By Mark Asch on May 28, This article appeared in the May 24, edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here. Affixed to the bus shelters all around the center of Cannes are celebrity photos from festivals past.
Partly this is so tourists can be reassured that they really are in the presence of greatness. Set during the American Civil War, it concerns a Union Army unit patrolling a largely unpopulated area of the western frontier. The Damned alternates poetic landscape shots with outbreaks of confusing violence and scenes of conversation semi-improvised by a largely nonprofessional cast. The soldiers discuss their reasons—or lack thereof—for enlisting, their beliefs or uncertainties about God, and their families and homes.
In a less politically fraught vein, two of the best films at Cannes concern insular communities bonded by ritual and facing down a looming sense of finality. The film is nine innings of ball-busting banter, as players keep score with a pencil nub, chase down foul balls in the woods, and spit sunflower seeds—all the coffee spoons with which baseball buffs measure out their lives. Lund captures the essence of dailiness through the routines of the sport, and I was delighted by a cameo from Joe Castiglione, the longtime Boston Red Sox radio announcer, whose voice still accompanies me on most summer nights.
Here, he plays a character who is feeling the inevitability of change—and the film can be seen to stand in for a number of troubling social developments just off-field and out-of-frame, including the erosion of monocultural objects such as our National Pastime, and the loss of communal third spaces like the baseball diamond.
At one point, the camera pans across a teeming array of family photos and one young character names each relative for another, even younger character. Such images made me think about the posters outside my Airbnb, and the many ways, and reasons, to make meaning from images of the past. Thoughtful, original film criticism delivered straight to your inbox each week.
