’t seeing Becca’s actual body, but a digital representation of it. There’s no way to know if it’s real.
Allowing for the shrouds, the film takes place in a familiar modern world. Cronenberg employs an interesting recurring shot from Karsh’s perspective, as he stares at modern technology: the audience watches a video on an iPad through Karsh’s eyes, makes a video call on an iPhone through Karsh’s eyes, sets his Tesla to autopilot through Karsh’s eyes. Much of the plot takes place in Iceland, even though Karsh never sets foot there. This is a world where everything exists at a remove.
There’s a solid criticism to be made that The Shrouds doesn’t really tie together into a single cohesive statement, that it is more of a mood piece. However, its thematic and narrative concerns overlap strongly enough, and its emotional core is solid enough, that this doesn’t really matter. That the end result doesn’t quite count among Cronenberg’s strongest films is more praise of Cronenberg’s body of work than criticism of The Shrouds.
The light day provided an opportunity to explore other facets of the festival beyond the immersive exhibition. I got to pop down to the “Internal Village” along the beach. It is an extension of the Marché, a set of bungalows that open up onto the coast, operated by local film boards and industries. These spaces provide two functions, inviting foreign producers to consider international locations and serving as a hub for visiting filmmakers and journalists from that country.
The American Pavilion is notoriously exclusive, which makes sense. They are a large presence at the festival and even in a year without too many major studios, they still represent the biggest distributors and producers. However, I got to visit the Irish delegation to Cannes, which is a vibrant cinematic economy punching well above its weight. There are five Irish co-productions at this festival, which is quite an accomplishment.
Three of those films have been warmly received: Kinds of Kindness, On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, and The Surfer. Another of them, September Says, premieres tomorrow. However, the fifth and final of those Irish co-productions premiered today, Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice (★★☆☆☆). It is something that has felt inevitable for about eight years, but which somehow took this long to will itself into existence: a Donald Trump biopic.
In some senses, it’s easy to understand why – outside of television shows like The Comey Rule – Trump has avoided the sort of cinematic mythologizing of other recent presidents like George W. Bush in Oliver Stone’s W. or Barack Obama in Vikram Gandhi’s Barry. Trump is a larger-than-life character. He is almost a living cartoon. It is nearly impossible to imagine a way to condense that personality down into a movie that wouldn’t feel like satire or self-parody.
This is the challenge facing The Apprentice, which effectively tells the story of the relationship between Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan) and Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong). The film tries to avoid crossing some sort of parodic event horizon by – allowing for a clumsy VHS filter – playing its drama relatively straight. This is not a deconstructive biopic in the style of something like Craig Gillespie’s I, Tonya or Adam McKay’s Vice. This is a very earnest, beat-for-beat, unironic traditional biopic.
It's an understandable approach, but it’s also a decision that fundamentally breaks the movie. It’s hard not to feel some measure of empathy for the film in general and for Stan in particular. Again, Trump himself is something of a caricature of a human being – the sort of demented creation one might get if they gave a six-year-old some crayons and asked them to draw “a rich guy.” He lives in the American consciousness as a self-parody, arguably even to his supporters.
So Stan has to make a calculated choice, whether to play Trump as a man or as a joke. Stan makes the decision to play Trump as a human being. He doesn’t affect an accent. He mostly avoids Trump’s distinctive cadence. He is trying to evoke Trump, rather than to embody him. This isn’t an inherently bad approach to take to such a mimetic figure. Anthony Hopkins did something similar with the title role in Nixon, leading to both an underrated film and an underrated performance.
However, Stan is undercut by two key details. First of all, the script is very much written to evoke Trump’s distinct verbiage. In the movie, Trump repeats many of his catchphrases. So it’s weird to hear words like “huge” or “you’re a very rude guy” delivered in a way that a normal person might say them, coming from an actor made up to look like Donald Trump. The second issue is that Stan is playing opposite Jeremy Strong, whose approach to acting is diametrically opposed to naturalism.
Strong leans hard into a recreation of Cohn, his accent, his mannerisms, his cadence. It’s a very mannered performance. It’s too much to describe it as caricature, because Strong manages to somehow wring genuine sympathy for Cohn. However, it is a very different energy from that brought by Stan, and it only serves to make Stan’s performance feel comparatively unconvincing. Stan’s choices are understandable, but the results are ineffective.
The movie itself falls into the familiar traps of the modern biography, largely reducing its subject to a set of recognizable quotes and references. There are extended sequences in The Apprentice that ask the audience to point at the screen in recognition. “You invent your own reality,” Cohn advises Trump at one point. “Truth is malleable.” Later on, he stresses, “Never admit defeat.” So much is signified, so heavily.
Late in the movie, grappling for a title for his autobiography, Trump stumbles upon “The Art of the Deal.” “I like that,” he muses, recalling Freddy Mercury’s (Rami Malek) reaction to writing his own lyrics in Bohemian Rhapsody. Cohn introduces Trump to Roger Stone (Mark Rendall), explaining that he’s an expert in “dirty tricks.” So much of the movie is built around this sort of heavy-handed origin-story-crafting.
It’s a shame, because it leaves the rest of the movie underserved. In particular, Oscar nominee Maria Bakalova finds herself wasted in the thankless role of Ivana Trump, largely relegated to the most generic and conventional of the biopic standards: the put-upon wife. Admittedly, Ivana is decidedly more put-upon than most other examples of the archetype, but The Apprentice never seems to have a firm grasp of who she is and what she wants.
To be fair, given the recency and the relevance of the source material, it’s probably not surprising that The Apprentice feels so clumsy and so uncertain of itself. It is, however, a surprise that The Apprentice is so boring.
Check out the rest of Darren’s Cannes columns below –
Cannes Diary, Day Three - The Premiere of Coppola’s Megalopolis
Cannes Diary, Day Six - Kevin Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga
Comments
Jeroen Delcour
"It is, however, a surprise that The Apprentice is so boring." Wonderful summary! It's taking me a while to catch up with the rapid fire of these blogs, but I'm enjoying them immensely so far.
Darren Mooney
Oh, you think it's bad for you! I've seeing four or five of these a day; they tend to blur together.
W. Brad Robinson
Great to hear about some of the more esoteric features of the festival. The VR movies seem like something new might be coalescing in the fog between two media. Good chance it will just fade away again, but it's still neat to know about. Great movie reviews too, though of course my brain doesn't ever fully pay attention so part of me now thinks there's a movie where Donald Trump invites his girlfriends to see Ivana's slowly decomposing corpse:-)
Darren Mooney
This is a very astute point. I do want to do a proper beginning-to-end rewatch of Cronenberg. I think there's a clear metamorphisis around "M. Butterfly" and "Crash", where he becomes more interested in interior emotional violence over body transformation. (And, to be clear, "A History of Violence" is - for me - one of his masterpieces.)
Jack Philipson
I think the thing that ties Cronenberg's fleshier body horror work to his more ostensibly mundane features is that he's very interested in people living in modified states, and the forces and compulsions that cause those modifications. Organised crime in Eastern Promises and A History of Violence, celebrity culture in Maps to the Stars, and the intangible allure of car accidents in Crash are recognisable as being of a piece with Videodrome, eXistenZ, and the Brundel's mutation in The Fly. The form changes but the uncanny power wielded over the characters endures.
