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A Senior Correspondent's Dispatch from the Fringes of the World's Most Glamorous Film Festival (Bus Route 200, Rear Seats)
BY JACKIE ESISKEL, SENIOR FILM CORRESPONDENT
IRREVERENT Magazine | Film & Culture Desk
CANNES, FRANCE — The panini costs four euros. I know this because I've been eating one every day for five days, from the same counter at a boulangerie seventeen minutes off the Croisette, past the intersection where a man on a motorized scooter nearly ended my career in film criticism permanently. Four euros. I have written down every expenditure in a small green notebook I bought at a tabac for two-fifty, which tells you everything you need to know about where IRREVERENT Magazine falls in the hierarchy of credentialed press.
I am sitting in the rear seats of Bus Route 200. A woman in a Valentino sundress is standing three feet away, presumably also going to Cannes, presumably not to review films. She has a security lanyard with a color I have never seen before in eleven years of attending this festival. I don't know what color that is. I don't want to know. Some knowledge ruins a man.
Let me tell you about the Palais.
The Palais des Festivals is a building that was designed specifically to make you aware of your own irrelevance. The architecture communicates a singular message: you, specifically, are not who we had in mind. The steps — those famous steps, the ones you've seen in a thousand photographs — are cordoned off approximately eighteen hours a day. The other six hours they are populated by people who are also cordoned off, just on the inside of the rope. I have walked past those steps enough times to qualify for a pedestrian's Palme d'Or. I have never gone up them.
This year I was here to cover the Competition slate, which is ambitious given that my press screenings are at 8:30 in the morning in a room with air conditioning calibrated to replicate the interior of a commercial blast freezer. I watched the new Jane Schoenbrun film — Teenage Lust at the Death Camp, a kind of psychedelic coming-of-age horror that vibrates at a frequency younger people seem to find profound — sitting next to a Belgian journalist who ate a croissant throughout the entire third act. I have opinions about the film. I have more opinions about that croissant.
The film everyone is talking about (be patient), naturally, is the one I had the most trouble getting into. Four attempts at the evening premiere, four polite rejections from a young man in a white jacket who looked at my badge the way customs agents look at a nervous traveler. I eventually watched a screener on my laptop in the hotel room — Hotel is generous; Room with Aspirations is more accurate — with the audio one notch below what I would prefer because the walls are thin and my neighbor has already knocked twice.
There was a standing ovation of nine minutes for a Romanian drama about inheritance law. Nine minutes. I timed it. I was not in the room, but I heard about it from a colleague who was, and she seemed genuinely moved, which I respected, and also slightly resented. I've been moved by films before. I was moved by Memories of Murder, which Park Chan-wook made back before he went fully baroque — before Oldboy, before all of it. That man could wring grief out of a parking lot. Nobody was giving nine-minute standing ovations in a multiplex in Chicago when I first saw it. We just sat there, stunned, then drove home.
On Wednesday I attended a panel called "The Future of Auteur Cinema in a Streaming-First World," which was held in a conference room adjacent to a party I was not invited to. The muffled bass from that party provided an inadvertent score for a discussion about artistic independence. Nobody on the panel acknowledged this. Professionals.
I spotted Benicio del Toro at a distance of roughly forty meters. He was wearing sunglasses. I was wearing the same jacket I've worn to this festival for three years running, which I consider a personal brand and which my editor considers a cry for help. I did not approach del Toro. I had nothing to say to him that he would find interesting, and I've reached the age where I know this about myself.
The Croisette at night is genuinely beautiful, I'll give it that. The light on the water, the palms moving in the warm air, the superyachts lit up offshore like floating tax incentives. I walked it twice this week at around 11 p.m., after the dinners I wasn't at had wound down and the people who attend those dinners had gone somewhere even more inaccessible. The city empties out in a specific way. You can feel the weight of all the commerce and aspiration lifting, just briefly, and what's left is a town on the Mediterranean in May, which is not nothing.
My panini tomorrow will also cost four euros. I've already identified the boulangerie.
I fly home Saturday. I have four pieces to file, eleven pages of notes, and a recording of myself whispering plot summaries into my phone in a dark screening room that I will spend the better part of Friday deciphering. I do not have a photograph of the steps. I do not have a party lanyard in an aspirational color.
I have, however, seen some movies. A few of them were excellent. That still means something, even from the rear seats of Bus Route 200.
Editor's Note: A few things. The photographer (Rumena) got you going up the steps, I included it here! Jane Schoenbrun's film is called "Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma." Also, "Memories of Murder" was directed by Bong Joon-ho, not Park Chan-wook. And the standing ovation you cite as "nine minutes" was actually seven minutes, which has been widely reported. Park Chan-wook directed "Oldboy."
A note in response to the Editor: Scott, with respect — and I do mean that — I have been watching Korean cinema since before it had a section at Blockbuster, and I stand by the attribution. Park Chan-wook and Bong Joon-ho came up together, they have collaborated in various capacities, and if you go back and look at the liner notes on the original Korean release of Memories of Murder you will find the situation is more complicated than the Wikipedia page suggests. As for the standing ovation: I was there, or adjacent to there, and I timed it myself on my watch, which runs slightly fast, which would actually make the real number higher than nine, not lower. And regarding the Schoenbrun film — I may have the title wrong. The spirit is correct. The spirit, Scott, is always correct. Lastly, I will note that you published the piece.
Editor's Note: That's not how math works.
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BY JACKIE ESISKEL, SENIOR FILM CORRESPONDENT
IRREVERENT Magazine | Film & Culture Desk
CANNES — There are moments in cinema when a filmmaker, burdened with the impossible weight of literary legacy, finally does right by the source material. The Devil Wears Prada 2 is, at long last, that moment. After nearly sixty years of Hollywood's shameful silence on Truman Capote's underappreciated 1962 manuscript The Devil Wears Prada — a slim, devastating novella about cruelty, couture, and the Manhattan fashion machine — someone has finally made the film Capote deserved.
The original 2003 adaptation, you will recall, starred Audrey Hepburn in what many considered a career highlight. (The Academy, disgracefully, disagreed.) That film — charming, yes; definitive, no — never once credited Capote's manuscript, a slight that the literary community has quietly seethed over for two decades. The sequel corrects no such injustice explicitly, but in its ambition and its swagger, it feels like an apology. A $200-million apology in Balenciaga.
It is Meryl Streep, of course, who anchors this enterprise. Stepping with magisterial confidence into the iconic shoes once filled by Anne Bancroft in the original, Streep brings something Bancroft never quite managed: stillness. Where Bancroft attacked every scene like a woman settling a debt, Streep simply arrives, and the film rearranges itself around her. There is a scene in the third act — set inside the Paris headquarters of Vague magazine, that legendary arbiter of taste — where Streep removes a single glove and I counted no fewer than four audience members audibly exhale. I have coined a term for this phenomenon: affective drapeausement, the suspension of viewer breath caused by an actor's purely textile interaction with the mise-en-scène. I have been using it in my lectures at the Esiskel Institute for some years now, and this film is its purest cinematic expression.
The screenplay — which I will not summarize in detail, as real critics experience films, not plots — concerns itself with legacy, betrayal, and the particular violence of relevance. The young protagonist, played with doe-eyed determination by an actress I am choosing not to name on principle (she knows what she did at the Venice screening), serves as our surrogate inside Vague's hermetically sealed world of impossible standards and expensively mediocre food. Her journey is Capote's journey. Her wounds are Capote's wounds. I wept during the runway sequence. I will admit this freely.
Thaddeus P. Higginbotham III, the estimable senior critic of The Westchester Quarterly Review of Moving Pictures, wrote in his recent monograph that "Esiskel's concept of affective drapeausement represents the most significant theoretical contribution to fashion-film criticism since someone, presumably Esiskel, invented fashion-film criticism." He is not wrong. And watching this film, his words rang in my ears like a perfectly tailored bell.
The supporting cast acquits itself with variable distinction. There are at least two characters I recognized from television. One of them gives what I would describe as a "performance." The costuming, naturally, is beyond reproach — one gown in particular, worn by Streep in the film's penultimate scene, appears to be constructed entirely from what looked to me like regret. Possibly also silk. The production designer has clearly read Capote's novella more than once.
My sole reservation concerns the film's ending, which I found — and I say this having seen every film ever made, including several that do not officially exist — somewhat familiar. It echoes the finale of Bergman's The Seventh Fashion, a 1961 Swedish feature on similar themes that most audiences will have missed because most audiences, frankly, have not done the work. I have done the work. I have always done the work.
The Devil Wears Prada 2 is not a perfect film. But it is the film Truman Capote's novella has always deserved, delivered sixty-four years late by a franchise courageous enough to finally acknowledge its debt. See it in IMAX. Dress appropriately.
★★★★½ out of ★★★★★
EDITOR'S NOTE: Jackie — Truman Capote did not write "The Devil Wears Prada." It is a 2003 novel by Lauren Weisberger. The 2006 film starred Meryl Streep, not Audrey Hepburn. Anne Bancroft was not in it. The magazine in the film is called "Runway," not "Vague." We have also confirmed that Thaddeus P. Higginbotham III does not appear to exist. — Ed.
JACKIE ESISKEL RESPONDS: The editor has noted that the novel was written by Lauren Weisberger in 2003, that the original film starred Meryl Streep rather than Audrey Hepburn, that Anne Bancroft was not in it, that the magazine is called "Runway" and not "Vague," and that Thaddeus P. Higginbotham III "does not appear to exist." I have received these notes. My review stands as written. Affective drapeausement remains a real term. Good day.
— Jackie Esiskel has been reviewing films for IRREVERENT Magazine since an incident at the 1998 Sundance Festival he prefers not to discuss. He holds an honorary doctorate from an institution he has described only as "European."
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BY JACKIE ESISKEL, SENIOR FILM CORRESPONDENT
IRREVERENT Magazine | Film & Culture Desk
CANNES, FRANCE — I have seen every film ever made. This is not a boast. It is a burden. You try sitting through the complete oeuvre of humanity's cinematic output and see how it affects you. See how it changes a man. See how it makes you the only person on earth capable of properly contextualizing Shrek.
I saw Shrek on opening weekend in 2001. I was seated in the third row, which is the only row where film may be properly absorbed. Anyone sitting further back is essentially watching television. I had already read the William Steig picture book, of course — three times, in the original French, though it was written in English. These things happen when you are as widely read as I am.
What Mike Myers accomplished with this film is nothing short of staggering. (EDITOR'S NOTE: Shrek was directed by Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson. Jackie is incorrect here, as Mike Myers voiced the title character but did not direct the film. This is Jackie's error, not the magazine's.) Here was a man — an auteur — who understood that the fairy tale was always, at its core, about loss. About the things we bury. About the parts of ourselves we exile to a swamp so that the villagers will not have to look at them. I wept during the funeral sequence. I am not ashamed to admit this. It is a devastatingly choreographed piece of cinema, set to a Smash Mouth track that functions, in context, as a kind of elegy.
The film's central insight — that Lord Farquaad represents not merely a villain but the banality of institutional cruelty — has been widely noted by lesser critics who arrived at this conclusion after me and with considerably less precision. I had written about this theme in my unpublished monograph The Swamp and the Self: Animated Cinema as Existential Confrontation, which I completed in 1999, two years before the film's release, which I consider an act of prophecy.
Mike Myers, as both voice actor and — I maintain — the film's true creative spirit, brings to Shrek a profound physicality that transcends the animated medium. (EDITOR'S NOTE: Again — Mike Myers did not direct this film. See above note. This is Jackie being Jackie.) One can hear in the Scottish brogue a man who has stared into the abyss and decided the abyss would make a perfectly serviceable home, provided one had a good cauldron and some privacy.
The supporting work is equally remarkable. Eddie Murphy, playing Donkey, delivers what legendary critic Thaddeus P. Higginbotham III once called "the most purely physical comedic performance captured in digital animation since the invention of digital animation, a medium in which physicality is, technically speaking, entirely fabricated, which makes this achievement either more or less impressive depending on your epistemological commitments." High praise. Thaddeus was not a man who gave it lightly, having famously walked out of three Merchant Ivory films in a single weekend on principle.
Cameron Diaz, as Princess Fiona, brings a complexity to the role that the Academy ignored entirely, because the Academy, as a body, has never understood animation and never will, a position I have held consistently since the 1987 incident, which I will not discuss here.
The film grossed an enormous sum of money, which I have always considered irrelevant to questions of artistic merit, except in this case, where it confirms everything I have said.
Shrek is not a children's movie. It is a children's movie in the same way that King Lear is a play about an old man having a bad week. Technically accurate. Profoundly insufficient. The film asks us to confront our own Farquaads — the small men inside us who build towers to compensate for their smallness and pass zoning regulations against ogres who simply want to be left alone with their feelings and their mud. It is, in the end, a film about acceptance: of others, of ourselves, and of the fact that Smash Mouth was, briefly, correct about everything.
I give it four and a half stars. The half-star deduction is personal in nature and not subject to discussion.
— Jackie Esiskel has been filing dispatches from the intersection of cinema and civilization for thirty-one years. He is the author of twelve unpublished books and one published letter to the editor of a regional arts quarterly.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Shrek (2001) was directed by Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson. Mike Myers voiced the character of Shrek but did not direct the film. Additionally, there is no funeral sequence in Shrek. There is a montage set to "I'm a Believer" by Smash Mouth and a climactic wedding interruption, but no funeral of any kind.
Jackie Esiskel responds: I am aware that Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson are credited as directors, and I accept this information as technically accurate in the same way that a map is technically accurate about where roads are without telling you anything about the journey. I am further aware that the film does not contain a funeral sequence in what the studio chose to release as the theatrical cut. However, this does not alter the essential emotional truth of what I have written, which is that Shrek is a profound meditation on grief and loss, and the funeral sequence — whether it appears in the theatrical cut, the director's cut, the international cut, the cut that plays on airplanes over the Atlantic, or the cut that exists in the hearts of those who have truly watched — remains one of the most affecting passages in modern animated cinema. I have seen this film more times than most people have had meaningful thoughts. I stand by my account. The correction has been noted and filed.