Old Masters. - Cannes Review 2001 - movie review

The 54th Festival International du Film closed much as it had opened, with a shrug of disappointment. Cannes had promised a festival of auteurs -- there were new films from Godard, Rivette, Imamura, Oliveira -- and this it delivered, sometimes brilliantly. For many festivalgoers, equally exciting was the notion that a younger generation would fulfill its auteur promise as well, a promise that the likes of Shinji Aoyama, Todd Solondz, Tsai Ming-liang and Cedric Kahn consistently failed to live up to or even suggest. If nothing else, their failure intimated, however unfairly, that the idea of the auteur is as much in question as film itself. "The drama does not reside in the growing old of men," Andre Bazin wrote in 1957, "but in that of the cinema: those who do not know how to grow old with it will be overtaken by its evolution." As it turns out, the greatest films at Cannes this year were from three septuagenarians and one nonagenarian, men who have grown old with cinema, men who have not been overtaken by its evolution -- or even its increasing irrelevance. Yet when they are gone, what then? Can cinema exist much less evolve without new auteurs to take their place?

If the overall dearth of good work was disappointing, so too was the inevitability of the critical response. Bouquets were tossed at obvious favorites and thorns stuck in work that was perceived as difficult and disturbing, qualities that in most other arts are generally accepted or, at the very least, tolerated. One of the best films in competition was also one of the most critically reviled -- Michael Haneke's The Piano Teacher, a harrowing story of sex and fascism about the ties that bind and those that throttle. Based on the novel by Elfriede Jelinek and set in contemporary Vienna, the film stars Isabelle Huppert as Erika, a woman in her forties who, after a lifetime of captivity under her mother's watch, has become a prisoner of her own grotesque desires. Erika, trained to become a concert pianist, condemned to teach those for whom she feels contempt, lives alone with her mother, a harridan who is at once her jailer, her only family, her single friend. The pair even sleep in the same room, side by side like husband and wife, twinned corpses fast on the rot.

The two live in an apartment that has become a de facto tomb, one of those sun-forsaken spaces in which fictional women are so often condemned to live out their fates. (Years earlier, the father and husband had been condemned to an insane asylum, an unfortunately overdetermined piece of the puzzle.) The piano teacher is equally forsaken: she's a stranger to most human connections, with pleasures that are both parsimonious and fugitive. There is the occasional clothing purchase and, shockingly, furtive visits to porn emporiums. Neatly dressed, hands gloved, Erika pushes by the staring (or sheepish) men and cloisters herself in private video booths. There, she digs through the trash and retrieves used tissue paper, which she then holds to her nose, breathing in the aroma of semen as she watches the mechanical sexual display -- rapt, captive once more.

It's an arresting vision, all the more outrageous for the gulf between Erika's appearance -- she holds the tissue like some swooning Victorian -- and the specificity of her kink. As with the title character of Jeanne Dielman, Erika is alive but not living, condemned to a monotony so precisely calibrated that even her heel clicks have the dead rhythm of a metronome. All this upends when one of Erika's students makes a play for her. Swooping down on her (in the "ladies room"), he persuades her to become his lover, a proposal she accepts provisionally. The vision of female masochism that emerges is spot-on but finally subsidiary to the film's larger points about fascism, which here begins in the home and spirals out into the world. Still, for all its political resonance it is the human factor that makes the movie shattering. Huppert won the award for Best Actress, a prize that she deserved for, if nothing else, the moment when her face turns into a spasm of pain so terrifying, so ugly, it's a wonder we all didn't turn to stone.

No single image in Mulholland Drive is as scary as the void of Huppert's howling mouth, but David Lynch's new film is shot through with shivers as nervous-making as they are pleasing. (Lynch shared the Best Director award with Joel Coen, who won for the jejune noir pastiche, The Man Who Wasn't There.) Originally slated for broadcast on television, where it was rejected, this site-specific cautionary tale about Los Angeles feels very much like the media hybrid it is. Newcomer Naomi Watts plays Betty Elms, a would-be movie actress with stars in her eyes and cliches on her lips. Stepping out of the airport into the Los Angeles sun, she all but bursts into song (she tugs forth a string of platitudes instead) with an unfeigned enthusiasm that marks her as yet another of Lynch's naifs whose comeuppance seems assured. She is and she isn't, which is key to the film's various surprises and its unexpected emotional warmth.