- guardian.co.uk, Thursday May 13 2004 03.04 BST
- The Guardian, Thursday May 13 2004
Abbas Kiarostami, the grandmaster of the Iranian cinema, likes cars. He says they provide an intimate atmosphere that leads to truth-telling. Ten, his last film shown at Cannes, was shot entirely within the confines of a taxi, where various women, including a prostitute, spoke about their lives.
Kiarostami stays in his car throughout 10 on Ten and gives us a kind of masterclass concerning the gradual development of his kind of film-making. He says he can't write scripts with much conviction, so he gives his mostly non-professional actors a shape to go on and tells them to flesh it out as they like. This is exciting, and leads eventually to a better film.
But the real liberation is the digital camera. This produces more reality than any other method, freeing the film-maker from the aggressive act of directing and allowing him and everyone else to escape from the many other restricting rituals of conventional film-making.
All this is very interesting as the master drives around outside Tehran, in the area where he made A Taste of Cherry, his Cannes Palme d'Or winner. It is not, however, the sort of thing one expects to see within the official programme at Cannes, and a good few eyes among the packed audience were firmly shut by the middle of the film. Perhaps the car was just too relaxing. Kiarostami has another film here called Five, shot entirely on digital video. Those who have seen both say Five is half as entertaining as 10 on Ten and neither is as good as Ten. Confusing, isn't it? Derek Malcolm
Winner of two awards at the Sundance film festival (for director and lead actor) and now showing in the Cannes Market, Down to the Bone is a low-budget, digital-video feature that uses its performers and locales to good effect, despite a downbeat script that pushes all the buttons we have come to expect from such self-consciously scrappy film-making.
The central figure is Irene (Vera Farmiga), mother of two, checkout jockey and cocaine fiend, carving out a meagre existence in icy upstate New York. The narrative follows her through drug busts, counselling sessions, group therapy programmes and relationship difficulties. Director Debra Granik handles her story with commendable restraint, even if the faux-documentary manner of her film is already a well-worn convention for this sort of material. Granik gets a strong performance out of Farmiga, as she does from nearly the whole cast; only the post-9/11 predilection for group hugs and I'll-be-there-for-you-ing lets things down occasionally.
In fact, the shadow of 9/11 hangs over proceedings right from the start, as Granik uses a plethora of flags to create an impressively ironic backdrop for her opening montage of run-down middle America. Bruce Springsteen could have written it. Andrew Pulver
