Hope you’ve enjoyed a nice holiday Saturday!
🎶coming out of my cage and I’ve been doing just fine 🎶
Since many of us are in a situation where we’re beginning to ease our lockdowns, sharing a Q&A style piece with public health experts that BuzzFeed put together that I found very informative and useful: “Is It OK To Expand My Quarantine Circle? Here's What Public Health Experts Say.”
As you know, we love a helpful list with a lot of ways to help and give compiled in one place! The Infatuation came through with 19 organizations helping essential workers and the restaurant industry in NYC.
A number of these will likely look familiar to long-time Distancer readers, but here’s one that’s new to me! FoodtoEat, a service that normally connects women, minority and immigrant-owned restaurants with corporate catering gigs, is rerouting that support towards feeding nursing homes. As you may be aware, many businesses owned by these groups were disproportionately underserved in accessing recovery funds. Let’s step in to help out businesses and our community!
CANNES FACT #12: Today, we would have found out what film Spike Lee’s jury awarded the Palme d’Or. Apparently he’ll return next year to chair again…
Ever wonder why, say, Parasite walked away with just the Palme d’Or and nothing else? That stems from a rule change in 1991 after the Coen Brothers’ Barton Fink ran away with the Palme d’Or, Best Director and Best Actor. Rather than let one film monopolize the awards at the expense of other competition titles, the festival amended their rules to only allow a film to take home two prizes maximum. (Some speculate the French acted in slight ill-will after Barton Fink capped off a three-year run of American Palme winners.) I can’t find it in writing anywhere, but it’s my understanding that any film awarded the top three prizes — Palme d’Or, Grand Prix, Jury Prize — is ineligible to win anything else.
That’s it for this Cannes miniseries — I hope you’ve enjoyed and maybe learned a thing or two about the quirks and importance of the film festival! If you’re interested in more of a ground-level view, I’d recommend this New York Times piece that compiled stories and quotes from filmmakers who’ve had their works play at Cannes. There are a number of quite funny and odd ones, but the one that stuck out to me the most is this one from two-time Palme d’Or winners Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (Two Days, One Night):
“Some say that the future of film lies in the private space of the streaming platforms. The proof of this is supposedly the growing use of those platforms in quarantine. But doesn’t this growth only prove that streaming suits the needs of a society in lockdown, from which real social life has vanished? Do we really want to live in such a paranoid world? Aren’t we social beings who long to live with one another in public space, notably in movie theaters where we watch films together on a screen that is bigger than we are, then gather in cafes and restaurants to talk about what we’ve seen? Shouldn’t this wake us up to demand of our leaders that they produce and extend the basic rights to health, education and culture? We are perhaps at the dawn of a new kind of solidarity. It’s up to us to want it.”
With that, au revoir, Cannes!
Now, what you came for…
DAY 72: The Tree of Life (available on HBO GO)
After awarding prizes, it’s customary for the jury to face the press and explain their choices. In 2011, jury president Robert DeNiro explained why his gang of nine chose Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life for the Palme d’Or in his typically plain-spoken fashion: “the size, the importance, the intention, whatever you want to call it, that seemed to fit the prize.” There’s something kind of perfect about his terse description of the film, which channels the ineffable so exquisitely that it becomes an almost indescribable experience. (Though if you want to read someone who really could channel his appreciation into words, Roger Ebert’s reflections on The Tree of Life from Cannes are among the best he ever wrote.)
I can’t say I loved The Tree of Life the first time I saw it. While I admired the ambition of a film that attempted to portray no less than the grandiosity of life developing on earth and the mundane yet majestic story of a single Texas family within the span of the same film, it felt a little unpolished. I still feel that way to some extent nearly a decade and countless rewatches later. But I’ve come to appreciate that the cumulative flashes of brilliance we get from Malick’s impressionistic style in the film outweigh the consistency of a more technically precise work. This is the rare film that earns two words that get tossed around in critical parlance far too casually: transcendent and masterpiece.
At the very least, you need to see The Tree of Life at some point if you’re at all a canonical film lover once the next set of greatest-of-all-time polls drops; this is, without a doubt, going to rank at or near the top of any new entries from the 2010s. And your favorite filmmakers all love this movie and mimic/steal from it constantly, too. (Ever wonder why so many big-budget movies have bizarre images of hands running through fields of wheat to convey solemnity? Yeah, they got that from this movie.)
But you should also see The Tree of Life because it’s a significant aesthetic milestone for cinema as an art form as Malick, with the help of cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, push the painterly bounds of cinematography to awe-inspiring ends. It’s more than just beauty for beauty’s sake, though. Malick grounds the film in the lived-in reality of the O’Brien family but filters everything through the lens of a dialectic struggle as represented by the boy’s parents: their strict father (Brad Pitt) symbolizing the earthly “way of nature” and their ethereally kind mother (Jessica Chastain) standing in for the heavenly “way of grace.” For an optimal viewing experience, fixate less on plot and more on the exploration of this eternal thematic struggle.
Something stirs deep inside my soul during the film’s centerpiece “Childhood” montage, which depicts how the three O’Brien brothers grow up both gradually and all at once. It taps into something spiritual within me, evoking a sense of wonder from the familiar contours of Texan boyhood. This juxtaposition of the sublime with the simple gives the film such incredible potency. Malick reminds of our simultaneous smallness and significance in the the grand scheme of the universe, vibrating on frequencies both deeply sacred and human.
There’s simply nothing else like this in movies, and it must be seen and experienced to be believed.
Be good to yourselves and to each other,
Marshall