Un film de Sean Penn: The Last Face

The Last Face (2016, c. River Road Entertainment)

I haven’t been to the Cannes festival in a lot of years, probably not since 1999 (which was a pretty wonderful edition, what with the Dardennes' Rosetta and Bruno Dumont's Humanité.) I do rather wish I was there this week, if only to get an early look at Sean Penn’s new film The Last Face, which is premiering in competition and looks to me like a work of big promise, given its bold big-canvas subject matter (conflict in Liberia and Sierra Leone, international aid and the role of the UN) plus Penn’s considerable artistry as a picture maker.

One of the most purely enjoyable bonuses of my having written a long study of Sean’s life and work with his participation is that I've had a fair few opportunities to watch him at close quarters while he works, both as actor and writer-director. I visited the location of The Last Face in late 2014 and, as usual, found it a hugely absorbing experience to observe the "big electric train-set" in motion; the new element was seeing Penn at the helm, right in the thick of that fast-flowing decision-making torrent that is directing a movie.

Penn’s attention to detail in creative matters is fairly well-documented (not least by me). But artists do define themselves by the things they pay attention to in life (cf. Bresson's injunction to 'show [the spectator] things in the order and the way that you love to see them and to feel them’); and Penn’s special investment in what he does is quite a powerful thing to be around. Here as elsewhere there's nothing 'armchair' about him.

Barry Ackroyd, DP on The Last Face, and Lake Geneva

Movies are made inch by inch, of course, so as a rubbernecker in those situations your sense of the whole is about as refined as what an insect perceives while crawling up a Byzantine mosaic. But while I was knocking around the location I was excited to see some rough assemblies of sequences that Penn’s long-time editor Jay Cassidy was putting together in the now-standard manner of movie production, and they struck me as highly powerful and affecting in their drama. So, here’s to the finished item, or Bonne Projection! as they say in the Palais de Festivals.

It's worth saying that Cannes, the best of festivals in this regard, has championed Sean as a director from the start, and the official brochures for the 2016 edition will note that his body of feature film work also includes The Indian Runner (1991), The Crossing Guard (1995), The Pledge (2000), and Into the Wild (2007). 

These films are full of feeling, made with great verve and command of the tools of cinema (also very characteristic of their maker, who wrote the first two and has had a hand in the scripts of each subsequent project); and I think they repay a look from any discerning film fan.

The Great Gatsby & Baz Luhrmann's green light

It’s rare indeed that I find myself quite so far ahead of the pop-cultural curve... but for anyone seeking insight into Baz Luhrmann’s new film version of The Great Gatsby in advance of its Cannes premiere, I can direct them to a long interview I did with Mr Luhrmann for the newly published Picador film tie-in edition of Fitzgerald’s novel.

The pilgrim will find much of interest in Luhrman's reflections, I feel – about the influence on the director of Francis Coppola and Joseph Conrad, also of a journey he took on the Trans-Siberian Railway; on Luhrmann’s compendious research into Fitzgerald’s world and that of the novel; on the bold structural choices he and Craig Pearce made for their screenplay; on his musical collaborator Jay-Z’s opinion of Jay Gatsby’s character; of what Gatsby has to say of its time and to ours; and more.

Our conversation was a privilege for me in more ways than one: on top of his creative accomplishments Mr Luhrmann is a hugely eloquent and engaging speaker, witty and charming, free of airs and, I should say, a gentleman, too. His movie is very keenly awaited, of course. But I’m very struck by what I’ve heard and seen, and I’m certainly wishing this Gatsby all the very best, old sport.

This is how our conversation wound round to its conclusion:

RTK: In their famous interview Alfred Hitchcock and Francois Truffaut agreed there was a problem about turning great books into films because the books were already masterpieces, made out of words, which pictures couldn’t emulate. Clearly, having made 'Romeo + Juliet' you’re happy to work with classic texts. But do you feel there is something about 'Gatsby' that you have to try to be ‘faithful’ to, to satisfy the book’s admirers? Or are you content to say to audiences, ‘This is the way I see it...’

Baz Luhrmann: Of course I hear that perspective. But there have been some pretty good cinematic goes made of some great books... There may be people out there with large pieces of wood counting down the days until the movie is out so they can come and hit me... ‘How dare you?’ And I understand that, and I don’t take it lightly. Nonetheless – I love the book too. And I always think great literature is there to be interpreted in many different ways, in different times and by different people – for example, I look forward to the next person who does a 'Romeo and Juliet' movie different to mine. To me, what defines greatness in literature, culture, of any kind, is that it’s able to move through time and geography, it can play in any country and continues to play in any era. And that’s true of 'The Great Gatsby'...

Another thing I must say about this Picador edition is that it’s quite a thrill for me to have some of my words – be they very simple ones – bound up between covers with those of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s and a novel that I, like millions of readers, think of as one of the most brilliantly achieved in English.

It has a special little nostalgia for me because I studied Gatsby for the A-Level English Lit paper I sat back in the summer of 1989. I have before me, in fact, the A-format Penguin paperback that was my text at the time: unusually zealously annotated with pencil-scribbles, a source of amusement to me today, for as long as no-one else gets to see them. I’m reminded, for one thing, that the 18-year-old Me was strongly persuaded of Wilde’s maxim that only shallow people fail to judge by appearances. I don’t think I would want such a judgement levied today – or not on myself, at any rate.

I would, though, stand by the pencilled ‘Genet!’ that I put beside Nick Carraway’s early description of Tom Buchanan’s ‘cruel body’, an interesting way for one guy to look at and describe another guy’s figure. Gatsby is often thought of, or remembered, as a romantic book, as a love story. And yet the ostensible love object, Daisy, is really not such a nice girl – unworthy of all the fuss, you might say. And so the ‘romance’, finally, lies more in Jay Gatsby’s outsized illusions about her and the world (for which he constructs his dazzling facade of a life, and then throws that life away.)

Or does it? Is the biggest romantic crush in the book actually the one Nick Carraway has on Gatsby, in whom he finds ‘something gorgeous’ (above and beyond his pink suit), even after all the shows of ostensible disapproval...? This theme of latency has been explored in more recent criticism of the novel, I believe. I don’t say I go along with it. I only note it.

'This Must Be The Place': Cannes 2011

Thankful news emanates from Cannes HQ that Paolo Sorrentino’s This Must Be The Place has been afforded a competition berth at this year’s edition of the great festival. Sean Penn, as so often, will be competing against himself, as Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life also graces the line-up. I await both movies keenly, and look forward to discussing them with their leading man, for the benefit of the revised Sean Penn: His Life and Times which is due later this year or else early 2012.

Esquire (June 2009) now on stands: includes Christian Bale and Cannes

I've always liked Christian Bale as an actor, especially in that dragon film. He's the subject of an excellent frank interview in the new Esquire, which is chockfull of other fine stuff as always. (There's also a new Esquire website/blog which is shaping up nicely.) My contribution to the new print issue is a piece reflecting on the Cannes Film Festival, the 62nd installment of which opens for business next Wednesday. I won't be there, which is a source of relief rather than ruefulness, as I say like so in the piece:

"It was the sacred aura of great cinema that first lured me to Cannes in 1988, aged 17. And, for sure, there is no finer place to watch a film than the cathedral-like munificence of the 2,500-seater Salle Lumiere in the main Festival Palais. But otherwise, the hectic, histrionic air of Cannes made me feel a bit like Bunyan’s pilgrim stumbling into Vanity Fair. To my horror, people were doing deals, making money, dining out in ostentatious fashion even as the arty movies were screening across the street. Such is the Cannes described by a director friend of mine (fondly, I should say) as ‘a big, colourful cornucopia of lies, bullshit, bragging and seafood.’"

The Sean Penn Administration, Cannes 2008

Last weekend I had a really interesting conversation with Sean Penn about his service as Jury President at the recent Cannes Film Festival. (That's him in the photo, having a smoke and looking slightly concerned - whether by the gentleman next to him or the paparazzi gang behind, we're not to know.) Anyhow, an edited account of aforementioned conversation will run in the next issue of Sight & Sound.
After Sean was announced as this year's Cannes Prez I was struck by the number of media outlets who decided to run the rule over the Festival's choice, so rehashing the legend of Penn the Dangerous Hothead of 1980s tabloid lore, as if ignorant of the fact that inter alia he had previously competed in the Official Selection at Cannes both as actor and director, and won the Acting Palme for She's So Lovely in 1997. But, such is the general standard of reporting on cinema out there, and particularly when bracketed to coverage of the Cannes Festival, where the celebration of what is very best in film is inevitably shackled to a realisation that movies are consumed far more widely and profitably by devotees of Spiderman and Batman, be they young or old.
Sean has been on the record umpteen times in the past about his particular problems with the Hollywood mainstream, and the outriding assumptions about the audience. And this subject naturally arose in the course of our Cannes discussion: 'As an audience member', he remarked, "I always feel frustrated by the monoculturalism of American cinema, and in so many places it’s American monoculturalism that people buy." (Yes, 'Hollywood Movie Actor' is still his own main occupation, but the closest he's ever got to the Hollywood mainstream is working for Clint Eastwood, whose creative control over his own work is the envy of film artists everywhere.)
There is a certain caste of film critics for broadsheet newspapers, in the UK as well as the US, who see themselves as the scourges of that 'American monoculturalism', but very often I think they're kidding themselves, if not their readers: their own finicky sense of personal discernment is what comes top of their agendas. The thought reoccured to me when Sean described how he and his jury ignored all the daily critical chatter about the films they were adjudicating upon: a discipline that resulted in his feeling aggrieved on the part of certain films and filmmakers once he reviewed the press coverage in the aftermath of the Festival and saw how movies he admired unreservedly had been instantly weighed in the balance by The Critics and found wanting.
At Cannes the deadline-driven comprehensive-coverage rush to judgement can be very injurious to a movie. Of course, judgement is always waiting round the corner for any creative undertaking and cannot be hidden from. But I know how Cannes works, and what is the daily routine for most film journalists out there (it's long, but not arduous, not by any reasonable standard, other than on the liver...) And it's a matter of fact that Cannes is not the ideal place for arriving quickly at a considered view of a picture, much less for conveying that to readers. Hence Sean's lament, particularly on the part of Steven Soderbergh's Che, on which his jury bestowed the Best Actor prize for Benicio Del Toro, but which had a rough ride in a lot of print outlets. "The diminishment", Sean told me, "is reminiscent of the bad reviews Bonnie and Clyde got, or Apocalypse Now, or the 'failure' Wizard of Oz was or It’s A Wonderful Life was." This remark I think is particularly useful, because the critical tendency is very often to make the best the enemy of the good. But with a lot of critics who regularly refer to the masters and masterpieces of the past, all you have to do is imagine what they would have said of those great originals had they been reviewing at the time: most likely, "Not without interest, but with (sighs) a lot of problems..."