Cannes: ‘American Honey,’ ‘The Handmaiden’ and a (brief) word on long movies

7:07 A.M. REPORTING FROM CANNES, FRANCE

Cannes: ‘American Honey,’ ‘The Handmaiden’ and a (brief) word on long movies

Justin Chang

How long is too long? It’s a question that moviegoers are accustomed to asking at the Festival de Cannes, with its reputation for marathon running times, and this year has been no exception.

The official selection got its most time-consuming entry out of the way on the first day with Cristi Puiu’s just-shy-of-three-hours “Sieranevada.” But Puiu’s film is scarcely the sole competition entry to have clocked in at well north of two hours. Park Chan-wook’s “The Handmaiden” runs a tightly coiled 145 minutes, and Maren Ade’s “Toni Erdmann” and Andrea Arnold’s “American Honey” last a somewhat baggier 162 minutes each — and have, even in their most glowing notices, taken some flak for their perceived self-indulgence. (Still to come: Kleber Mendonça Filho’s 140-minute “Aquarius” and Na Hong-jin’s out-of-competition thriller “The Wailing,” listed in the festival program with a running time of 156 minutes.)

I’ve already written about why I think “Toni Erdmann,” in mapping the contours of an unusually intricate father-daughter relationship, largely earns the right to be unhurried and exhaustive. “American Honey,” though in some ways trickier to parse, earns it, too. Arnold, the prodigiously talented British director of “Red Road,” “Fish Tank” and “Wuthering Heights,” has shown an increasingly fearless command of form with each film, and in “American Honey,” her tough, electrifying, the-kids-are-definitely-not-all-right road movie, she leaves conventional ideas of narrative structure almost completely by the wayside, relying on pure texture, sensuality, imagery, music and performance to drive her picture forward.

The astonishing newcomer Sasha Lane plays Star, a Texas girl who, fed up with her depressing home life, impulsively tags along with a band of teenage drifters making their way across the Midwest. At the instruction of their whip-cracking manager, Krystal (a terrific Riley Keough), these kids raid remote outposts and suburban neighborhoods trying to sell magazine subscriptions, though it’s soon clear that what they’re really selling are their own dead-end sob stories — something that will stir the charitable empathy of the poor and wealthy alike. They are in effect selling themselves, the implication of which Arnold follows, at one point, to its logical conclusion.

There are some toxic romantic complications and misunderstandings involving Krystal’s top seller, Jake (a charismatically grunged-up Shia LaBeouf), who shows Star the ropes and soon shows her other things as well. But the movie never becomes fully invested in their on-again-off-again flirtation, and with a few exceptions, we never learn much about the other kids in this nomadic commune, either.

Arnold’s attention gravitates toward other elements in this rural American panorama: the startling beauty of a prairie sunset, the furious pop energy supplied by the film’s terrific soundtrack, and the small insects that repeatedly creep into the frame — as though drawn, moth-like, to the flame of Lane’s magnetism. You can’t blame them: Arnold and her extraordinary cinematographer, Robbie Ryan, keep their camera close to their leading lady, who has both a spunky-sultry impudence and a profile worthy of a Greek coin — a quality emphasized repeatedly in Ryan’s ravishing square-frame compositions.

“American Honey” is a jaggedly beautiful aesthetic object, and at two hours and 42 minutes, its accumulation of immersive details is meant to frustrate your sense of time passing. The subculture being examined here is a fascinating one, but long stretches of tedium, we come to understand, are also a significant part of the characters’ journey. Which is not to suggest that Arnold’s road movie, for all its sensory pleasures, lacks an arc or a destination: In a revelatory culmination of song, image and wordless exchange, the movie arrives exactly where it needs to, with Star emerging a bit sadder and a bit wiser — an epiphany that wouldn’t matter as much to us if we hadn’t seen and experienced so much alongside her.

How long is too long? Roger Ebert was fond of saying, “No good movie is too long and no bad movie is short enough.” I have a feeling he would have dug “American Honey.”

*****

“The Handmaiden” is the Korean director Park Chan-wook’s most delectable narrative feature in years — and I say that as someone who found his “Stoker” a genial hoot, but had little patience for “Thirst,” “Oldboy” and his other strained exercises in gore-sloshing perversity. There’s a little of that sadism on display here, but it doesn’t rear its head until the very end, and when it does it feels almost reflexive, compulsive — as if Park himself had become so wrapped up in the yarn he was spinning that he suddenly realized, shoot, he hadn’t sliced off anyone’s fingers yet.

Adapted from Sarah Waters’ Victorian-set novel “Fingersmith,” but relocated to 1930s Korea, this ornately art-directed erotic puzzler centers around two beautiful women: Sook-hee (Kim Tae-ri), a wily pickpocket turned duplicitous caretaker, and Lady Hideko (Kim Min-hee), a Japanese heiress who is the target of Sook-hee’s deception. Over the course of the movie’s three chapters, two of which provide a revelatory, “Rashomon”-style shift in perspective, the women will become lovers, rivals and allies, and their teasing, mercurial role play is what gives the movie its seductive pull.

A sort of “Gaslight”-meets-“Jane Eyre” with a big ol’ splash of “Diabolique,” “The Handmaiden” has predictably generated a lot of ink over its explicit lesbian love scenes — a touch that might well have been decried as exploitative (just as “Blue is the Warmest Color” came under attack here at Cannes three years ago), if not for the righteous narrative primacy that Park grants his leading ladies. Guys may well get off on the sight of these two women going at it, but the entire audience can take a certain gratification in the way they turn the tables on the devious and controlling men in the picture, including Hideko’s uncle (Cho Jin-woong), a pervy old purveyor of Japanese erotica who keeps a collection of human genital parts in jars.

Fetishism is both a crucial plot point and an entirely accurate description of Park’s stylistic approach. “The Handmaiden” may not be much more than ravishing surface at the end of the day, but Park’s embrace of his own voyeurism is awfully infectious. He likes to watch, and it’s a pleasure to admit that we do, too.

*****

By Ebert’s running-time logic, Nicole Garcia’s dreary competition entry “From the Land of the Moon,” though relatively trim at two hours, should feel positively interminable. It doesn’t, exactly. Marion Cotillard never ceases to be watchable even in a role as painfully limiting as Gabrielle, a gorgeously miserable 1950s Frenchwoman who spends all (and I do mean all) her time pining for men who will never be hers, while her perfectly decent, sensitively stubbled husband (Alex Brendemühl) suffers silently in the background.

Wallowing gently in picturesque scenery, coyly filmed couplings and prettily tortured shots of Louis Garrel, but without ever building the sort of delirious, full-on sexual boil that might have cut through its exquisite drippiness, the film (adapted from Milena Angus’ book “Mal di Pietre”) builds to a ludicrous final twist that’s pure Nicholas Sparks. That said, this particular masochistic weepie is still preferable to last year’s stealth Nicholas Sparks movie in competition, Gus Van Sant’s indefensible “The Sea of Trees.” (Presumably the sea of trees and the land of the moon are thematically if not geographically adjacent.)

In a year of heightened attention to industry-wide diversity issues, much worthy attention has been focused on the presence of three female filmmakers in competition: It’s not enough, but it’s still an improvement over past editions of Cannes, and I’d argue that the improvement is as much a factor of quality as quantity. “Toni Erdmann” and “American Honey” both have their detractors, but you’d be hard-pressed to find two Palme d’Or contenders that feel more thrillingly, urgently and cinematically alive.

“From the Land of the Moon” isn’t in the same league, though I’m leery of comparing leagues in the first place: Why lump filmmakers together simply because they’re female — and why hold Garcia to a more exacting standard than that of the numerous male-directed mediocrities that have been slotted into competition without a second thought? Garcia’s film can be defended, up to a point, as an old-fashioned throwback to the “women’s pictures” of the 1940s and ’50s, though its retrograde sexual politics would almost certainly have felt livelier and less dated in that context. Like most movies that take themselves with such deadly (and deeply French) seriousness, this unhappy-marriage drama almost begs to be remade as a comedy, perhaps even a sitcom. “One of these days, Gabby, bang, zoom! Straight to the land of the moon!”