Cannes: Day Two continued

An assessment of Kim Ki-Duk's new film as well as the latest offering from Alain Cavalier.

May 13 2005

Cannes is a funny place, full of contradictions and absurdities.

A hot ticket in terms of an extremely quickly packed press show was 'The Bow', the latest slice of sexual-spiritual mumbo-jumbo from Korea's cult favourite Kim Ki-Duk, though to hear the hacks laying into it and him afterwards, you'd wonder why most of them turned up in the first place.

I myself, having been put off seeing 'The Isle' by others' descriptions of it, and having found 'Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter, Spring…' (or whatever it was interminably titled) pretentious and essentially dishonest poppycock, carefully placed myself at the end of a row, imagining an early exit might be desirable.

Not only desirable, as it turned out, but altogether necessary.

I managed just half an hour of the bogus folkloric fluff, in which, for no clear reason, a 16-year-old beauty, who for no clear reason has been kept on board a boat by its 60-year-old owner (a fiddle-playing archer – hence the title – who aims to marry her on her 17th birthday). But the girl is paid court by and falls for one of the young fishermen who visit his vessel for angling and fortune-telling.

Sound appetising? Maybe, if you're a senile sexagenarian angler with a penchant for jailbait and clairvoyance, but otherwise, the endlessly picturesque yet empty images (think shampoo commercials coupled with 'Mondo Topless'-era Russ Meyer), the schoolgirl fetish, the broad acting, and the cod-symbolic emphasis on arcane ritual will have you gagging – probably with laughter.

But the joke wears thin very quickly, mainly because Kim doesn't see it himself. Apart from laughing all the way to the bank, he appears to take himself very seriously.

If Kim's cynical manipulations are thought by some misguided souls to typify auteur cinema of profoundly personal commitment and significance, they should check out 'Le Filmeur', the latest digital work from Alain Cavalier and also in the Un Certain Regard strand.

Cavalier first came to the fore in the '80s with 'Thérèse', which, while a dramatic feature, seemed more interested in painterly images than in relating an event-filled story.

His later 'Libera Me' was a more experimental work, a series of wordless balletic tableux which slowly built up to a poetic but powerful study of torture, cruelty and imprisonment.

Thereafter he moved into a far more personal video-diary-cum-essay form, and 'Le Filmeur' perpetuates the momentum of works like 'The Encounter', the only difference being that here Cavalier shows his own face.

What emerges is partly a record of his own life, partly a billet doux to his beloved Françoise, partly a document of the world around him, and partly a meditation on life, ageing, illness and death – and the camera's relationship to all the aforementioned.

It's at its most touching when dealing with Françoise and his frail, ailing parents; it's also often witty and, in its own modest way, philosophically perceptive. But in the end it can't entirely evade accusations of self-indulgence.

Still, compared to the Korean movie, its integrity is immediately evident.

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