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‘Restless’ premiere
Gus Van Sant, who’s one of the Cannes Film Festival’s favorite U.S. directors, goes way off track with his latest, “Restless,” which premiered Thursday at the festival.
It features a paint-by-the-numbers melodramatic screenplay and a syrupy style that will test the patience of most cinephiles. It might, however, find support among young people who haven’t seen this kind of sap before. But it’s doubtful.
Here’s the setup. Enoch (Henry Hopper) is obsessed with death. His mother and father are dead, and in his spare time, he sneaks into the funerals of people he doesn’t know, just to look around. This is his idea of a good time.
At one of the funerals, he meets a young girl, Annabel (Mia Wasikowska), who is mourning one of the children who died in the cancer ward where she works. She makes goo-goo eyes at Enoch during the funeral and starts stalking him.
After initially rejecting Annabel’s advances, Enoch warms up to her quirkiness. But Enoch doesn’t know that Annabel has only three months to live. She has been working at the cancer ward because she herself has cancer.
Enoch and Annabel visit the grave of Enoch’s parents, where they carry on fanciful conversations with the dead. Enoch also has a best friend, a young Japanese guy who goes around dressed like a Japanese soldier. But the Japanese guy is really a ghost, and no one can see him but Enoch.
Enoch deals with the news of Annabel’s impending demise with what the press notes describe as “irreverent abandon.” I’ll leave it to you to figure out the last hour of the plot. Suffice it to say: You’ve seen this before.
“Restless” was the opening night film for Un Certain Regard, an official sidebar to the main competition selection. It doesn’t belong there. And it doesn’t really belong in Cannes.
Director Gus Van Sant takes a photo during a photo call for Restless, at the 64th international film festival, in Cannes, southern France, Friday, May 13, 2011. (AP Photo/Lionel Cironneau)
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