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...even high-art programmers know that films are also movies. So this year Cannes had a quartet of horror-SF pictures. Two, X-Men The Last Stand and the Taiwanese thriller Silk, showed out of competition in the main selection. Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly played in the official sidebar Un Certain Regard. The fourth film, Bong Joon-ho's The Host was in the independent Directors' Fortnight program...
...Scanner Darkly was the second of two films at Cannes this year by writer-director Linklater, and I'll start by saying it's better than the other Linklater item, Fast Food Nation, which so far has tied Richard Kelly's Southland Tales as the Festival's biggest flop. This one is an adaptation of a 1977 novel by that crucial and deeply disturbing SF visionary, Philip K. Dick. It's Dick's memoir of his addiction to painkillers and other drugs, as refracted through the sci-fi-delic prose style of his later years...
...Scanner Darkly can be synopsized... you know, I'm not going to try. The whole enterprise is too dizzyingly oneiric. I'll just say that everyone is after a drug called Substance D, for Death (and for Dick). Also that the two leading characters are a drug-addled renegade, Robert Arctor, and his pursuer, an undercover cop named Fred - and that both are the same person. See? It's complicated...
...Scanner Darkly is a live-action animated film. That is, Linklater first shot scenes with his star cast of actors - including Keanu Reeves (as Arctor/Fred), Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson and Winona Ryder - and then had artists trace over the images, adding such fantasy elements as bugs crawling over one druggie and a protean "scramble suit," worn by Fred to disguise his identity (whatever that is). At times a face is given a kind of Jell-O elasticity. Linklater first used this process, called rotoscoping, five years ago in Waking Life. It's appropriate to the subject, and is used...
...Last night's screening started 10 minutes late, because, we were told, the stars and director were delayed in traffic. When he walked onto the Debussy stage, flanked by Reeves and Downey, Linklater wanted the audience to know that Scanner was, among other things, a comedy. Yet the movie never matched the onstage raillery of Downey, who grabbed the mike and announced, "Would the person with the Peugeot please move your goddam car? You're blocking traffic on the Croisette...