Xan Brooks 

Cannes 2011 diary: The meaning of life explodes into ice-cream sundaes

Xan Brooks: Terrence Malick's epic odyssey through prehistory leaves me reeling, especially when it receives the same reaction as Bertrand Bonello's brothel melodrama
  
  

Cannes 2011: Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain at The Tree of Life premiere
Staggering ... Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain at the photocall for Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life. Photograph: Stephane Cardinale/People Avenue/Corbis Photograph: Stephane Cardinale/People Avenue/Corbis

It's week two of the Cannes film festival, though it feels a decade old. By now we have long since grown accustomed to the scrum at the morning screenings, the colliding traffic on the Palais steps and the English-language menus at the restaurants, with their promise of "duck bosoms", "burned cream" and "salmon on a paving stone". My favourite of these mistranslations can be found on a menu in a cafe off the Rue d'Antibes. It reads "Ox Dimensions (one person)", which sounds like a cryptic crossword clue.

We roll through the weekend, blown this way and that by the schedule. The parties play host to the likes of Kanye West and Leonardo DiCaprio; the press conferences to Penélope Cruz and Angelina Jolie (the latter reportedly quizzed on her reaction to the death of Bin Laden), while Harvey Weinstein hoves like a shark through the foyer of the Majestic hotel, passing so close that I feel the air move in his wake. Saturday's big screening is Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, a lumbering, machine-tooled fairground ride of a film, its cars stuffed with amiable pantomime buffoons. Russell Brand stars as naughty Captain Jack and is almost as convincing as Johnny Depp was in that film about Arthur.

Pirates of the Caribbean, of course, screens out of competition, which leaves the top table reserved for the likes of Almodóvar and Von Trier, Sorrentino and Nuri Bilge Ceylan; none of whom have arrived yet. The general consensus appears to be that the three early frontrunners for this year's Palme d'Or are We Need to Talk About Kevin, the Dardenne brothers' The Kid With a Bike and The Artist – a left-field, last-minute entry that charts the end of the silent-screen era. On Sunday night we head out to see Bertrand Bonello's L'Apollonide, an opulent soft-porn melodrama set inside a turn-of-the-20th-century brothel. I don't think it stands a chance. Bonello's film is like some mountainous ice-cream sundae, piled with cream and wafers and sprinkles. It looks ravishing but it's bad for you. Gorge too far and you'll make yourself sick.

This morning it's the Malick, a whole year after it was supposed to unveil. But seeing as The Tree of Life provides nothing less than an Americanised, Malickised adaptation of the book of Genesis, it seems churlish to complain. What's a year's delay when set against the creation of the cosmos, the coming of the dinosaurs, the ice age and the arrival of the first pioneers in what would become the leafy, twilit suburbs of Waco, Texas? Only after all that is out of the way does Malick narrow his focus to one everyday American family; the kids picking their way through an Edenic paradise that will later be torn down and destroyed. Brad Pitt plays the ramrod-straight dad who dreams of being "a big man", while Sean Penn is his son in later life.

I love The Tree of Life. I think it's extraordinary; a high-minded, unashamedly serious picture about the infinite and the finite; about how beauty is fleeting, how we screw up our lives and how the only thing that survives us (maybe) is love. I'm fondly imagining that the rest of the audience is feeling much the same way, but at the end they hoot and boo and the reaction is worse than the one received by Bonello's Victoria's Secret adaptation. So I stagger out in disarray, torn every which way but loose and with 101 things to attend to, not knowing where I'm going or quite how to process the film I've just seen. I'm a mess in other words. Ox dimensions, one person.

 

Leave a Comment

Required fields are marked *

*

*