CANNES: ‘Chatroom,’ ‘Aurora’

Far be it from me to tell Thierry Fremaux et al how to run a festival – though I’ve programmed some pretty wicked DVD marathons in my time, I’ll have you know – but the scheduling at Cannes this year has been haphazard, to say the least. Today, for example, served up no Competition titles whatsoever, with only two Un Certain Regard titles to keep “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” (which I hardly expected to emerge as my favorite film of the day) company on a Friday night.

Cut to me drawing up my viewing schedule for tomorrow, frantically calculating the pros and cons of around eight different titles I want to see, and I can’t help wishing they’d spread the weekend wealth a little. Mike Leigh’s “Another Year” and WoodyAllen’s “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger” are the two major attractions, of course, but I’ll be sorry to miss Cam Archer’s “Shit Year” in Director’s Fortnight. That’s just the morning menu: later on, we get buzzy new titles from Gregg Araki, Xavier Dolan, Charles Ferguson and Mahamet-Saleh Haroun … there will be, if not blood, some heavy-hearted cross-outs.

Not that I was much in the mood for further screenings after today’s slightly gruelling back-to-back triple-bill, one-third of which found me hunched on the stairs of the Salle Debussy theater as press packed out this afternoon’s screening of Hideo Nakata’s “Chatroom.” (They’d regret their enthusiasm before long.)

Finally, bad cinephile’s confession: I’d fully intended to take advantage of today’s lighter viewing load to dive into the Director’s Fortnight for the first time, but when Jeff Wells blagged me into the Abu Dhabi beachfront party (no, I don’t know what it was for either), the promise of free champagne and my first hot meal since Sunday outweighed that of another few hours in the dark with a worthy film for company. I am but human.

There, I heard from Pete Hammond similar rumors to those Dave Karger had mentioned in our chat earlier today: that Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “Biutiful” could turn out to be very special indeed. It may only be three days away, but that can seem awfully far away when faced with films like the following two.

“CHATROOM” (1/2*)

Do teenagers still use chatrooms? Have more advanced social networking options not rendered them quaint? Or have they been rendered so quaint that they’ve now regained an ironic cache of cool? I’m about 10 years too old to answer these questions with any authority, but they all ran through my mind as I watched Hideo Nakata’s grimy, inert and profoundly unalarming thriller about the dangers that lurk when those crazy kids get online.

Pitched halfway between the thrumming horror beats of Nakata’s signature “Ring” series and a particularly overstimulated episode of “Skins” – it duly filches the best actress from that very series, Hannah Murray, for its ensemble, to no positive effect – the British production fails straight out of the starting-gate, with its bafflingly misguided decision to literalize the concept of online chatrooms for the screen.

Aware of the fundamentally uncinematic properties of typing, Nakata and screenwriter Enda Walsh (adapting his own play, and worlds away from the heights of “Hunger”) have chosen to feature their principals in conversation in a zanily-decorated dream chamber of sorts, mostly ignoring the fact that a) this is no less static than the non-metaphorical alternative, and b) the dynamics of a chatroom environment hinge entirely on participants’ facelessness.

Aaron Johnson, working an even less appealing cocksure stance than the one he brought to “Kick-Ass,” headlines as a psychologically troubled teenager who gets his kicks off preying on peers even more insecure than he; filling out his chatroom are a group of misfit kids whose names may as well be “Girl with Body Consciousness Issues,” “Boy with Paternal Abandonment Issues” and “Boy with Paedophilic Attraction Issues” for all the interest the film takes in their individual personalities.

I could list the assorted ways in which “Chatroom” is unspeakable, from its poky visual schematics to the overbearing X-Files-meets-Richard-Clayderman score to the afterschool-special performance level throughout, but none of those are as irksome or offensive as the evident relish the film takes in exposing a social institution that couldn’t have been more naked already; I expect Nakata’s equally brain-dead and cruddy-looking MySpace thriller to drop sometime around 2019. With any luck, that one won’t be granted an indefensible Un Certain Regard berth.

“AURORA” (**)

Apparently, Romanians make moussaka with potatoes. This is not, I admit, the kind of knowledge one needs or expects to gain from a Cannes festival entry, but it is the most significant thing I took away from Cristi Puiu’s sporadically droll but perversely languid anti-thriller tracing the behavioural meltdown of a mild-mannered family man. (That’s all you’ll get from me: incident is low enough as it is in the film without me spoiling his few consequential actions.)

Puiu’s 2005 black comedy “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu” garnered much well-earned admiration for its broad canvas critically detailing the minutiae of Romanian civic life, but his latest falls some way short of that film’s focus and bite, while drawing out the running time to a punishing 180 minutes. Puiu can be a remarkable choreographer of sequences when characters are engaging levels of text and subtext, his inquisitive camera locating tension of the most banal of shared spaces. Too often, however, this film settles for simpler miserablism, stranding us in empty rooms with a lone, ungiving protagonist. With apologies to Burt Bacharach, a chair is still a chair, especially if there’s no one sitting there.

Many will admire “Aurora” (indeed, many already have) for the brazen, uncompromising endurance test that it is – and in an uneasy, deadpan final confession sequence, at least, it partially earns their plaudits — but it’s hard to see arthouse patrons cottoning to it in quite the same numbers that they did the comparatively pithy “Lazarescu.” Perhaps Puiu himself seemed aware of this as he introduced the film at today’s press screening, sheepishly saying, “It’s a very long film, and for that, I feel for you.”