Polishing Off Cannes 2018 (or trying to)

Leto (Kirill Serebrennikov, 2018)

On the face of it, Leto ["Summer"] is the sort of film that is probably better suited to the Un Certain Regard sidebar than the rare air of Competition. But then again, it's difficult for me, and I suspect others, to fully judge its aesthetic and intellectual impact. This is a film made by Russians for Russians, raising to the level of towering myth a particular part of history that is mostly unknown to non-Russians, aside from a few savvy aficionados. Leto is a dramatization of the height of the Leningrad rock scene in the 1980s, specifically the success of Mike Naumenko (Roman Bilyk) and his band Zoopark, and the rise of Viktor Tsoi (Teo Yoo) and the band that would eventually become Kino.

Based on a memoir by Mike's wife Natalia Naumenko (Irina Starshenbaum), the film is rather conventionally structured around a romantic and professional rivalry between Mike and Viktor, which lends Leto a rather stale, plodding aspect. But within this rather uninspired template, Serebrennikov does manage to convey both the electricity of the scene and the staid Soviet forces working to keep a lid on it. The main narrative is frequently interrupted by sing-along dream sequences in which the power of rock music overtakes the whole of Leningrad, this energy displayed with onscreen animations and floating lyrics. Then, a character designated only as the Skeptic (Aleksandr Kuznetsov), who functions as a kind of anti-narrator, will hold us a sign reading "This Did Not Happen."

It's hard to figure how this film could play to a non-Russian audience. Serebrennikov, to his credit, doesn't give an inch. We are intended to thrill at watching as classic songs like Kino's "Eighth Grade Girl" and "Aluminum Cucumbers" come into being, and presuming these songs mean nothing to you, their creation will mean about as much. But personally, I was appreciative that Leto exposed me to a vital cultural corner about which I had thus far been only vaguely cognizant. (I knew that rock music started emerging from the U.S.S.R. during the Brezhnev era, but I didn't know anything about the circumstances.) Leto is a good film, but it's something of an internal memo.

Capernaum (Nadine Labaki, 2018)

On the other hand, here's a film that, despite its global particulars, speaks the universal language of poverty porn. A film that asks educated bourgeois audiences to roll in the muck of abject deprivation by proxy -- far easier than actually doing something about it -- Capernaum is premised on the idea that 12-year-old Zain (Zain Al-Refeea), doing time for murder, is bringing suit against his parents for bringing him into the world. This frame story is largely just a nifty premise for setting up the miserable flashbacks -- the juridical equivalent of Slumdog's gameshow plot -- except for the fact that it culminates in young Zain proclaiming, like some junior senator from Oklahoma, that the poor should not reproduce.

Meanwhile, Labaki's film trades on both lower-class impoverishment in Lebanon and the plight of undocumented refugees, without taking any care to systematically distinguish between the two. So what is actually one of the most progressive nations in the Middle East is depicted as the most backwards hellhole imaginable, with no larger context for understanding. Combine this with a trope that shamelessly panders to upper-class viewers' sense of righteousness: that the poor are fundamentally wicked, don't care about their children, and would sell them for a pack of ramen in a heartbeat. Sure, they are desperate -- circumstance has "made them that way" -- but there's never any suggestion that people who are struggling might help one another or possess a shred of dignity. In fact, the only adult who is not an outright villain, the Somali refugee Rahil (Yordanos Shiferaw), just becomes a victim herself, as well as accidentally saddling Zain with an infant.

The closest Capernaum ever comes to providing a broader view of the society it depicts is going overhead for one of its many drone shots. Look! A whole city of equally desperate, hopeless people locked in dog-eat-dog savagery. What sort of response does this really demand? I can only be reminded of Band Aid's "Do They Know It's Christmas?" and its classic line of smug liberal self-regard: "Well, tonight thank god it's them instead of you."