If selecting entries for an international film festival weren't challenging enough, knowing how to schedule their premieres throughout the event is akin to an art form. This year the programmers at the Cannes Film Festival, headed by artistic director Thierry Fremeaux, proved just how skilled they are at both.
Always the first to be criticized when a title doesn't live up to heightened expectations, Fremeaux and his programmers are rarely credited with their ability to juxtapose films against each other during the festival's hectic schedule. It's a task akin to how a museum curator might hang a painting by Georges Braque next to one from Pablo Picasso in an art exhibition on the development of cubism. On Friday, Fremeaux's team pulled off a master stroke by screening Winter Sleep by Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan against Wild Tales a film from Argentina made by Damián Szifrón.
Regular Cannes attendees know Ceylan and his work. His films have appeared here for more than a decade, including Climates in 2006, Three Monkeys in 2008 (for which he won the Best Director prize) and Once Upon A Time In Anatolia, which won the Grand Prix in 2011. Thus, audiences were well aware what they had signed up for when the lights dimmed in the Grand Théâtre Lumière for its premiere.
Ceylan's movies are long, beautifully shot, slow pieces, often with only the subtle hint of a narrative throughline. It is not uncommon for festival audiences to flee midway through his films. Winter Sleep is no different, and in fact manages to perfectly underscore all of these characteristics.
It is easy to see why film critics in Cannes have compared Winter Sleep to the work of Chekhov. The film features long stretches of rapid dialogue and anyone who doesn't speak Turkish needs to have Olympic training in subtitle reading to keep up with the conversation. One scene between the patriarchal Aydin and his sister Necla goes on for what must be 20 minutes and devolves into a bitter, abusive argument, as the camera cuts between two head shots for what seems like an eternity.
What we don't see a lot of in Winter Sleep is Cappadocia itself, considered to be one of most beautiful places on Earth. Though Ceylan spends the first few minutes presenting panoramic shots of breathtaking scenery, much of the film occurs indoors. This was exactly the filmmaker’s intent. "I actually didn't want to use it, but I had to," he said of the region’s picturesque qualities. "I originally wanted a very simple, plain place, but the film had to be set in a tourist area, and I needed a hotel that is a little isolated, outside of town. Cappadocia was the only place I could find that in the winter time still had tourists."
In talking about a location that provides a backdrop most filmmakers would be jealous of, Ceylan's sensibility, and possibly his personality, slip through. "I was afraid of shooting in Cappadocia because it might have been too beautiful, too interesting," he said. "But I didn't show it too much, I hope."
While Winter Sleep can be a bit of a slog, maintaining the interest of only the most diehard cineastes, like most of Ceylan's films, seeing it through to the end is strangely rewarding. You're not sure entirely what you've witnessed but know it perfectly captured the difficulty of fragile human relationships and the struggle between class differences, all delivered in a unique signature manner.
Less than an hour after audiences completed Ceylan's marathon of seriousness, the festival invited members of the press to see the first screening of Szifròn's Wild Tales. It could not have been more perfect programming.
Tired and a bit exhausted after "the Ceylan," few knew anything about "the Szifròn.” Only that the film was from Argentina and that renowned Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar is one of its producers. What we got was two hours of sheer enjoyment and laughter.
Szifròn has cooked up a dark comedy comprised of a series of standalone short stories or vignettes, featuring characters that suffer through some extraordinary occurrences. To say anything more about this Wild Tales would be to spoil it. But, for example, one story features an explosives demolition engineer who grows ever more frustrated with having his car improperly towed from legal parking spaces. Unlike many of the sketches found within, this one actually ends on what could be considered a positive note.
All of the stories Szifròn includes in Wild Tales are just that, wild tales that spiral out of control in all directions—from the improbable to the violent, from the tragic to vengeful. The very first segment comes before the film's title sequence. It takes place aboard a plane and when the titles raced onto the screen at its conclusion, the audience of 1,200 odd journalists erupted in applause. Needless to say, at a festival known for booing selections when the credits roll, cheering one on after the first five minutes is a rarity.
By the time the lights rose on Wild Tales, our sides hurt from continuous laughter. As the audience filed out of the screening, you could hear giggling every so often from journalists excitedly discussing what they had just seen.
Cannes is not known for including comedies in its official selection, let alone placing them in competition as Wild Tales is. A French journalist standing outside the Salle Debussy, where the film screened, put it best: Wild Tales was a little gift from Fremeaux after the depressive, yet rewarding, strain of Winter Sleep.
That Cannes was able to pull of this kind of high-wire curatorial feet is what makes festival programming an art, not simply a chore of logistical scheduling.
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