Cannes diary day 11: 'A Scanner Darkly' review

Geoff Andrew sizes up the new films from Richard Linklater, Paolo Sorrentino and Rachid Bouchareb.

May 25 2006

Since 'Bamako' and 'Babel', it must be said that this writer had found little of note to admire in the Festival, especially in terms of the Competition: in their very different ways, both 'Marie Antoinette' and 'La Raison du Plus Faible' left him terribly unimpressed.

And while Richard Linklater's animated account of Philip K Dick's 'A Scanner Darkly' has considerably more intelligence than may be found in those two films put together, it must be said that it is so verbose as to be somewhat dull and soporific. Fans of the book may enjoy the movie, and Linklater still appears to have some diehard cult followers, but this is very far from being up there with the finest of his films, and perhaps even less generally accessible than 'Waking Life'.

It was with some anxiety, then, after such disappointments, that I went into the screening of Paolo Sorrentino's follow-up to 'The Consequences of Love'. Happily, I emerged from 'The Family Friend' in considerably better spirits. For while it's true that the film is probably less immediately enjoyable than its predecessor, it's immediately apparent from the very first scenes that we're watching a supremely assured and able filmmaker at work.

Like 'Consequences', the movie kicks off by centring on a protagonist hard to sympathise with and then invites us to reconsider our initial assumptions; this time around, the monstrosity in question is Geremia, a repulsively ugly, odorous, lecherous and avaricious tailor and moneylender happily squeezing maximum profits out of vulnerable victims at the drop of the potato-packed bandage he wears around his temples to stave off migraines. When the parents of a local beauty-queen borrow money for her wedding, he finds feelings aroused in him which are – or so he believes, at least – more to do with love than lust. Not that that prevents him accepting sexual favours in return for a reduced interest rate…

It's questionable whether Sorrentino makes us care for Geremia – which may have something to do with the rather over-copious shots in the film that display unclothed nubile female flesh – but he certainly manages to make us interested in his fate, and to believe in the strange, very slightly surreal world concocted for the movie.

The Scope camera comes at this world and its inhabitants from an impressive variety of angles, accompanied usually by very well selected music. But Sorrentino also fashions a witty, intensely stylish film that for all its surface appeal is also concerned with issues of ugliness and beauty, fear and desire, attraction and repulsion, power and need.

Some find his technique flashy or his narrative needlessly fragmented; go with it, however, and at the very least you're left with a clutch of intriguing questions and some of the most memorable images produced by the Festival.

Next to Sorrentino's film, 'Indigènes' ('Days of Glory') seems in some respects positively antiquated, since Rachid Bouchareb deploys a determinedly linear narrative to chart the experiences of a number of North Africans fighting for the French army in order to liberate la patrie from the Nazis during the second half of the war.

It's a tale of training oneself as a solder, of coping with the constant risk of death, of dealing with difficult superiors – in which regards it resembles hundreds of other war movies; but it's also very specifically concerned with the institutional racism and injustices meted out to second-class colonial troops by a country priding itself on its devotion to freedom, equality and brotherhood.

And it's there that the film gains its special power. While in many ways it can be seen simply as a maghrebi version of 'Band of Brothers', the refusal to reduce the characters to black-and-white ciphers do ensure that we are caught up in the movie as drama rather than as a polemical rewriting of history; the robust but subtle performances of a fine cast help out no end in this respect too.

But the fact that Bouchareb also proves himself a very fine genre director – the suspense built up for a final clash with the Germans in an Alsace village is quite terrific – makes the film compelling through, so that we really do come to care about why these men fight and what they will get out of it. The ending is sobering, and shows the movie's continuing relevance. Small wonder it was greeted with rather more applause at the press screening than anything in days.

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