Awards Daily

You see a lot of movies and most of them are pretty ordinary. Once in a while you see one slightly above average and it’s a cause for celebration. On rare occasions you see something truly outstanding and you’re reminded why you love cinema in the first place. It’s the nourishment that keeps you going through the day-to-day ordinary. That happened this morning at Cannes with the debut of Asghar Farhadi’s The Past – all the more remarkable because the film comes with such high expectations following the Iranian filmmaker’s Foreign Language Oscar-winning A Separation. If anything, Farhadi has topped himself. The Past is a richly rewarding human drama of seemingly infinite depth and nuance.

The raw narrative material exploring a couple in the throes of a breakup is similar to A Separation, but Farhadi manages to dig deeper and reveal even more nuances of human experience. The emotion of The Past is also not quite so front-loaded as it was in A Separation. It’s a slow burn that reveals itself in layers, almost as a matter-of-fact mystery, each new detail reshaping the complexion of the story and upending your expectations. The pleasures come largely from these subtle turns and to itemize each plot point in an attempt to describe the film would be to ruin it.

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How do you measure the importance of a life? Do you look at a man’s contributions to society, his success, his wealth, his prominence in the community? Are some lives worth more than others? Up-and-coming filmmaker Ryan Coogler addresses that question, showing both the troubled side of 22-year-old Oscar Grant, who was accidentally shot on a subway platform in 2009 while being subdued by police, and the more hopeful side, a man committed to raising his daughter and living a cleaner life.

Whatever Oscar Grant’s troubles may have been — whether he’d been convicted of felonies for drug dealing, whether he’d been previously tased by police, whether or not he went to college — none of that should have mattered when measuring the value of his life. He was someone’s son, father, boyfriend, friend. Oscar Grant, by all accounts, was a good guy trying to make his way in a world that thought it already had him figured out before he even had a chance to show who he was. Black kid from Oakland? Drugs? You know the score.

The beauty of Fruitvale Station is that it shows what life is like on the other side of the tracks when the police break up a fight between black kids and what they might have done if kids doing exactly the same thing had been white. Fruitvale Station shows what can happen when cops have already made up their minds about you before they even know who you are. Most of White America has no idea what it’s like to grow up like that, to be presumed guilty of a string of crimes before you’ve even committed them. Why else would the cops have reacted in such an extreme manner? Handcuffed, thrown to the ground, never given a chance to explain.

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There is construction going on all over Cannes. They are building a new train station at the bottom of the hill. I know because I usually stay up that way and use the train station, and the tunnel underneath it, to find my way. The tunnel smells like urine mixed with cigarettes. This was my fourth year to Cannes and I was planning to show my expertise to my friend Craig Kennedy from Living in Cinema who was coming along for his first ever Cannes Film Festival. We’ll take the shuttle, I told him. It should give us plenty of time to get to the press office and get our badges.

We’d flown out of Los Angeles on the red-eye to Zurich. Neither of us were successful at requesting aisle or window seats so we sandwiched ourselves between other travelers and tried not to sleep. “If you stay up most of the night you won’t be as jet lagged,” Craig had said. I fell asleep two thirds of the way through Psycho and didn’t wake up until Swiss Air was ready to serve breakfast.

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Spotted on a wall in Cannes by Matt Dentler. Full-size after the cut.

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