Wherever you look this year in Cannes, this tall, slender, formidable figure sticks out, whose white-blonde head of hair glows in the summer sun. Tilda Swinton has a fabulous five films at the festival this year. The Scottish actress, who turned sixty last year, appears ageless, more productive, more interesting and more sought-after than ever by directors. In the July heat of this pandemic Cannes, the presence of your person, who, thanks to their patented permanent paleness, strolls around like a sun allergy incarnate, is a very special experience.
Swinton made her biggest appearance in “Memoria”, the new work by the Thai cinema Zen dreamer Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who won the Palme d’Or eleven years ago and has since been one of the leading film authors of the present. This time he swapped the rainforest of Southeast Asia, where his films were often set, for the jungle of Colombia. In many carefully composed picture tableaus he emphasizes the old-fashioned, sometimes slightly brutalist architecture of the city of Medellín. Tilda Swinton plays an orchid researcher who doesn’t have too much to do there. Therefore she can look at her surroundings in long, very calm shots with contemplative amazement. In her curiosity about everything she is a kind of alter ego of the director – and also the producer of the film.
The film sounds like a wrecking ball is crashing into a gigantic meditation gong
Her film character also has a kind of mission, because one early morning she is startled from sleep by a loud clap of thunder that echoes in her head. It sounds like a wrecking ball is crashing into a gigantic meditation gong. Apparently she’s the only one who hears the noise, which worries her and not only leads to a doctor, but also to a state-of-the-art recording studio. There she tries to reconstruct the sound in her head with a helpful young sound designer from a database of noises. Just how the two try to encircle sound with language – a little “rounder” here, a little more “earthy” there – leads to an unforgettable scene about the secrets of hearing and the modeling of sounds.
As is so often the case with Weerasethakul, the film more and more evades the waking logic of the day, becomes a journey into the jungle and a kind of trance experience that remains fascinating, even if practically nothing happens for a while. In any case, the origin of the enigmatic thunder dissolves in the end – so spectacularly that the scene in the director’s rather quiet oeuvre strikes a completely new note. In any case, Weerasethakul is again a contender for a palm with “Memoria” when the festival ends on Saturday evening and the jury, led by Spike Lee, awards the prizes.
Whether Sean Baker’s film “Red Rocket” from the USA has a chance would be an exciting question. The film is brilliantly played and very gripping, but its background theme – America’s porn industry and what it does to people – maybe a bit too disreputable for international awards. With films like “Tangerine LA” and “The Florida Project”, Baker has already empathized brilliantly with people on the fringes of American society who keep slipping into the hustler and prostitute milieu in the struggle for survival. His new antihero Mikey is one of those characters too: injured, burned out and without a cent in his pocket, he returns to his old home, the oil workers’ suburb of Texas City. In Los Angeles he was once a bigger number as a porn star, now he can’t get a foot in the door there. He is played by Simon Rex, who was a porn star himself before starting a normal film career.
Sahar Goldust in the drama “Ghahreman / A Hero” by Asghar Farhadi in the competition in Cannes.
(Photo: Festival de Cannes)
How Mikey now, with lies and truths at the same time, with a crooked smile and genuine charm, sneaks back into his old childhood sweetheart and later porn partner, who now lives completely burned down with her mother, like again after endless self-destruction and injuries between the two Hope buds is fascinating to watch. Seldom has the cinema captured the seductive power of a narcissist so convincingly. But when Mikey fixes his fatal charm on a seventeen-year-old donut saleswoman named Strawberry, whom he not only wants to get into bed, but also wants to turn into a porn actress, one gets scared and anxious. Then you marvel at how genuinely sexy Sean Baker stages this new couple, without any excuses, and finally how plausible the developments remain. The suburban and youth culture of the USA, that means, has long been much closer to the porn world than expected …
But once again the Iranian Asghar Farhadi is closer to palm chances with his film “Ghahreman / A Hero”, whose tragically tricky social studies have already won two Oscars, Berlin bears and Cannes prizes. Farhadi also shows an antihero. A man named Rahim (Amir Jadidi), who is in prison and who is on leave for the first time. This criminal is so gentle and friendly that you take him to your heart straight away – and the woman he learned to love while in custody (Sahar Goldust) would do anything for him. She found a bag of gold coins at a bus stop and could use the money to pay half the debt he is incarcerated on. Nevertheless, the couple decided against it and hung up leaflets with the find. The coins go back to their owner, who really needs them urgently …
“The really exciting things never go away,” predicts Tilda Swinton in an interview
The noble act aroused the interest of the prison administration. Rahim is presented as a kind of model prisoner, gives interviews on television and wins more and more supporters who want to settle his debt. Too bad that he cannot name his fiancée as the finder of the coins, their connection is not official. As a small white lie, he pretends to be the finder, but as always with Farhadi, seemingly venial little sins later lead to the greatest complications. Nobody is really angry in these films, everyone has their reasons and their burden to bear, but Farhadi’s mastery leads the characters on paths where an honor is destroyed or a life is ruined. The only thing that speaks against “Ghahreman” in the jury meetings about the palm tree: Farhadi has already tried out a very similar dynamic in films like “Nader & Simin”, and at that time he weaved his web of threads of fate a little more inevitably and plausibly than here.
The day is finally coming when you can no longer see Tilda Swinton shining on the red carpet from afar, but rather ask her a few questions up close in a hotel suite. The theme in this case is her film with Wes Anderson, “The French Dispatch”, where she plays an American in Paris and a fabulous art critic. When asked about role models for the role, she admits that she didn’t really want to imitate a specific person, but that studying with Rosamund Bernier unfortunately turned out to be a key experience. This real American in Paris who was the influential art magazine in 1955 L’oeil and was intimate with Matisse, Picasso and Miró, has given lectures with great theatrical verve later in life: “I couldn’t resist stealing many of their gestures and mannerisms,” says Swinton.
Will journalism ever produce such figures again? Then she shakes off all nostalgia and flashes the unstoppable energy that you need to place five films at the same time in Cannes: “No matter how much we complain about the decline, I’m sure of one thing: the really exciting things never go away . “