A world spiralling out of control at Cannes

Economic and social tensions run like a common thread through several of the films competing for Cannes' top prize this year

A police officer – portrayed by Adam Driver – in Jim Jarmusch’s zombie zinger The Dead Don’t Die, the 72nd Cannes Film Festival opener, is a man with a premonition. His refrain all through the film is: “I have a feeling it is going to end badly.” It does. For him and Centreville, a town that represents a nation overrun by unbridled consumerism, hatred and fear.

Several other films in the festival’s 2019 Competition, if not in a way as bizarre as The Dead Don’t Die, zeroed in on a crisis-ridden society hurtling in the direction of a social, economic or political dead-end. In the 2018 edition of the world’s premier film festival, Japanese auteur Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Shoplifters, a film about a cobbled-together family whose travails revealed the rarely-seen underbelly of economically prosperous Japan, took home the Palme d’Or.

Taking a cue of sorts from that deserving award winner, Korean director Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite, one of 21 films in Competition in Cannes this year, focuses on not one but two families – one barely making ends meet, the other obscenely affluent. The film gives the rich-poor divide an incredibly original and vigorous spin in a story of a clash of two worlds that inevitably culminates in a burst of shocking violence.

The violence in British filmmaker Ken Loach’s Sorry We Missed You, another Competition title, isn’t of a physical nature. It manifests itself in the emotional and social implications of life in a gig economy, where jobs are scarce and zero-hour contracts are the norm.

Sorry We Missed You, scripted by Loach’s regular collaborator Paul Laverty, is a profoundly moving film about an overworked delivery man who struggles to keep his family – a care-giver wife, a talented but temperamentally mercurial son and younger daughter – together in the face of high debt and dwindling income.

Sorry We Missed You is unembellished filmmaking at its finest. It strikes an instant emotional chord, shot through as it is with an overwhelming and depressing sense of veracity, enhanced by the directness of the performances from Kris Hitchen and Debbie Honeywood. The struggle for survival with dignity and poise does not always end well between the couple, and even less so between the man and his angry, frustrated son.  

In Parasite, the impecunious family also has four members – a man, his wife and son and daughter, both older than the children we meet in Sorry We Missed You. But the methods that they employ to rise above their station in life are borderline criminal. They exist at subsistence level and live in a half-basement home surrounded by squalor and bickering neighbours.

A still from The Dead Dont Die

The boy, on a lead provided by a friend set to fly out of the country, lands the job of an English tutor to a teenage daughter of a wealthy couple. He then conspires to get his sister into the household as an art therapist for the girl’s hyperactive younger brother whose energies are in need of channeling. Soon enough, the father and the mother also worm their way into the house as the family chauffeur and 24/7 housemaid, respectively.

As the quartet takes control of the opulent home and its resources, secrets begin to tumble out from hidden corners of the house. Parasite is a searing commentary on a world where individual happiness hinges on material well-being. This genre-bender is markedly different from The Dead Don’t Die, which employs zombie movie conventions to take swipes at rampant greed and Trump-era immorality. The film divided the audience in Cannes, but made its point about the world we live in in unequivocal terms.

Another film in the 2019 Cannes Competition, seasoned French director Arnaud Desplechin’s Roubaix, A Light (Oh Mercy!), probes the titular city, the filmmaker’s hometown, a once thriving industrial hub that has now fallen on terribly hard days and stares at a bleak future.

It is Christmas night and police captain Yakoob Daoud, a man of Algerian descent born and raised in Roubaix, drives around the deserted streets of a crime-infested city. A burnt-out car, a fire caused by suspected arson, a rape of a 13-year-old girl in a subway, a girl on the run from her family, and finally the murder of an octogenarian woman in her home: it is a busy night for the officer, played with impressive restraint by Roschdy Zem.  

A still from Atlantique

The old woman’s neighbours, two young alcoholic women who are lovers, are the only suspects. A real-life crime procedural that reveals the truth layer by layer and stresses on the need for humanity to triumph no matter what, Roubaix, A Light is as much about a city in decay as about the implications of poverty and distress on people.

Of a completely different tenor is Atlantique, directed by French-Senegalese Mati Diop, the first Black woman ever to compete for the Palme d’Or. The sure-handed film forays into the paranormal genre in portraying economic distress and unemployment in an African nation where the disparity between the rich and poor is disturbingly glaring.

A young construction worker loses his job and vanishes into the blue when he and a number of other men attempt a boat journey across the ocean to get out of their misery. The girl he loves isn’t ready to give up on him even as rumours are rife that the disappeared man has been seen back in town, stray fires are lit, and a mysterious disease afflicts the women. The place is symptomatic of a world spiralling out of control in more ways than one.