Killer Styles
The 51st edition of the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs marked the first under the stewardship of Italian curator Paolo Moretti, who replaces former delegate general Edouard Waintrop following the latter’s seven-year reign as head of Cannes’ most prominent parallel program. Over the course of Waintrop’s solid if unspectacular tenure, the Quinzaine seemed to settle comfortably into its standing as a clearing house for auteur films generally thought to have been either passed over by the official selection committee (rightly or wrongly), or not paid much mind at all due to affiliations with this or that style or genre or subject. (Indeed, Waintrop programmed more genre films during his tenure than the section had ever previously seen.) As a result, the Quinzaine remains crucial to adding diversity and dimension to a festival that, over this same time, has taken only half-measures (if that) toward revamping its programming hierarchy. As for Moretti, it’ll likely take more than one edition to get a read on where he plans to take the program, which this year was for the most part indistinguishable from a Waintrop-assembled selection. In a recent interview with Sight & Sound online, Moretti acknowledged as much, conceding that “change is obviously ongoing and the first year is generally not very representative of the potential of a project, so I hope I will be given a few more years to develop things yet further.”
Fair play, and to Moretti’s credit, although he did play it safe, the program that he and his team put together was wideranging and eccentric, balancing established names a first for the Quinzaine—even mediums. Comprised of three individual installations, marries the Taiwanese new-media artist’s interests in interactive technology with the American musician/filmmaker’s preoccupation with science and the cosmos. Accompanied by Anderson’s typically dulcet, florid narration, the three pieces call upon the viewer to participate to various degrees in the action. In , that means grabbing hold of bits of debris as you float through the sky after a plane crash; as each object is gripped, Anderson extols a little anecdote about the unity of all things. In (which, along with , premiered in 2017 at MASS MoCA and won an award at last year’s Venice film festival), the participant is given free rein to explore an enormous, cube-like structure suspended in space. Each room features a different interactive component, most based around the generation of words or sounds via physical movement, but it was just as fun, if not more so, to simply fly through the open-world environment, extending arms outward to gain momentum or tilting your hands to swerve through the structure’s labyrinthine passageways. In the final piece, , the user is placed in a series of scenes on a futuristic lunar surface and allowed to navigate each location as Anderson speaks of the stars and man’s instinctively destructive nature—themes that, despite the lofty trappings, are conveyed thoughtfully. Compared to the official selection’s recent foray into VR, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s ill-conceived (2017), is pleasingly pitched between the awestruck and the ambitious, playing more like an open inquiry into a budding technology than a self-satisfied ploy for empathy.
