Design and architecture in 5 films we have seen at the Cannes Film Festival

Holocaust movies have created a specific aesthetic and have spread the strongest architectural elements of Nazi concentration camps around the world through different generations. They include the sloping-roofed guard towers, the barbed-wire walls, the barracks housing prisoners, and then the grim chimneys of the ovens, all the way to the train entrances, with tracks going all the way inside. The Zone of Interest starts right here. A movie that purposely relates the ordinary, commonplace issues of the family of the commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp. They live in a cottage of completely different architecture just outside the camp. As we follow their petty daily squabbles, we see in the background those architectural elements – the tip of a roof or a bit of smoke from the chimneys. 

When the children play in the garden the neighboring wall has barbed wire, we hear shots in the distance and screams. Although no one cares and everyone is used to it by now. Now and then a train comes, and we can tell by the smoke, at night the light from the guard towers passes over the house. It is not the Holocaust itself, but the Holocaust evoked by its architecture and sounds, now so deeply rooted in us that a hint in the background is enough to evoke its terror. The characters in the foreground, the Nazi family in the cottage next door, do not care. For them – and at some point for us as well – it is just background noise and introjected architectural landscape.

Not just a film shot in Japan with a Japanese protagonist, but a film set in Tokyo with a character in the role of a toilet cleaner. Astounded by the cult of the Japanese public toilet, Wim Wenders films this toilet cleaner as he performs an unlovely job with joy and a contagious serenity. There are different kinds of toilets, different designs, different technologies. One is transparent but when you lock the glass door and walls, they change polarity and become opaque, hiding the inside. They are all beautiful. 

Perfect Days is all focused on this neat and precise character in a whole city that is orderly and precise, methodical, and geometric, in which repetition, dedication, and purification through practice always seem to be just a step away. History and urban design that go hand in hand.

At the logical opposite of design and design care there are the awful, brutalist (without knowing what brutalism is) buildings of Zhili – located about 93 miles from Beijing. We are in the textile district, Happiness Road to be precise. And never has the name been more misleading. These meanness-created public housing blocks house labs where children’s fourth-rate clothes are mass-produced using homemade sewing machines inside bare rooms with no windows. It is piecework to be done quickly and controversially, always. 

Above all, it is a job for children. This documentary follows so many stories of these clerks, their demands for better wages, their lives in the horrible accommodations they are provided between steel doors and garbage on the terrace. Yet they are so vital. The contrast between the aggressiveness of this inhumane architecture and instead the loves, the pushes, the desires but also so much of the jokes and laughter of the young workers is most powerful, as if nothing, not even the disregard of any form of power, could suppress it.

How can one fall in love in the lifeless working-class neighborhoods of Helsinki? A man and a woman meet and seem to share the same fixity of expression, the same resignation to their condition of being ousted from society. They have jobs or odd jobs, not even looking for a better tomorrow. Yet this film is hilarious. They seem depressed but the laughs in the theater chase each other and are triggered by the unique humor of its author (the same as in The Man Without a Past). 

It might be a bitter plot, but their brightly colored clothes speak of quite different desires, their bare houses have colorful walls. We soon realize that their days are all about trying to meet, perhaps date. Kaurismaki’s is truly the most unexpected love film of the year. This feeling, tangible and capable of changing lives, finds its way into environments we never thought could host it – Formica tables and radios of outdated design. 

Along four hours Steve McQueen has time to explore the length and breadth of Amsterdam. Streets, houses, buildings, interiors, exteriors, courtyards, squares, industrial and central areas, museum and recreational areas, public and private, stores and red-light districts. All the spaces of the city in which this former video artist now filmmaker (he is the same as in 12 Years a Slave and Shame) has chosen to live for years are filmed as they are lived in, inhabited, or as they are traversed. These are the months of the pandemic, between more or less severe lockdowns, but the voiceover that accompanies like a carpet the images tells instead stories from the Nazi occupation, stories that happened in those very houses or those framed streets. 

Stories of massacres, violence, abuse, or resistance. A city is not just the sum of its places but the burden of the history of its places, even if decades later they seem to bear no visible traces of it. The contrast between the accounts of terrible decisions, essential suicides or hidden Jews and the images of those places where children now play, or families work is a widening of the historical perspective of architecture never seen on the big screen.