Cannes - do not put up

Time Out offers up its opinion on Sam Shepard's return as writer and actor, and its not good.

May 19 2005

Maybe it was the return of Sam Shepard as writer and actor, maybe it was goodwill towards executive producer Jeremy Thomas, or maybe it was just plain wishful thinking, but there have been rumours going around since the start of the Festival that Wim Wenders’ ‘Don’t Come Knocking’ was going to provide evidence of a return to form for the director.

No such luck, sadly; if anything the new movie is worse than his last Cannes entry, ‘The End of Violence’.

And it’s not only Wenders who seems to have lost it; both Shepard’s script and, for the most part, his performance are well below par.

He plays an ageing bad-boy western star, Howard Spence, who goes awol from a movie being shot in the desert by George Kennedy, heading off to see the mother (Eva Marie Saint, perhaps the best thing in the movie, for what that’s worth) he hasn’t seen for years.

She informs him he has a child up in Montana, the fruit of one his many trysts over decades of loose living; he hazards a guess at the identity of the woman who rang her, and heads north, unaware that the completion guarantee company for his movie have sent Tim Roth on his trail. So far, so hackneyed, but it gets worse as the movie slides into incoherence and inconsequentiality, not to mention a disregard for logic in terms of narrative and characterisation – by the end it feels as if they were making things up as they went along. There are some generous souls who view the entire movie as absurdist parody, but this writer and what seemed to be the majority of viewers regarded any laughter it provoked as wholly unintentional. What’s more, the film doesn’t even look good; where’s Mr Müller when Wim needs him?

Considerably better than the German’s catastrophic cowboy saga was ‘Sleeper’, a first feature by Austria’s Benjamin Heisenberg, playing in the Un Certain Regard strand. The film is modest, straightforward and almost entirely successful in its ambitions as it charts the changes in the relationship between two young scientists involved in virus research and a girl they both fall for; what makes this story rather more than a conventional love-triangle drama is the fact that one of the boffins has been asked to keep an eye on and report on his Muslim colleague by the security services. As such it’s a study of loyalty, envy and betrayal, with Heisenberg and his fine young cast delivering subtle nuances in such a way that the movie is at once astute in its insights, precise in its observations, and very relevant to the mood of a post-9/11 world.

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