“Mangez le rat!”
Now, let us all be honest. There has only been one surf film, ever, worth the time of an auteur and that is Bruce Brown’s seminal masterpiece The Endless Summer. Others, including Point Break, North Shore, Blue Crush are cute. Others still, including Chasing Mavericks and In God’s Hands, are so offensive as to count as crimes against humanity.
None, though, has received a knee-buckling six minute standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival. None except Nicolas Cage’s new offering The Surfer, that is.
Variety shared, “Cage appeared to be having a ball, beaming from ear to ear and waving across the room as cheers erupted around the Palais for the film, a wild, mind-bending adventure that sees the fan favorite hit the sort of deranged peaks not witnessed on screen since ‘Mandy.’ At one point he took the mic to ask how to say “eat the rat” in French — a line from the film (and likely to become a meme) — roaring “mangez le rat!” to the delight of the crowd.”
The picture, directed by Lorcan Finnegan, is said to be an homage to vintage Australian New Wave films and is receiving rave reviews.
The Hollywood Reporter declares, “There’s no point in hiring Nicolas Cage if you’re not going to let him rip with a wackadoodle, OTT performance, and he duly delivers in the sly psychological thriller The Surfer.”
The action is described thusly:
Unfolding largely on a beach and its adjacent parking lot in Western Australia, but about a man who is trapped by his own compulsions, The Surfer must be one of the most claustrophobic films that takes place almost entirely outdoors. Hold on, there are a couple of interiors: a grotty public toilet, the inside of a few cars, and a shack on the beach where local antagonists of the eponymous unnamed hero, the surfer (Cage), hang out. But the frequent zooms into the surfer’s twitchy eyes, sudden flashes back and forward, and shimmering shots that look like they’ve been filmed underwater even when on dry land all suggest the story might be unfolding in the surfer’s head as his sanity unravels.
But of course you will see and I will see and we will discuss our various feelings. Until then, let’s enjoy the trailer together.
Need more entertainment? Don’t worry. David Lee Scales and I got together for our weekly chat and discussed surf adjacency. Enjoy, rats.
