Cannes 2017: Alejandro Irritu’s virtual reality project is festival’s true disrupter – Los Angeles Times

Since virtual-reality entertainment began gaining currency several years ago, two key questions (among many) have emerged: Will the mainstream film community embrace it? And what form will that embrace take?

The first question is increasingly heading to an emphatic yes. That point has been underscored over the past few days at the Cannes Film Festival, where organizers for the first time invited a VR project to its official selection: a piece by Alejandro G. Irritu, the Oscar-winning director of Birdman and The Revenant.

Titled Carne y Arena, the project has both Hollywood bona fides it is partly funded by the studio heavyweight Legendary Entertainment and the stamp of the art house community, for which Cannes is a holy site.

Answers to the second question about form, however, remain far more ambiguous.

Installed in an airplane hangar about 20 minutes outside of town, Carne y Arena tells the story of Latin American immigrants who are attempting to cross into the United States via the Arizona desert when they are spotted and caught by U.S. authorities. Irritu and his frequent cinematography collaborator Emmanuel Lubezki, who goes by Chivo, located real people who suffered the torturous journey and had them reenact it on camera; they then shot their stories with VR's 360-degree sweep and in-your-face urgency.

Until you feel it until you feel what it's like to be 20 years old, not left wing or right wing or any wing you can't really talk about it.

Alejandro G. Irritu, director of the VR project 'Carne y Arena'

(A version of the piece will come this summer to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where its expected to run for several months, welcoming one museum patron at a time and making the five to seven people allowed into the precipitation portion of Rain Room seem like a flash mob. Carne also will open in a few weeks at the Fondazione Prada in Milan; the arts institution was a backer as well.)

Viewers experience the film in a highly curatorial way. The piece is flanked by an art installation on-screen testimony, a reconstructed holding pen while the movie itself is a walking VR piece that allows viewers to wander around the desert at will (or at least as much as the room, a sand-strewn space the size of several volleyball courts, allows).

Displayed in an Oculus Rift headset, the six-minute piece begins with a desperate group of immigrants straggling into sight, led by their "coyote" smugglers. But the windswept quiet is soon jolted by the sight (or heavens-rattling sound) of a military helicopter. In an instant, the terrain is turned into a Children of Men-style horror show. As guns are pointed and orders barked, the immigrants drop to their knees. So too can a curious viewer, if he or she chooses; the virtue of VR is the ability to walk up to and around a film's subjects, almost like one holds an invisibility force field.

This is very different from the rhetoric and the politics, Irritu said in a joint interview with Chivo at the festival Sunday. Until you feel it until you feel what it's like to be 20 years old, not left wing or right wing or any wing going through something like this, you can't really talk about it.

The subject matter is not new to VR. Border stories have been explored for years by many of the medium's preeminent filmmakers (especially the former USC pioneer Nonny de la Pea), so the air of novelty put forth by those promoting the project will be met by VR veterans with a measure of skepticism.

What Irritu has done differently is offer a sense of scope and scale much like a studio director who adapts the techniques of an independent filmmaker to a bigger canvas. There is an almost unprecedented vastness to the desert, which can seem peaceful until the cavalry arrives and turns it into a kind of wasteland prison. The use of a comparatively large budget (undisclosed) and whiz-bang technology (new and changing by the minute) also offers a level of hyper-realism that would have been unthinkable to filmmakers working with different tools or a shallower pocketbook.

We came in with two cameras thinking we'd block everything and then shoot it. And we realized that was very naive.

Emmanuel Lubezki, cinematographer

Beyond the question of the border story, whether documentary-style pieces are ideally suited for VR generally remains to be seen. Dropping a viewer into the action is one of the chief assets of the medium, making the documentary style a no-brainer.

Whether it also is the most compelling not to mention the most commercial approach is another matter. Given their resumes, Irritu and Chivo might have seemed likely to press a fictional narrative something live-action VR has been sorely missing though, when asked, the pair hedged on whether they'd try that next.

Still, the filmmakers seem well disposed to VR from a technical standpoint, having used 360-degree camera techniques in The Revenant and Birdman, in which they at once broke cinema's frame and worked within it. This time around they had no frame to break, just a cover-every-pixel process they described as being as vexing as it was liberating.

It's a completely different medium. You can't use the tools weve developed in film for over 100 years, Chivo said. We came in with two cameras thinking we'd block everything and then shoot it. And we realized that was very naive.

To hear the pair talk with fresh wonderment about the form the need for new grammar and the obsolescence of old techniques, the flouting of convention and the different rules of consumption is to listen to conversations that many in the VR community have long had and in a sense moved past.

Still, such remarks are noteworthy, offering a glimpse at the crossover dynamic that occurs when the artistic establishment in one form begins discovering another, like when rock musicians first stumbled upon an already thriving world of hip-hop beats.

Hollywood and VR still need to work out cultural differences too. The notion is highlighted by the unusual layers of Hollywood bureaucracy around seeing Carne at Cannes, which clashes with the informality and filmmaker accessibility that has until now characterized the space.

Even the simple matter of what to call these new pieces was complicated by the number of emails sent to journalists exhorting them to call Carne an art installation instead of a film.

Certainly the presence of Carne at Cannes makes for a complex juxtaposition. Much of the Sturm und Drang at the festival around digital technology has been centered on Netflix, which with two films in competition has provoked a backlash from French theater owners and plenty of headlines. But in a way, streaming services are not the real disrupters. They may upset theater owners, but they keep intact many of the film industry's long-standing rules and players. Hollywood in the Netflix age is doing what it has always done, it has just delivering film differently.

VR, though, upends the game much more significantly, changing the very way stories are told and since hardly every filmmaker is as game as Irritu and Lubezki who will tell them too. That is far more anathema to the ideology of Cannes, which reveres cinema and its masters like few others. This makes it all the more surprising that festival director Thierry Frmaux enthusiastically persuaded a skeptical Irritu to bring the piece here (at least as the filmmaker explained it), instead of the other way around.

If (when?) VR takes off as a storytelling medium, the idea of people gathering in plush theaters named after French artistic greats to watch two-hour slices of edited film could seem as quaint as the masses gathering for the latest Bizet debut.

In that regard, Irritu and Chivo are ahead of the curve when they say that VR could soon become a much bigger part of film fans' diet.

I think it could be less than 10 years when kids look at a movie on a [traditional] screen and say, You used to watch things on that? Chivo said.

In the meantime, filmmakers are ranging around to match content and medium.

We are using the highest technology to express the stories of the people treated like the lowest in society, Inarritu said. It is virtual reality to express a bad reality."

What other kinds of reality and whether it needs to be real at all still needs to be sussed out. Maybe at future festivals.

See the most-read stories in Entertainment this hour

steve.zeitchik@latimes.com

Twitter: @ZeitchikLAT

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Cannes 2017: Alejandro Irritu's virtual reality project is festival's true disrupter - Los Angeles Times