Cannes: Day Eight continued

The competition films go into 'sudden and steep decline' with 'Sin City' and 'Peindre ou Faire l'Amour'.

May 18 2005

The string of strong films in the Cannes competition had to come to an end at some point, and with 'Sin City' (all right but overlong if you like that kind of thing) and 'Peindre ou Faire l'Amour' ('To Paint or Make Love'), it went into sudden and steep decline.

The latter, by Arnaud and Jean-Marie Larrieu, is not quite as pretentious as their 'Un Homme, Un Vrai', which played at last year's LFF, but it's pretty insufferable all the same.

Indeed, it would probably be wholly unwatchable if it weren't for an engaging cast – all of them, however, underperforming somewhat due to the drippy, dippy script.

Daniel Auteuil is the weatherman who's just taken early retirement, Sabine Azéma his Sunday-painter wife who introduces him to the pleasures of a run-down farmhouse for sale in the Vercours mountains.

She in turn was shown it by Sergi López, blind mayor of the local village and hubby of luscious Amira Casar, who turn out to be the new homeowners' only real neighbours.

They get on well enough from the start, especially as López, who can recognise the fragrance of his spouse from across a spring meadow, is clearly some kind of wise nature-boy (the song gets a couple of outings to underline the point), but once he and Casar have had their own home go up in flames, Azéma and Auteuil invite them to stay and things start getting complicated…

The problem with the film is not only that it's packed with implausible scenes – at one point the canny López leads his new pals back home across a hill and through a forest on a moonless night, all in about 90 seconds – but that it's so risibly smug and arty-farty.

At one point Azéma and Auteuil complain about some prospective house-buyers as ghastly, vulgar types who will build swimming pools and bring ponies, but when the next couple who turn up announce themselves as graphic designers into sculpture, it's more or less a case of 'Soyez bienvenus, mes amis – would you like to come in and fuck my wife?'

This, coupled with a pair of poems set to poncy pop music on the soundtrack, is fairly symptomatic of the tone of what is basically a pretty witless ménage à quatre that endeavours, among other things, to eroticise blindness.

A few reckoned it possibly ironic, which may be true of a handful of moments but certainly can't salvage a fiasco notable only for its fine photography of a lovely landscape.

In the Un Certain Regard section, Iranian actress Niki Karimi made a decent debut as writer-director with 'One Night', in which a young woman, ousted from her home by a mother indulging in an affair with her friend's husband, wanders Tehran for the night.

Most of this actually consists of her being given lifts to one destination or another by three men in succession, and having conversations with them about their lives and their attitudes to male-female relations – which inevitably calls to mind Kiarostami's '10' (and, indeed, '20 Fingers', the likewise derivative directorial debut of Mania Akbari, the lead actress in '10').

But towards the end we also get a scene reminiscent of 'Crimson Gold' (which Kiarostami wrote), and then another which first looks like it's going to turn into a variation on the end of 'The Taste of Cherry' and then caps it with a coda reminiscent of 'And Life Goes On…'

It's good to see filmmakers absorbing the influence of Kiarostami rather than someone like Michael Bay, but one does wish that they'd learn from his methods and principles rather than simply mimic his narratives.

That said, 'One Night' is a touching, illuminating, efficient first feature, and it'll be interesting to see what Karimi comes up with next.

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