The '68 Comeback Special - The Awards

I've always wanted to be on a film festival jury, and now here's my chance! Sure it's off the books, but hell, Ima embrace it! With the right honorable David Cairns as my co-juror, we deliberated long and hard, smoked hundreds of cigarettes, drained the '68 Comeback Special greenroom of all its whiskey and wine, and made four hundred paper cranes out of unused ballot sheets. It was tense, it was nerve-wracking, it was deeply erotic. And here, ladies & gentlemen, are our decisions.

Palme d'Or – Capricious Summer

I'm beyond thrilled we decided on this. It's a film I fell head-over-heels in love with the first time I saw it and it's the sort of film that rarely walks away with the big win. It's slight, it's lovely, its ambitions are much more about improving your mood and lulling you into a cinematic spell. It's a joy, pure and simple, and runs a cool 74 minutes, occupying the same fugue state as Terence Davies The Long Day Closes and Jacques Tati's M. Hulot's Holiday, spaces of play tinged with bittersweet melancholy. You may not have your life changed, but you'll almost certainly want to live in these films.

Grand Prix – Petulia / Kuroneko

This was tougher. We both agreed that these films deserved recognition for their formal chops and ability to upset and enchant in equal measure. Their of a kind, when you get right down to it. Women punished for expecting to wait on men, now ghosts in their own lives. Richard Lester uses his pop-psychedelic montage to its greatest imaginable effect, crafting a world of facades where it's easy to understand how pain is hidden and ignored. It's easier to pretend we fit in than to really look at ourselves and our suffering. Kuroneko places the same story in the context of historical Japanese art. Kaneto Shindo presents a fourth wall-smashing miasma where women are at the mercy of men corrupted by war and honor, or lack thereof. Both are haunting, both are splendid, both uniquely cinematic stories.

Caméra d'Or – Albert Finney for Charlie Bubbles

As David pointed out in his late show-edition of the comeback special Finney only directed one movie. Like Brando before him, all it took was the failure of a film he cared about for him to kind of drop out of the artistic vanguard. Still shows up for a paycheck, and in largely decent movies, but ever since Charlie Bubbles that twinkle's been missing from his eye. Finney has a knack for innovation that proved he wasn't just idling between takes working for Tony Richardson and Karel Reisz. He dreamt a lot of ingenious devices people are still copying, discovered Liza Minelli and all the while gave one of his best performances. Not bad for a first try, is it? We almost gave the prize to Marcello Fondato, but Finney's been given almost no credit for the elegiac Charlie Bubbles so we're hoping to right some of that egregious wrong. Now, how about a blu-ray, world?

Prix du Jury – Doktor Glas

Speaking from personal experience, Mai Zetterling's Doktor Glas was the ideological pièce de résistance of the Totally Illegal Film Festival. The Long Day Closes shut us all up with its suspenseful gymnastics and raw imagery, but Doktor Glas had us all talking. About motivation, about patriarchy, about abortion, about murder, about justifications. Any film that can get a room full of people volleying interpretations at each other is worth talking about. Doubly so considering that no one talks about Zetterling. Criminal, we say! Criminal!

Prix du scénario – Firemen's Ball

Bitterly funny and warmly cynical, Firemen's Ball ties you into knots with its many strains and schools of humour, its sly critique of authority and coterie of non-plussed faces. Though directed in a style that would inform every third major American classic of the 70s, without its razor sharp script, one of the finest of an unprecedented era of charming malcontented masterpieces. And as dark as it gets, it never loses its cock-eyed wit, and makes you smile ever broader with every new defeat. 

Prix d'interprétation féminine – Lisa Gastoni for Grazie, Zia

Quite simply she's the whole film. The rest is D.O.A. Gastoni, who was not often asked to do more than look disturbingly gorgeous, seems weighted down not just by her lot in life but by the script, and her weariness is transcendent. She retains her irresistibility, her adorable remove, the untouchable quality that makes you fall for her, but her melancholy seems in danger of outweighing it. That battle is by far the most compelling conflict in the film. Her performance makes this horrible, horrible movie worth watching. That is no mean feet. 

Prix d'interprétation masculine – Woody Strode for Black Jesus

Strode is the ultimate underrated American performer. No Oscars, no Golden Globes, no retrospectives programmed around him, no tacky portraiture available in the lobby of similarly tacky Vegas hotels or wild west gift shops. He was never stretched by American directors, so much as they leaned on his chiseled features for support whenever they needed an illustration of winsome sturdiness. Not handsome so much as monumental. It took an Italian (and not Sergio Leone) to put Strode's face in the context it so richly deserved. His performance is undercut slightly by dubbing (not bad dubbing, by any means) but he's so perfectly attuned to the character of a martyr in rags that even though his death is inevitable (see: title) it becomes high tragedy. We cannot look away. We don't want to.

Prix de la mise en scène – Miklós Jancsó

Even before his tragic passing there was no question that Jancsó was the only pick for Director. As I've said 150 times, he remains the only filmmaker good enough to have two films, which, it should be noted could not be more different even if they are quite evidently the work of the same man, in competition for the highest honor at Cannes. How did this titan become, in Adrian Curry's words, "something of a forgotten man?" Perhaps it was that he was constantly denied the Palme? Or that it appears as though the majority of his films never made it to the US? Maybe he was just too embedded in his mythic modernism? Whatever excuse we've come up with isn't going to do anymore. He was a genius who made several undeniable works of beauty and he deserves more than what we've given him. As far as I'm concerned that ends today. 

The '68 Comeback Special: Grazie, Zia

As David Cairns and I have been highligting the films of the '68 Cannes Film Festival, I was wondering which of us would hit upon a true disaster first. Turns out, that would be me. I try, always, to find something likable in even the most detestable works of trash (I am a card-carrying member of the Joe D'Amato fan club, after all), and Grazie, Zia came close to defeating me. It starts with the cartoon intro. An insidious pop song with a shrieking girl chorus plays over too-loud drums while an impish, exaggerated cartoon avatar of wheelchair-bound hero Lou Castel races around the credits against a backdrop that suggests Hanna-Barbera approximating Laugh-In for even less money than they typically spent. Then, before the song has played for an entire verse, the other music comes in...the somehow even-more-saccharine Ennio Morricone piece that will pop up every six or seven minutes from then on to remind audiences to feel something, anything! The soundtrack tries for innocence or insouciance and comes off cloying and obnoxious, which might be fine except it never. Fucking. ENDS! 

Once we've gotten enough of that piece stuck in our heads, against all odds the pop song then returns for another few bars. The first image we're treated to when the misguided titles have stopped flashing? Lou Castel writhing in pain during electroshock treatment. The movie might have been intended as a joke, a pop-art cartoon satirizing the idle rich, but Castel has not been let in on this joke. He injures you with his screaming, and no amount of mock playfulness can hide the torment he's going through. The movie hasn't started and it's clear that with Salvatore Semperi, we are in the hands of a truly sadistic director, someone on par with Michaels Bay or Winner. 

The trailer below is important because it gives you a sense of everything that goes wrong. There's the focus on the breasts and vaginas of humiliated, sad women over faces or dialogue (no subtitles, but believe me you don't need them). Castel freaks out like a petulant child, not like someone plagued by massive internal conflict. You'll see the editing attempting to forge some coherent tone or shape. You'll notice not only the grating pop song from the credits, but towards the end that deathless Morricone tune that plagues the soundtrack like a rash it can't shake. The accidental glamour of the players. The pigheaded image-making and the overbearing, unattractive confidence. Watch this so you might be spared the whole ugly picture.

In its defense: a performance from Lisa Gastoni that's so good it doesn't seem possible she gave it. This from the pin-up girl from the Gamma One films? She drips with a unique melancholia, at once sad, neglected, conflicted, rich, empty and powerless. Her intended doesn't appreciate her fully and Castel (playing her nephew) does, but in a deeply upsetting way. Which makes her feel worse? Semperi tries to undercut her at every turn by disrobing her and making her purely an object of lust whenever it suits him, but she evidently sensed she might never get another shot at heavy-lifting like this and never does anything less than awe-inspiring work. I don't think she was ever as beautiful on screen and she certainly never commanded the frame in this way, her dark eyes effortlessly pulling you in. The script makes a hash of her character but she's better than the material. Of course she'd almost have to be as Grazie, Zia feels like a fratboy power fantasy (a rich boy seduces his appealing older, unfulfilled relation) rather than the scathing social commentary it wants to be. 

Also in the film's corner: Lou Castel. Any film with Castel is interesting enough to watch at least once. Don't question me on this. It's a fact of science! This film's biggest misstep? Putting Castel, a live wire who so ruthlessly grabs your sympathies in Fists In the Pocket, in a wheelchair. Not only is he stuck delivering warmed-over political-ish dialogue (for all his fuckery, his character doesn't actually seem to believe in anything), he can't even stand up and walk away, let alone explode with anger, run around or hide in shadow. Everything that makes Fists in the Pocket seem like a revelation, something both outside of and in the guts of the time that spawned it, are why Grazie, Zia feels totally inessential and useless. It wants to have thought of the conceit of Fists in the Pocket first, so rather than be subtle about its apocalyptic implications it saws them off like shotgun barrels and begins blasting up the place like William Holden in The Wild Bunch. Its overt politics are second-hand Godard but rather than playful and knowing they're childish and snide. Godard, for his part, had said everything he could by 1967 in a completely oblique fashion that plays as subtle if only because it's wrapped in thirty layers of text, subtext, supertext, metatext, megatext and context, then chewed up and spit out for our second digestion. When you reach 1965, you feel permanently a step behind him; not always a good feeling. How do you fully enjoy something that feels like it was deliberately not made for you? Grazie, Zia is even further behind that. Worse still is that all its best elements and style are begged, borrowed or stolen. 

Nothing is explained, up to and including everything Castel, Gastoni and her fiance Gabriele Ferzetti do, say or feel. Everything in Grazie, Zia simply happens because Semperi had seen these things happen before in better films and that was motivation enough. Lou Castel is here as a man who wants to murder his family because he did the same thing in Fists in the Pocket. This has the effect of making him seem like he survived that film and found a new family to terrorize, rather like Patrick Vive Ancorra only, needless to say, far less fun. To waste Lou Castel is criminal. To make him borderline slappable is unthinkable. Rarely are actors so impossibly fascinating. He twitches and sparks fly. Semperi relies on this to make his film compelling when he isn't lifting devices wholesale. Pop music appears because he'd heard it in Masculin Féminin, La Chinoise, L'Avventura and L'Eclisse. The framing and contrast are right out of Bellocchio's China Is Near. The relationship dynamic between Gastoni and Castel is straight out of Bertolucci's Before The Revolution. To add insult to injury, Semperi boosted Revolution's cinematographer Aldo Scavarda, (who, along with Ferzetti, is a hostage from L'Avventura). Even worse, if clearly a coincidence: Bertolucci is now actually confined to a wheelchair due to health problems, as if Semperi wasn't content with stealing from him and took his health while he was at it. That's how powerfully awful this film feels. The editing becomes crisp and angular just as Castel reads a Diabolik comic, suggesting the serialized work of Franju (rather than Bava - Semperi would have needed an actual sense of humour to crib from him), whose work we suddenly feel we're watching second-hand, as if Castel had found one of his films while channel surfing. The political subtext makes the film feel like like a forerunner to Animal House and Revenge of the Nerds about bringing the wealthy elite off their pedestal. Except that Semperi acts like one of the cardigan sporting villains from those movies, looking down on everyone with equal, unearned contempt. It's Snobs Vs. Snobs, and no one wins. As soon as I saw the game he was playing I began joylessly waiting for the incest I knew must surely be on the way, pining for the overblown and misguided La Luna. I knew anything that Bellocchio and Bertolucci flirted with, Grazie, Zia would mount like a drunken coed playing truth or dare. Every Cannes has a dud or two. If only this had been the lone misstep in the 1968 line-up. Unfortunately, greater crimes await us...