Last year, when the Telluride Film Festival asked me to help organize a tribute to the director Eugène Green, I happily accepted the assignment, even if the task fell to me less because of any special talents I possess than because I was, at that point, one of the few persons in America familiar with Green's work. Not one of his films has been commercially distributed in the U.S., and prior to Telluride, no U.S. festival had endeavored to present a Green retrospective. As Green himself later told me, his own producers had repeatedly assured him that there would be no audience in America for his films, no matter that Green himself is an American, if one who has spent most of his adult life living in Paris.

Even in France, and despite a strong base of critical support, he remains something of a marginal figure, often unable to raise the funds he needs to make a new film. Yet Green has persisted, and since making his feature debut in 2001 with Toutes les Nuits, he has directed two additional features and one short that I take to be among the most breathtakingly original in modern movies. So, it is to be regarded as one of the major achievements of Cannes 2006 that Green (who presented his 2003 feature Le Monde Vivant in the Director's Fortnight sidebar) has ascended to the ranks of the festival's Official Selection with a new 30-minute "mini-film" called Signs, which is being screened as part of a special program that also includes new shorts by Jane Campion, Gaspar Noé and Monte Hellman. Good company indeed.

To describe Green's cinema is no easy feat: baroque music abounds on the soundtrack, the actors deliver their lines while staring directly into the camera (when, that is, we're not seeing a close-up on a hand or a shoe), and the real frequently collides with the mythic. Le Monde Vivant, for example, seemed like nothing short of a remake of Shrek directed by Robert Bresson, with its disarming tale of a brave "knight" (attired in oxford shirt, blue jeans and cardboard sword) who sets out to slay a child-eating ogre with the aid of a fearsome lion that just happened to be played onscreen by a Labrador retriever. But the key themes in Green's work — love and loss, disappearance and return — are both universal and eternal, which is what I suspect made the Telluride retrospective so successful that additional screenings had to be added to the schedule.

In Signs, a mother and her two young sons living in a small fishing village pine for the husband and father who vanished without a trace a decade earlier. Each in turn then encounters a mysterious fisherman (played by Munich and Kings and Queen star Mathieu Amalric), who may or may not be the missing man, and who even if he is has certainly been transformed by his journey. Like all of Green's films, this one is a fable, about a group of characters who find themselves at a crossroads, and how they come to choose which of many possible paths upon which to shine their symbolic candles. "How does one search?" one character asks, only to be answered "By looking at the world." And there are few greater pleasures to be had in Cannes this year than looking at the world through the eyes of Eugène Green.

--------

Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://mt.laweekly.com/mt-tb.cgi/35328