Festival de Cannes 61 -- 2008

[Chris Knipp]

FESTIVAL DE CANNES

As Johann just pointed out, Michael Moore, who's done well at Cannes before, is there to get a distributor for his Fahrenheit 9/11 sequel. He's not alone. According to an introductory story on Cannes' opening, the Cannes "market head" Jerome Paillard says about a billion dollars worth of movie deals are clinched at that venue every year.

The head of the jury is Sean Penn. That is a choice that combines good proportions of name recognition, hipness, and social responsibility. And beside that he has a characteristic still makes the French feel at home: he smokes a lot.

Penn looked natty in his tux flanked by Alexandra Maria Lara of Youth Without Youth and Jacques Rivette favorite Jeanne Balibar, but he made it clear he's not letting the glitz blind him to bad stuff going on out there: ""The earthquake will influence my judgment with almost every movie," Penn declcared:"This is part of our global shared emotions and life, these things that are happening. This makes us more raw." He also softened the judgmental sting in advance by saying, "We're going to be sending some love-letters to some of these movies," but,"Those who don't get them, don't be discouraged."

Clint Eastwood and Steven Soderbergh are presenting films that deal with attention-getting topics: Eastwood child abduction in Changling starring Angelina Jolie, Soderbergh a four-hour, two-part biopic about Che Guevara. Somehow that all sounds a bit unlikely. So is Harrison Ford well into his sixties doing his own stunts in yet another Indiana Jones flick. But the world loves a franchise.

The Festival opens with a literally dark story--about Blindness, which is the title of the film, starring Julienne Moore (no stranger to on-screen suffering) directed by City of God's/ Fernando Meirelles and based on a novel by a Portuguese Nobel winner, Jose Saramago.

Lest things get too serious, Jack Black came into Cannes harbor on Festival opening day to be "greeted" by "dozens of giant pandas" (it says) to promote a movie called Kung Fu Panda. We don't have to actually look at Jack in this one; it's an animation and he just voices the lead panda.

All this silliness, posing, and self-promotion should not blind us to the fact that a lot of good films are likely to see the first light of day at Cannes, as usual.

You can peruse the various categories, including the Official Selections, Un Certain Regard series, and the Directors Fortnight, all explained in English on the official Cannes website.

Out of competition films include new ones by Woody Allen, Emir Kusturica, and Barry Levinson. Besides those already mentioned In Competition films include new work by Agoyan, Cantet, Garrone, Walter Salles with Daniele Thomas, Wim Wenders, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, James Gray, Charlie Kaufman, and Arnaud Duplechin.

And best of all, Festival de Cannes screenings will include work by plenty of people I've never heard of, yet--but will learn about in the months and years to come.

[Chris Knipp]

(Mostly drawn from NYTimes comments by Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott. Alphabetical by director's names.)

Laurent Cantet's The Class/Entre les murs. Another interesting Cantet study of work, this time of a French middle school teacher. (Scott omits any mention of Cantet's last film about older women with paid lovers in Haiti, Heading South/Vers le sud. ) The Class received a very positive audience response.

Arnaud Despleshin's A Christmas Tale/Un conte de Noel is a busy, original twist on the usual home-for-the-holidays movie with his regular central character Matthieu Amalric and a juicy cast including Catherine Deneuve, her daughter Chirara Mastroianni, Emmanuelle Devos, Hippolyte Girardot, and Melvil Poupaud. Full of disasters but basically a comedy, it filled Scott with "unadulterated joy." Sean Penn, head of the Cannes Jury, regretted that there were not more comedies.

Clint Eastwood's Changling directs Angelina Jolie, an odd match for a lurid, James Ellroy-worthy true crime story set in 1920's California that doesn't quite work.

Philippe Garrel's Frontiers of Dawn/La frontiere de l'aube again as in Regular Lovers starring his son Louis Garrel, with Laura Smet, which has Garrel senior's usual sad poetry and beautiful black and white imagery, but annoyed the early morning press audience at the Festival. Opens in Paris in early October.

Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah is a powerful screen version of Roberto Saverio's study of the Mafia. This would be a leap toward more mainstream concerns after The Embalmer. Seems to have been well received.

James Gray's Two Lovers again stars Joaquin Phoenix, with Vinissa Shaw and Gwyneth Paltrow, this time a crime-free melodrama about a Brighton Beach lad trying to choose between a family approved Jewish girl and an alluring blonde shiksa. Groans from the Cannes audience but a bold move by Gray to attempt melodrama without crime.

Jia Zhang-ke's 24 City works again at the edge between fiction and documentary in depicting the surreal new world of modern China. The focus is the shutdown of a munitions factory in southwest China being replaced by a luxury housing complex. Shot in intensely sharp digital and digitally projected for a hyperreal effect.

Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York stars Phillip Seymour Hoffman with Catherine Keener, Michelle Williams, and Emily Watson is a revolutionary study in complex storytelling that makes Kaufman's brilliant previous screnwriting efforts seem conventional by comparison. Baffled the audience.

Brillante Mendoza’s Serbis, first Filipino film in a Cannes competition, mostly happens in a porn theater called Family, and is a chaotic, noisy domestic drama and homage to cinema that features a runaway goat.

Hungarian director Kornel Mundruczo's Delta A.O. Scott found an enjoyable if formulaic "festival film" full of beautiful cinematography, long silences, and a plot marked by gothic minimalism.

Kelly Reichart of Old Joy, Scott says, has another quiet but convincing winner in the Un Certain Regard offering Wendy and Lucy, starring Michelle Williams, about a young woman on the edge of poverty traveling to Alaska with a dog. Well received.

Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas' Linha de Passe is a film in the spirit of Italian neorealism about a small family trying to "rise out of the mean streets of Sao Pauo."

Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire's Johnny Mad Dog, a drama about African child soldiers in Liberia starring actual former ones. Manohla Dargis was "wrung out" by it. To her it felt exploitive, but the Liberians' endorsement of it left her conflicted.

Soderbergh's Che. NYTimes' A.O. Scott says interesting, but misleading; it covers Che's two leadership roles in conflict and omits his misdeads; also a hard sell at a four-hour-plus, two-part length. Much anticipated and much debated.

Paolo Sorrentino's Il Divo. Scott couldn't understand why it was even included. Variety's Jay Weisberg says this biopic of seven-time Italian PM Giulio Andreotti is brilliant, bold, finely crafted and acted, but a hard sell outside Italy. Like Garrone, Sorrentino has nonetheless moved into relatively more mainstream territory with this topic.

Scott doesn't seem to have bothered to see Stephen Speilberg's Indiana Jones sequel--why should he, since it's already in US theaters? It's the big mainstream American turkey Cannes usually features, which The Da Vinci Code was a couple of years ago. Manohla did see it and says "I was bored out of my mind while watching the movie;" she suspects Spielberg was "terribly bored while directing it."

James Toback's Tyson is the maverick fiolmmaker's documentary about the fighter's rather tragic story. Its subject has recently said of the film, "I look at it now, and I’m embarrassed I did it. There’s a lot of information people didn’t need to know." Toback said it made Warren Beaty and Annette Benning cry. Opening Stateside in the fall.

Other competition titles:

Atom Agoyan's Adoration "A fascinating muddle.....Folding all sorts of post-9/11 questions - about the ethics of terrorism [etc.] this ambitious think-piece ultimately smothers its good intentions in didactic revelations, earnest pleading and incessant violin music."--Justin Chang, Variety.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Three Monkeys A "more ripely melodramatic" kind of story than his earlier films, and thus "sacrifices some of the wit" that made them memorable (Scott).

Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne's Le Silence de Lorna. About the moral struggle of an Albania girl in Belgium. Scott: "It’s very good. Not a masterpiece, though, which is what the Dardenne brothers have conditioned us to expect."

Ari Folman's Waltz With Bashir. Israeli animation/documentary about Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon which led to the the Sabra and Shatila massacres, the film deals with the repression of memories of atrocities. Powerful stuff, by reports, if still a one-sided account of the events. Well received.

Lucrecia Martel's The Headless Woman. "Errs on the side of consistency" (Scott: he means in contrast to Ceylan's new departure), but she may make up for that with her next one, a sci-fi alien invasion story, L’Eternauta,.

Fernando Meirelles Blindness. The Festival opener, metaphorical/apocalyptic story about everybody (except Moore) going blind. Starring Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo and Gael Garcia Bernal. "Zombified version of Children of Men" wrote Joe Utrichi of Rotten Tomatoes. He applauded its ambition but found it shallow. Not well received.

Eric Khoo's My Magic The Singapore director shot this mostly in the Tamil language: a story about "a downtrodden alcoholic magician who tries to reconnect with his 14-year-old son" (blurb). I saw Khoo's Be with Me (2005) in Paris and found it finely observed, but didn't write about it.

Pablo Trapero's Lion's Den/Leonora. About women's prisons that house mothers with their children. Martina Gusman may be a contender for the Cannes Best Actress award. Mixed reviews for the gritty film by the director of the 2006 Born and Bred, which I reviewed as part of the SFIFF 2007.

Wim Wenders' The Palermo Shooting "Greeted by a chorus of boos," according to the UK Telggraph. One of the least well received.

[Chris Knipp]

First prizes announced at Cannes Saturday, May 24, 2008, are for the Directors Fortnight series.

Bouli Lanners' Eldorado (Belgium) won the top awards of the series (the Label Europa Cinemas and Regards Jeunes prizes). It's a "small but damn-near perfectly formed serio-comedy" (Leslie Helperin, Variety) involving "A heroin addict and the lonely car dealer whom he just tried to burgle" who wind up making a road trip together.

Claire Simon's God's Offices/Les Bureaux de Dieu (France) received the SACD (Society of Authors and Composers) award for the best French language film in the series. A talking heads feature about family planning centers.

Juraj Lehotsky 's Blind Loves (Slovakia) received the CICAE (International Confederation of Arthouse Cinemas) art and essay award. A formally inventive documentary about the passions of blind people.

Tiao's Muro/The Wall (Brazil) won the New Vision Prize awarded by the telecom firm Neuf Cegetel for a short film.

[oscar jubis]

The best news from Cannes 61 came courtesy of J. Hoberman: Ashes of Time, one of my top 10 movies of the 1990s and my favorite film directed by Wong Kar Wai, has been "restored, rescored and digitally recolored". I'm always reluctant to recommend it because it deserves to be watched in a theater and because the available dvd is almost as shitty as the atrocious one of Hou's The Puppetmaster (another Top 10 1990s film).

Here's Hoberman's own take on Cannes 61:

Some Alternate Cannes Awards
Che wins the only Cannes award that really matters: ours
by J. Hoberman
May 20th, 2008 12:00 AM


CANNES, France—The competition for the Palme d’Or is ongoing as I write, but the story of the 61st Cannes Film Festival is Steven Soderbergh’s two-part four-and-a-half-hour Che—an epic non-biopic that might well have been approved by Roberto Rossellini, envied by Francis Coppola, and even appreciated by its subject. (And the greatest disappointment? Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York—a maiden directorial voyage saved only by its actors from comparison to the Titanic’s.)

Gazing into the depths of Indiana Jones’s crystal skull, I predict that Sean Penn’s socially conscious jury will bestow its highest award on either Che or Matteo Garrone’s corrosive gangster exposé Gomorra, with significant props to the creators or casts of Clint Eastwood’s Changeling, Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale, and Ari Folman’s feature animation Waltz With Bashir.

Which is to say—whadda I know? Thus, on behalf of my own one-man jury, with scant compensation for the winners and in scandalous unfairness to those few movies yet to screen, I bestow the following awards:

Le Gran Surprise du Festival to Che

Soderbergh’s $65 million rumination on Che Guevara’s activities, first during the miraculous Cuban Revolution and then his doomed Bolivian campaign a decade later, may be a great movie, but it is also something just as rare—a magnificently uncommercial folly. This skillfully didactic, nervily dialectical, feel-good, feel-bad combat film has less in common with The Motorcycle Diaries than with Peter Watkins’s La Commune (Paris, 1871) or even a structuralist extravaganza like Michael Snow’s La Région Centrale. Che is a thing to be experienced. Soderbergh’s single-minded meditation on the practice of guerrilla warfare, the creation of militant superstardom, and the nature of objective camera work is at once visceral and intellectual, sumptuous and painful, boldly simplified and massively detailed. Despite this, as well as a commendable performance by Benicio Del Toro, Che may require its own miracle—or at least a few angels—to reach an audience in the form Soderbergh intended. While the first half could certainly be tightened, the movie demands to take its time and be taken in at a single sitting. One can only hope that the world beyond Cannes will get the opportunity to do so at something approaching the original running time.

The Cri de Coeur for the Best Film in Competition Least Likely to Win a Prize to Lucrecia Martel’s La Mujer Sin Cabeza (The Woman Without a Head)

A woman perhaps runs over a dog on the highway and, possibly as a result, suffers her own injury. Dazed and forgetful, she wanders through her newly defamiliarized routine, engaging in all manner of impulsive behavior, always with a gracious smile and quizzical air. For her third feature, the Argentine director of La Ciénaga and The Holy Girl has created a comedy of disassociation. La Mujer is typically dense (and often very funny) and, no less than the protagonist, the viewer is compelled to live in the moment. Is that a problem? This hilariously titled movie’s successful use of a genuinely experimental film language was rewarded with walk-outs, boos, and disastrous reviews.

An Endless Red Carpet for the Most Heroic Star Performance in Art or Life to Angelina Jolie for Changeling

Last year at Cannes, Jolie lost her husband to Islamic terrorists; this year, suggesting a skull costumed for Halloween in a cloche hat and kissable wax red lips, she’s no less distracting as the suffering single mother in another true story. The main attraction in Eastwood’s two-fisted gothic snake-pit weepie, Jolie loses her child to knaves, psychos, and the entire state institutional apparatus. (Michelle Williams’s understated performance in Kelly Reichardt’s modest—but cosmic—Wendy and Lucy gave a far greater meaning to the loss of a dog.) Meanwhile, La Jolie put herself in contention for a future chevaliership making multiple tapés rouge appearances in an advanced state of pregnancy and confiding in the press that she would be delighted to have her child born in France.

The Special Prize of the Jerry (Lewis) to James Gray for Two Lovers

While certain French critics have anointed Gray the “Russian Scorsese,” Americans consider him, if at all, as a maladroit poseur. Switching from gangsta grit (We Own the Night) to romantic drama, Gray picked up additional hometown support while maintaining his unerring knack for negative credibility (tone-deaf repartee, botched authenticity, bungled local color). Two Lovers stars Joaquin Phoenix in the Adam Sandler role of a bipolar Brighton Beach lad torn between a comely JAP (Vinessa Shaw), a crazy shiksa (Gwyneth Paltrow), and Isabella Rossellini as the world’s least likely (yet most annoying) Jewish mother. Gray clinched his prix in telling Libération that his preferred reading includes Jacques Derrida and Louis Althusser—now, as a colleague observed, we know where he gets his dialogue.

A Magic Mirror to Synecdoche, New York

Collapsing in sodden self-reflexivity after a promising 40 minutes, Kaufman’s arch, interminable phantasmagoria—with Philip Seymour Hoffman as a Job-like theater director—retroactively improved all but the most miserablist movies I saw at Cannes (and especially Philippe Garrel’s equally lugubrious Cannes debut Frontier of Dawn, a typically distended and glumly romantic analog to Two Lovers). For the secondary gain of rendering the festival’s minor aggravations pleasures by comparison: Merci.

And finally, as this year’s festival passes in history, a Golden Madeleine to Wong Kar-Wai’s Ashes of Time Redux

The master of Chinese chinoiserie managed to return to Cannes for the fourth consecutive festival with a restored, rescored, and digitally recolored version of his 1994 exercise in action sword-play and wuxhia nostalgia. Insanely gorgeous, filled with poses and ecstasies, and always trembling on the brink of self-parody, this tale of medieval warriors and the women who can’t forget (or remember) them evokes the most extreme mannerism of the ’60s—Last Year at Marienbad, Flaming Creatures, Once Upon a Time in the West. Had it been selected by Cannes in 1994, could Ashes of Time have beaten another delirious, time-tripping genre film—Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction? It’s highly unlikely (a poll published during the festival named Pulp Fiction the most popular Palme d’Oreate of all time), but it’s beautiful to think so. Memories should be made of this.

[Chris Knipp]

The big prizes of Festival de Cannes 61 were announced on Sunday, May 25, 2008.

GOLDEN PALM (PALME D'OR) to Laurent Cantet's The Class/Entre les murs The first French winner since Maurice Pialat's Sous le soleil de Satan 21 years ago. Also another nod to the Banlieue and multiculturalism.

THE GRAND PRIZE (GRAND PRIX) to Matteo Garrone's Gomorra. Garrone's film is a screen version of Roberto Saverio's book expose of the Mafia.

THE BEST ACTOR AWARD to Benicio Del Toro for his performance as Che Guevara in Steven Soderbergh's Che. This had been predicted all along.

THE BEST ACTRESS AWARD to Sandra Corveloni for her performance in Walter Salles and Daniela 's Linha de passe. The Brazilian actress was a first-timer; her previous work was mostly in theater and a few short films. A bit of a surprise.

THE BEST SCENARIO AWARD to ean-Pierre et Luc Dardenne for Le silence de Lorna. An indication of Cannes' great admiration for the two-time Golden Palm winners (Rosetta,1999;The Child/L'Enfant, 2005).

THE BEST DIRECTOR AWARD to Nuri Bilge Ceylan for The Three Monkeys

THE JURY AWARD went to Paolo Sorrentino's Il Divo A biopic of long-reigning Italilan politico Andreotti, Considering the low energy level of Italian film production these days the double victory is surprising and may be encouraging.

THE CAMERA D'OR prize went to the English director Steve McQueen's Hunger This was the festival opener starring Julienne Moore et al. This in view of reports is the surprise among the awards.

SPECIAL CAREER AWARDS went to Catherine Deneuve and Clint Eastwood Mme Deneuve walked in saying she didn't know what she was doing there; she found out.

Le Monde's article on the wins notes in conclusion that Eastwood for his Changling and Ari Folman for his Lebanon war documentary/animation Waltz with Bachir were much appreciated at the festival but both "went home empty-handed."





Note to Mr. Hoberman: "surprise" is feminine in French. And "red carpet" in French is "tapis rouge."

[Chris Knipp]

This information from today's Le Monde may also be of interest to foreign film fans. Paris release dates for these Cannes Festival selections:

- Blindness - Fernando Meirelles - July 30
- The Class/Entre les murs - Laurent Cantet - October 15
- The Three Monkeys - Nuri Bilge Ceylan - January 2009
- Lorna's Silence - Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne - September 10
- A Christmas Tale/Un conte de Noël - Arnaud Desplechin - May 21 (already released)
- Adoration - Atom Egoyan - September 24
- Walz with Bashir - Ari Folman - June 25
- The Edge of Dawn/ La Frontière de l'aube - Philippe Garrel - October 8
- Gomorra - Matteo Garrone - August 13
- Two Lovers - James Gray - November 26
- My Magic - Eric Khoo - November 12
- The Headless Woman - Lucrecia Martel - March 2009
- Che - Steven Soderbergh (two films) - October and November
- Il Divo - Paolo Sorrentino - December 10
- Leonera - Pablo Trapero - Early 2009

[Chris Knipp]

The Un Certain Regard jury was headed by Fatih Akin and gave their prize to Sergey Dvortsevey's Tulpan. a first fiction feature by a Kazakh documentary director. They also gave an on-the-spot created "KnockOut Prize"to James Toback's Tyson.

IFC picked up not only Steve McQueen's Hunger and Summer Hours but also a Korean serial killer flick called The Chaser.

Sony confirmed purchase of The Dardennes' The Silence of Lorna, BEnt Hamer's O'Horton and the Israeli animation, Ari Folman's Waltz With Bashir. Toback's Tyson possibly to be bought by Sony but not yet confirmed at this writing.

Three notable Cannes Official Selection titles not yet picked up are the controversial and obviously interesting one Soderbergh's Che, Charlie Kaufman's Synechdoche, New York, and James Gray's Two Lovers.

Olivier Assayas' Summer Hours (an IFC purchase) sounds good, though its non-problem-driven middle-class white plot would not have endeared it to the "political" jury headed by Sean Penn. IFC continues to show a good balance of edgy and more easy to take but always quality selections, though how widely they get them shown I don't know.

[oscar jubis]

The information was from other sources. Sources were clearly identified. Info was for your benefit. If you don't want it, so be it. It's gone. I'm losing patience with comments like that from you. I have better things to do, really.

[Chris Knipp]

Surely the information was for everybody's benefit but so is using quotation marks for verbatim quotes and naming the source each time you quote (especially to the benefit of the writers). Cutting and pasting must be used with circumspection. Culling out info (directors, titles, buyers) and phrasing it all in your own words would have been fine with the prior mention of the two sources. That is what I did with my information in my recent Cannes posts drawn mostly from the NYTimes and Le Monde. I did not cut and paste except a few proper names, to get the spelling right.