Cannes may be still abuzz with the roaring engines of George Miller's "Mad Max: Fury Road"—a joyful act of kinetic overkill that provided a tingly
morning jolt to members of the press—but there's also a quieter fare playing
here that can be no less thrilling in its own unassuming way.
Whereas the Main Competiton kicked off yesterday with Matteo Garrone's "Tale
of Tales," an interesting if uneven rumination on the theme of loss and
disenchantment, today saw the opening of a side section called Un Certain
Regard, which is nominally a second-string competition, but sometimes offers
films to rival the quality of those officially vying for the Golden Palm (as
was the case with such fare as Alain Guiraudie's "Stranger by the Lake" and
Ruben Östlund's "Force Majeure").
This year's opener of the section was Naomi Kawase's "An," a cloyingly sentimental yarn of an elderly pastry chef
transforming lives around her through the magic she does with the titular pancake
filling. Kawase is a long-time Cannes darling and I may be alone in my emotional
immunity to her films, but it needs to be said that this particular one feels
extremely calculated in its effort to become an arthouse version of the popular
inspiration-through-cookery genre that gave us "Babette's Feast" and "Chef" at
its best, and "Chocolat" and "Eat Pray Love" at its worst.
Formally speaking, the film's inoffensive simplicity suggests finger-painting,
and offers about as much sophistication in terms of character development and
theme. Also, to this foodie's disappointment, Kawase doesn't try to come up
with a way of filming food preparation itself that would seem appropriately loving
and sensual. Instead, we end up literally staring into a simmering pot of beans
for much of the film's running time, while the main character (rather
bullyingly) brings good cheer to everyone she meets—especially her grumpy
boss, whose dislike of sweets is an all-too-easy shorthand for the chronic
unhappiness from which he suffers.
Much more accomplished is "One Floor Below," Radu Muntean's excellent
and much-awaited follow-up to "Tuesday, After Christmas", the 2010 festival hit
that remains one of finest achievements of the so-called New Romanian Cinema.
Just like in his previous features ("Summer Holiday," "The Paper Will Be Blue"
and "Tuesday…," all co-written by Alexandru Baciu and Razvan Radulescu), at the
center of "One Floor Below" is a male character under moral pressure, entangled
in a thickening web of self-delusion while striving to preserve some sort of
control over his life.
As played by the immediately likable (yet consistently cryptic) Teodor
Corban, the main character here is a middle-aged man of the family breaking a
social rule and trying to cope in the wake of his deed. The story's set-up has
a near-Hitchockian clarity that positions the film immediately as a purposeful
variation on "Rear Window". We first see Patrascu jogging at a park with his
dog and trying to stick to his diet (his belly clearly shows, but so does his
determination to lose it). Upon returning home, he overhears a violent neighborly
row and decides to neglect it. Soon after, he learns a murder has been
committed in the apartment the argument took place in—however, when the policeman
comes knocking, Patrascu decides to withhold information about what he had witnessed.
This single decision comes as a surprise early on in the film and is
left unexplained by the script, which is why I suspect "One Floor Below" will
win fewer fans among Western cinephiles than "Tuesday," which also implicated the audience in the
main character's double-dealing, but since the latter was merely adulterous in
nature, the viewers might have found themselves a bit more forgiving (or at
least understanding). Here, what we witness amounts to a blatant violation of
one's civic duty, and in order to understand it, one cannot forget that the main
character is very much a product of an era of communist rule in Romania. His
reluctance to aid the police in the investigation is as clear a sign of his
personal fear (he suspects he knows who the murderer is and he doesn't want the
guy to be after his family) as it is of his alienation from society at large,
still marked by the aftermath of Ceauşescu's morally draining regime. The film
doesn't state any of this outright and instead weaves the argument into the
script very subtly: we see how easily corruptible the state clerks are at a licence plate workshop, then witness the main character tentatively approaching
the police only through a personal friend who happens to work in the force (old
habits die hard: in most communist countries, the only way of assuring
something got done was to have a member of the family work in some official
capacity).
All this comes wrapped in a suspense scenario: Muntean's signature
device is a long take of an ostensibly innocent conversation, usually focused
on technicalities in a specific field (dental care in "Tuesday", computer equipment
in "Floor"), with a subtle tension mounting due to viewers being privy to the
characters' hidden secrets. By stretching those moments in time, Muntean not
only builds palpable tension, but also shows the length his characters are
willing to go in order to avoid confrontation with the truth and maintain
illusion of order in their lives (this very delusion may be, in fact, his
favorite subject).
As I was watching the film, I admired how subtle it is in portraying a
man whose sense of social belonging and responsibility has been destroyed
almost totally by the authoritarian political system he grew up in. At the same
time, I feared that the way of articulating the subject matter may be too
offhand and subtle for it to fully register with audiences that haven't grown
up (as I have) within the former communist block. The key to appreciating "One
Floor Below" is to keep in mind that it takes place in a country still troubled
by its past—just like the son of the main character proves to be troubled by
chaotic, video game-fueled dreams in the film's last, strangely comforting
scene that is as close as Muntean gets here to articulating something akin to hope.
