‘Peshmerga’ gets Cannes ovation – Jeers greet Penn’s ‘Last Face’ at Cannes

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CANNES, France, May 20, (Agencies): A Kurdish cameraman who nearly lost his arm shooting a film by French celebrity philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy about the Kurds’ battle against the Islamic State group was cheered Friday at the Cannes film festival. Ala Tayyeb was called onto the stage by the flamboyant Gallic intellectual as he and a group of Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga generals got a standing ovation after the documentary “Peshmerga” was screened. “This is great. I am very moved, thank you,” Tayyeb told AFP.

The vehicle in which he was filming a Kurdish advance against IS last year was blown up by a mine, killing three peshmerga fighters inside. One of the Kurdish generals who figure prominently in the documentary was also killed in a firefight with IS six weeks ago. The 67-year-old thinker is shown warning General Maghdid Harki — who insisted on taking the same risks as his men — to be careful. But footage later has the general fighting off an IS attack on his mountaintop position overlooking Mosul, the biggest city held by the jihadists.

The camera cuts seconds before he is shot in the forehead. Levy travelled 1,000 kilometres (600 miles) along the front line between the Kurds and IS in Iraq filming fighting, “landscapes, and the faces of men and women rarely seen in the wider world”. He told reporters that the film is a “recognition of the courage of the peshmerga fighters and a recognition of the justice of their cause.” Levy was markedly less present in front of the camera than in “The Oath of Tobruk”, his film about his role in toppling Libyan dictator Moamer Kadhafi in 2011.

Sheikh Jafar Mustafa, one of the leading Kurdish commanders, said the peshmerga were “a rampart protecting the world from what has unfortunately happened in Paris and Brussels,” referring to IS terror attacks there in November and March. General Sirwan Barzani, a telecoms millionaire and nephew of the Massoud Barzani, president of the Kurdish Autonomous Region, was also at Cannes to see the film, as well as the “Kurdish Madonna”, singer Helly Luv. Festival director Thierry Fremaux mistakenly welcomed them as “our Turkish guests” before quickly correcting himself.

Last year, “Beasts of No Nation” told a story of mutilated innocence in an unnamed African hell zone, but it didn’t feel compelled to add a token white hero (the caring photojournalist! The conflicted UN Peacekeeper!) for the audience to identify with. “The Last Face,” an endless, logy cataclysm of a war-torn political drama directed by Sean Penn, goes right back to the look!-here-are-some-movie-stars-in-the-maelstrom paradigm. The film is set in some of the most blood-soaked territories of Africa — South Sudan, the Sierra Leone, Liberia — and it’s full of jaggedly edited sequences in which children lie on operating tables with their chests blown open, corpses appear in fly-buzzing piles, and homemade bombs and machine-gun fire explode out of nowhere at deafening volume.

At the front and center, though, are two characters who are in the crisis but not of it: Charlize Theron as Wren Petersen, a globe-trotting physician and activist, and Javier Bardem as Miguel Leon, a surgeon to refugees who lives his life in a state of triage. These two meet in Liberia in 2003, fall into an affair, argue about whether they love each other, and then break up (not necessarily in that order). “The Last Face” is Sean Penn’s version of an Angelina Jolie movie: It keeps advertising its compassion, yet it’s really a drama about two beautiful movie stars trying to save the world. Who, after all, can’t identify with that?

The last film that Penn directed, “Into the Wild” (2007), was an aesthetic breakthrough for him — it had a rhythmic and visual freedom that his earlier films (“The Pledge,” “The Crossing Guard”) didn’t, and a subtler humanity as well. But between that film and this one, Penn starred in Terrence Malick’s masterpiece of lyric memory, “The Tree of Life,” and it would appear that the Malick touch has now exerted a major influence on him, and not in a good way. These days, if an independent film includes one artful shot of a wheat field that lingers for more than four seconds, the filmmaker will inevitably be hailed as “a new Terrence Malick,” but the Malick influence is not, by and large, something to celebrate. (If you look at his recent films, even Malick is too influenced by Malick.) “The Last Face,” at heart, is a straightforward drama (or should have been), but Penn stages it as a needlessly fragmented and dreamy art poem. There are no establishing shots, so the hand-held verite stuff leaves the spatial dynamics of each setting a bit vague, and the whole film is stitched together by voiceover, with Wren and Miguel pouring out their overly mournful thoughts to us.

Take, for instance, the issue of why Wren does what she does. She leads an organization called MdM (essentially the film’s fictionalized version of Doctors Without Borders), which was created by her late father, and this is her way of attempting to live up to his legacy. Technically speaking, “The Last Face” is often an impressive achievement. Penn is a gifted filmmaker who doesn’t sugarcoat the horror of what he’s out to show us. The medical scenes are often brutal, not so much because of the wounds or the blood but because we’re watching children die. The message hits home, because really, how could it not? Yet Penn would do well not to mistake his own global caring for an artistic impulse. “The Last Face” was greeted with jeers at its premiere Cannes showing, and that’s because no matter how “well-meaning” a director may be, there’s something inherently eye-rolling about being asked to care about the tragedy of African children through the POV of two lovelorn glamourpusses. If you really take the message of the movie to heart, it just forces you to acknowledge that the story — to quote Humphrey Bogart — doesn’t amount to a hill of beans.

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