Out of Harmony's way

We look ahead to the big American presence at this year's Cannes, including the return of Harmony Korine.

May 14 2007

It's a big year for American cinema at this year's Cannes, which opens next week with the world premiere of Wong Kar-Wai's 'My Blueberry Nights', the Hong Kong filmmaker's first Stateside work and his first in the English language. Of America's homegrown filmmakers, Gus Van Sant will cross the Atlantic with 'Paranoid Park', a tale of skateboarders and murder; Michael Moore will follow 'Fahrenheit 9/11' with 'Sicko', an attack on the US healthcare system; the Coen brothers will screen their adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's 'No Country for Old Men'; and David Fincher will compete for the Palme d'Or for the first time with 'Zodiac', his film about a notorious series of unsolved murders in 1970s San Francisco.

But for many, the biggest question mark and most anticipation are reserved for Harmony Korine, the 34-year-old filmmaker from Tennessee who will screen 'Mister Lonely', his first feature after eight years in the filmmaking wilderness. During that time, he lived for a while in both London and Paris, collaborated with David Blaine, indulged his more bacchic habits, went teetotal and, finally, returned to a quieter life in Nashville, his home town, where he wrote 'Mister Lonely'. It's Korine's third feature as a writer-director and he shot most of it last summer in Paris and Scotland, with a few further scenes filmed in Panama that feature his friend and sometime collaborator, Werner Herzog (and, we're told, nuns tumbling from a moving plane).

The finished film remains under wraps but, last July, Time Out read the script and popped over to the film's set in Paris, where we found Korine out on the streets and shooting Diego Luna as a Michael Jackson impersonator and Samantha Morton as a Marilyn Monroe lookalike. In character and costume, the pair were sitting outside a café near the Montparnasse cemetery as the cameras rolled. Parisians wandered past unaware, both in front of and behind the camera, many of them doing double-takes as two of the twentieth century's most popular icons apparently sipped coffee together.

'Mister Lonely' is about lost souls – all the characters are impersonators (James Fox plays the Pope) – who find some serenity in each other. And it's Korine's comeback film in more ways than one. It's no coincidence he sets the story in Paris, a city that represents a personal nadir for him. It was in the French capital, he tells me during a break from filming, that he was 'flat on my back for eight months' just a few years ago.

He was lost and losing it. He doesn't mention drugs directly, but we both know what he's talking about. The character of 'Mister Lonely', a celebrity impersonator looking for meaning and love in the big city, is a version of himself. In 2003, Larry Clark – for whom Korine wrote both 'Kids' in 1995 and 'Ken Park' in 2002 – drew his own conclusions on Korine's well-being, lamenting that he 'has his drugs, he has his sycophants and I hope he makes it'. By all accounts, including Korine's own, he very nearly didn't.

He never disappeared entirely. To recap, he first caught the eye in 1995 as the 20-year-old writer of 'Kids', the Larry Clark film that tracked a bunch of New York teenagers as they drank, smoked, screwed and shot the breeze. Then in 1997 came 'Gummo', a disturbing portrait of delinquent kids in a screwed-up rural Ohio town which played out as a series of images, moments and episodes that swung from cat-slaying to moments of tender intimacy and which defiantly denied plot. ('Plot disgusts me,' Korine says, 'real life doesn't have plots.') And then in 1999 he made 'Julien Donkey-Boy', for which he scrapped the idea of a screenplay altogether and crafted through improvisation a portrait of a troubled American family that featured his 'Kids' and 'Gummo' collaborator and one-time girlfriend, Chloë Sevigny, and marked his first casting of Herzog as an actor.

Korine has always had a bad rap in some quarters. Some observers of his sudden rise to style-mag sainthood as the writer of 'Kids' couldn't stand what they saw as his hipster petulance – his willingness as an outspoken, upstart twentysomething to speak frankly about the world around him, freely slagging off other directors, from Francis Ford Coppola ('he can't do what he wants because he's got, like, one hundred wine cellars and 4,000 people to feed, and has to live in some kind of mansion') to those 'indie' names and Sundance faces with whom lazy critics were quick to bracket him, much to his annoyance. 'I say terrible things about anyone if I feel like it,' he once said. 'I don't care if they get hurt.'

Some couldn't stand the bedraggled, skater look he sported on David Letterman in 1998 to promote his directorial debut 'Gummo', looking like he'd been swept off the streets and giggling as if he was off his head. ('I notice that his pants are sewn together with dental floss,' wrote one Vice magazine interviewer in 1998, with obvious admiration.) Some thought he was a fake, a well-brought-up kid pretending to be a hick: 'Harmony pretending to be one of those lower-class kids is ridiculous. He's a middle-class Jewish kid,' sniped Larry Clark (they fell out badly over ownership of the script for 'Ken Park'). Others just hated his films. David Denby of the New Yorker decided that 'Gummo' was 'beyond redemption', while, here, Christopher Tookey of the Daily Mail wrote of 'this extravagantly untalented twit'.

In contrast, the radical spirits of cinema – Gus Van Sant, Werner Herzog, Lars von Trier – were quick to celebrate him. Von Trier invited 'Julien Donkey-Boy' to be the first American film to join the Dogme community. Herzog has returned to work with him on 'Mister Lonely' and Agnès B is the executive producer of the new film. Those he touches, he touches deeply: when Ewen Bremner was looking to name his child soon after acting in 'Julien Donkey-Boy', he chose Harmony.

Korine is an enlightened clown; an intellectual and a fool in the same body. A short film he made in 2000 shows him blacked up and tap-dancing in his backyard. In old interviews he switches from discussing Greek tragedy to explaining his never-finished 'Fight Harm' project – footage of him deliberately getting beaten up on the street. 'I feel like PT Barnum,' he said in 2003 when talking of his only major film project in the past eight years: filming for television his friend David Blaine living in a transparent box by Tower Bridge for 44 days. Now he's rejected some of his more destructive habits (he doesn't even drink) and decided to go back to his roots, we await his new film with all this behind us and hope it's the beginning of a renewed energy in this fascinating, opinionated and rare cinematic spirit.

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