(Untitled) - screened at Cannes Film Market by Jonathan Parker

She is smart, sophisticated, and tied to New York intellectual spheres. He is maladjusted, unconventional and rebellious. (Untitled) could have been some charming romantic movie about two unique people struggling with their differences, only to finally realize that the love they share is more important than anything. This kind of bridge between entertainment and indie movie has become a giant industry in which well-known actors find a place to show new facets of themselves. In this case, we have the blonde Marley Shelton, the wonderful lesbian nurse from Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror, and the weird Adam Goldberg, seen as the hilarious American boyfriend in Julie Delpy’s 2 Days in Paris. Over the past few years, distinguishing true indie movies from fake ones has become more and more difficult. Given all the recurring mistakes of this kind of exercise, (Untitled) is thus an intelligent surprise.

The film begins as a burlesque satire of contemporary art and its nonsense, with a logical explanation of the kind of conversation we’ve all had at some point during an exhibition. In a place where a blank wall or a stuffed deer become instantly priceless pieces of art responsible for a revolutionary speech, where is the limit between meaning and stupidity? The head of a trendy gallery, Madeleine Gray, expresses herself with twenty different styles of eyeglasses and a noisy leather skirt. When she attends Adrian Jacobs’s modern music show, in which broken glasses and rusty buckets replace instruments, this young woman just can’t keep her eyes off him. The line between love and admiration is thin, and most of (Untitled) is about this. But beyond this simple idea, Jonathan Parker is more interested in the nature of art and what makes people want to be part of this gigantic joke. The different artists are as funny as they are crazy, but each one of them symbolizes a particular element of the art world – money, ambition, disillusionment or loneliness. How far can we go to defend our artistic and political convictions? How can you find balance between your personal beliefs and the world around you? The answers are out of (Untitled)’s reach, but the simple fact that the movie asks the questions is enough to make it more interesting than average indie-tainment cinema fare.

By Geoffrey Crété