Cannes Film Festival - At Cannes

There’s a festive atmosphere at Cannes this year: organisers are high-fiving because attendance is up; the press is in a jolly mood because the line-up looks good; fans are grinning because the stars are working the red carpet hard; and pop culture addicts are tripping over themselves because Lady Gaga is somewhere in the vicinity (possibly wearing another dress made of meat). On top of all that, Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris” put a spring in most people’s step.

Look, even the poker-face security guys checking press badges below are getting into the Cannes spirit. Yep, that's them smiling.

The premise is a university student (Emily Browning) who takes a job as a call girl, but is put to sleep before clients have their way with her – so when she awakes, she remembers nothing. Leigh crafts glacially elegant images, relying on silence, stillness, and geometrically precise compositions to evoke a mood of dread and suggest the girl's emotional numbness and lack of freedom – at least I think that’s what she’s doing. The problem is all the coolness and symmetry, when coupled with little context for what happens onscreen, make for a needlessly alienating viewing experience.

Leigh’s refusal to use overly explicit psychological motives to explain her character’s behaviour is wise. But the combination of an outrageous tale, bare-bones storytelling, and a clinical, detached visual approach results in a movie that’s mostly asinine and incoherent, rather than mysterious. I left the theatre wishing I, too, could get my hands on one of those magic pills to make me forget the last hour and forty minutes.

I even told the cheerful woman pictured below, a non-accredited cinephile hoping to score an invitation to one of the screenings, that she should try for a different movie.

Much has been made of the fact that the festival this year has spotlighted the work of female directors and given the opening slot in the competition to one. In its "24 Frames" blog today (Thursday), the Los Angeles Times describes the film this way "A tragedy in multiple keys, difficult to watch but impossible to turn away from, Kevin reinforces Ramsay's reputation as a director in complete control of all aspects of the medium." Peter Bradshaw of Britain's Guardian newspaper suggests that Kevin is the kind of film that distinctly benefits from a woman's touch. "Ramsay's superb film reminds us that someone does the dirty, dreary work of explaining, feeling unhappy, going on prison visits and generally carrying the can bearing the blame. And that may well be the mother," he writes. "As Swinton's Eva wearily washes off the red paint that someone has splattered over her porch, the movie wanly restates the undramatic truth the mess must be cleaned up somehow, and it isn't the men who wind up doing it." Like that one, some of the most gripping scenes in the film are the ones without dialogue (another example a flashback scene of Swinton with her killer son Kevin as a baby, screaming as she attempts to quiet him -- unsuccessfully.) At a news conference following the screening Swinton remarked, "I'm of the belief that cinema went downhill ever since people began talking in it.