Jobs Well Done

Abstract

According to the speculation that always accompanies the run-up to the announcement of the Cannes Film Festival program, the 2010 edition (May 12––23) was almost certain to premiere new films by Terrence Malick and Beela Tarr. In the event, neither Malick's The Tree of Life nor Tarr's The Turin Horse made it (the former wasn't finished in time; the latter, who knows?), and these high-profile absences added to a sense of disappointment with a competition line-up that generally lacked big-name auteurs. Perhaps the competition wasn't as rich as previous years; certainly there was no Antichrist-style controversy this time and no film generated the same acclaim as The White Ribbon or A Prophet did in 2009. I had bad luck with the two competition films I managed to watch: Bertrand Tavernier's The Princess of Montpensier is a terribly creaky chivalric historical romance; and Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy , a talky drama about a couple who may or may not be pretending to be lovers, sees the Iranian director swap his usual nimble intelligence for plodding observations about the nature of artifice and deception. Much more interesting was Manoel de Oliveira's The Strange Case of Angelica . Playing in the Un Certain Regard strand, it tells of Isaak, a shy photographer living in rural Portugal who is commissioned to take the portrait of a beautiful young woman who has died only days after her wedding. Captivated by the image of her corpse, artfully laid out to rest before burial, Isaak falls under a ghostly spell. He becomes increasingly withdrawn from village life, and——in sequences of beguiling Meeliees-like fantasy——dreams of flying through the night sky with her. If The Strange Case of Angelica's dialogue scenes between the fellow guests in Isaak's boarding house are a little stiff, and the film's ruminative tone never …