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.

A new and updated edition of my 'Sean Penn: His Life and Times' from Faber & Faber in 2015

I’m pleased to report that I am now properly at work on a new and updated edition of Sean Penn: His Life and Times, originally published by Faber more or less exactly ten years ago, and so certainly due for a fresh lick of paint.

‘Time is a funny thing, huh’, as Tom Waits says in Rumblefish. ‘Time is a very peculiar item...’ I first met Sean Penn in 2001 and later that year secured his consent to do an interview-based ‘oral history’-style book about his life and work. I began work on that book in the autumn/winter of 2002 as Sean was shooting Mystic River with Clint Eastwood and then 21 Grams with Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu. One day in the midst of that I called his office to check his whereabouts. ‘Baghdad,’ came the unexpected – unexpectable? – reply. The first Faber hardback edition of Sean Penn: His Life and Times came out in October 2004, six months after Sean won his first Academy Award. A paperback edition followed a year later, with updates that concluded as Sean embarked on a journalistic assignment to Iran and secured the film rights to Jon Krakauer’s book Into the Wild.

So that was then and this is now, a good while later. Of course, lots of people lead very lively lives, whether or not they have the attention of a wider public, but Sean is livelier than most, and so the new section of the book detailing 2005-2015 is going to have plenty of good and all-exclusive meat in it. I hope it will appear around the same time as the release of The Last Face - Sean’s fifth feature as director, starring Charlize Theron and Javier Bardem, on which he is presently at work, the progress of which I have had a fortunate glimpse, and for which – based on the quality of the material, cast, crew, and the calibre of Sean’s previous productions as ‘helmer’ –  cinemagoers would surely be right to entertain high hopes.