At Cannes Film Fest, Global Economic Crisis Visible On- and Off-Screen

The global economic crisis has already shaped up as one of the defining stories at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

Its effects are evident both in empty theater seats and on-screen with a movie like “Inside Job,” a documentary about the crisis from Charles Ferguson, a dot-com entrepreneur turned moviemaker.

The global economic crisis has already shaped up as one of the defining stories at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

Its effects are evident both in empty theater seats and on-screen with a movie like “Inside Job,” a documentary about the crisis from Charles Ferguson, a dot-com entrepreneur turned moviemaker.

The global economic crisis has already shaped up as one of the defining stories at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

Its effects are evident both in empty theater seats and on-screen with a movie like “Inside Job,” a documentary about the crisis from Charles Ferguson, a dot-com entrepreneur turned moviemaker.

Like his first documentary, “No End in Sight,” Mr. Ferguson’s new movie tells a complex story exceedingly well and with a great deal of unalloyed anger.

Financed by Sony Pictures Classics, which plans to release it in the fall, “Inside Job” lays out its essential argument, cogently and convincingly, that the 2008 meltdown was completely avoidable. [br]

[EW: A point, of course, we would strongly endorse, since the so-called “credit crunch” is in fact a conscious LENDING FREEZE instituted by the TBTF banks et al to make SURE the government, ie the taxpayers, would make good on THEIR bad bets 😉 ]

As Matt Damon’s voiceover guides us through the past decade, Mr. Ferguson mixes charts, television clips, still photos and newspaper headlines fluidly with star interviews (George Soros, Eliot Spitzer) and some choice words from less familiar faces, including a brothel madam and a therapist who each catered to Wall Street in the bubble years.

The movie ends not long after Robert Gnaizda, formerly with the Greenlining Institute, a housing advocacy group, characterizes the Obama administration as “a Wall Street government,” a take Mr. Ferguson clearly endorses.

It’s too bad that the outrage that fuels “Inside Job” is nowhere evident in “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps,” Oliver Stone’s limp follow-up to his 1987 film, “Wall Street” …

But the human effects of poverty ARE visible in the work of other filmmakers, such as Romanian Cristi Puiu’s critically lauded but commercially unsuccessful “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu” showed a few years ago.

On Friday Mr. Puiu was back at Cannes, again out of competition in Un Certain Regard, with “Aurora,” a slow-burning tour de force that transfixed critics for three hours, according to this article in the New York Times.

This is the second film in Mr. Puiu’s cycle, “Six Stories from the Outskirts of Bucharest,” about middle-class Romanians haunted by poverty, [br]

and which he has called a tribute to Éric Rohmer, who made his own “Six Moral Tales.”

A mystery in which the largest questions are existential rather than procedural, “Aurora” involves a solitary man, played by Mr. Puiu himself with an increasingly disquieting stare, who about an hour into the film buys a gun and then, a half-hour later, fires it.

It’s uncertain what haunts the man, whose name, Viorel, like so many other significant details, emerges late or not at all.

Instead of pumping up the narrative with familiar thriller (and musical) beats, Mr. Puiu builds tension through absence, creating palpable unease through lingering silences,

a dearth of heightened drama — before the gun goes off, the exchanges are fairly banal — and an emptied-out apartment.

Only later do you grasp that this man has been hollowed out too – by the existential ravages brought on by the constant angst and humiliation of poverty.