CANNES Film Festival 2017

[Chris Knipp]

From Un Certain Regard (Uma Thurman presiding)

Screen Daily has a complete guide to the Un Certain Regard films



The Studio/L’Atelier, Laurent Cantet
"A fascination with abandoned youth." Coauthored by Cantet with his acolyte Robin Campillo (120 Beats a Minute. After the Palm d'Or for The Class.Entre les Murs (2008), Cantet continues to examine the minds of the next generation. With The Studio he looks at saving people, in a mixed fiction and documentary work set in the working-class Mediterranean city of La Ciotat on an exchange where wounds can be healed. Questions naturally to radicalization and racism in the country. The scenario turns to today's news like the Nice and Batacalan attacks. Particularly attention to an humanistic and multicultural approach, with each person able to speak without being judged. With Marina Foïs playing a Parisian writer leading a writing workshop. More and more the action narrows in Olivia (Foïs) and one student who is outspoken and comes to seem dangerous.


Accortsi, Trinca in Fortunata

Fortunata (Lucky), Sergio Castellito
A drama about a young mother recently broken up with her husband who wants to start a hair salon in a Roman suburb starring Jasmine Trinca, 16 years after she debuted as the daughter in Nanni Moretti's The Son's Room. Stefano Accorsi (The Last Kiss) costars. It's a "fervent melodrama" in which, according to the Screen Daily reviewer, the emotional extremes are distracting.

[Chris Knipp]

Cannes day 7: Kiarostami, Kawase


Kiarostami image

The final film of Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami is 24 Frames, a wordless series of sketches elaborating on his nature photography. Xian Brooks of the GUARDIAN loved it: "The Iranian director has produced a posthumous marvel with this bizarre, experimental ghost-film that even puts his hated cinema seats to decent use."

Japanese director Naomi Kawase’s latest film, starring a post-'Paterson' Masatoshi Nagase, is her fifth entry in Cannes’ official competition: Hikari (Radiance). Peter Bradshaw says in the GUARDIAN: "A preposterous and overly sentimental opener to this year’s Un Certain Regard serves up major disappointment" (2/5). Clarence Tsui says tin Hollywood Reporter his is "only slightly" an improvement over Nawase's last two Cannes entries.


Kiarostami opens his 24 Frames series with this Bruegel painting.

[Chris Knipp]

CANNES DAY 8

Sofia Coppola, Jacques Doillon


Colin Farrell in The Beguiled

Coppola
The GUARDIAN likes Sofia Coppola's The Beguiled (4/5), which Peter Bradshaw calls "a very enjoyable southern melodrama" and whose basic premise he describes thus: "Colin Farrell plays a wounded soldier who throws himself on the mercy of a ladies’ seminary during the American civil war – and sets them all of a decorous flutter." But Variety's Owen Gleiberman says "Sofia Coppola's remake of the lurid 1971 Don Siegel/Clint Eastwood Civil War drama is pulp made tasteful and flavorless." Hollywood Reporter calls it "a respectable but pallid redo."



Doillon
Bradshaw sounds downright angry at Jacques Doillon for his biopic Rodin (1/5) in a review that calls it "a mindblowingly dull biopic" and "a quite excruciatingly bad film." It stars the so often excellent Vincent Lindon in the title. Variety's role Jay Weissberg calls it "ploddingly dull," and Hollywood Reporter's Jordan Minzer calls says it " often feels as stiff and lifeless as an old slab of marble."

[Chris Knipp]

Loveless

Screen Daily
Ratings of Competition films so far on the jury grid are:

3.2 Loveless
2.7 Womansruck
2.7 The Square
2.5 120 Beats per Minute
2.4 The Meyorowitz Sisters
2.3 Okja
2.2 Happy End
1.9 The Killing of a Sacred Deer
1.5 Le Redoutable

So at the top are Zviagintsev (Loveless), Todd Haynes (Womanstruck) and Ostlund (The Square), with Robin Campillo (120 Beats a Minute) also a possible popular favorite. At the bottom, Michel Hazanavicius' somewhat dubious collection of Jean-Luc Godard pastiches, Le Redoutable. This is an international daily poll of critics at the festival.

You can flip through recent Screen Dailies digitally online, as I did to gather this information, by clicking on its title above (though I don't think this access lasts).

[Chris Knipp]

CANNES DAY 9

Sean Baker, Josh & Benny Safdie, Kiyoshi Kurosawa


Robert Pattinson in the Safdie brothers' Good Time with Jennifer Jason Leigh

NYTimes' Manohla Dargis is back not shedding much light, more darkness this time and an evident lack of enthusiasm, rather quickly sliding over the most critically acclaimed of the Competition films. Commenting on a shadow cast by the Manchester terror bombing and heavy security she describes this year's whole fest as downbeat, "lackluster" and "moribund" citing Doillon's disastrous Rodin. She likes Agnès Varga collaboration Visages Villages/Faces Places, and singles out Sean Baker's "glorious, gorgeous" Florida Disney World followup to Tangerine, his colorful movie shot on iPhone5's, with new anamorphic lens attachments, about trans prostitutes and their pimp. The new one, The Florida Project, focuses on kids living with parents in "seedy motels off the highway," the kind where " sex-by-the hour transactions" are commonplace. She speaks to Baker, who is pleased the kinds got to come to Cannes.

(Time to miss Mike D'Angelo again, for his more detailed coverage. But Dargis' claim that this isn't one of the best Cannes fests may have merit.)

The GUARDIAN'S Peter Bradshaw saw the Safdie brothers'Good Time (3/5 stars), "Pattinson turns in a strong performance as a career crim in the Safdie brothers’ exciting, if sometimes bewildering take on Elmore Leonard-style crime dramas." The screenplay was written by Josh Safdie and Ronald Bronstein. It costars Jennifer Jason Leigh. Sounds like fun to me. Another A24 release.

AA Dowd of AV Club, taking D'Angelo's place this year, actually liked Sofia Coppola's Clint Eastwood remake The Beguiled. But he found Doillon's roundly condemned Rodin as boring as everybody else, just had a more vulgar way of describing the protagonist as suffering from "a familiar case of wandering dick syndrome." Dowd says Bruno Dumont has a new "heavy metal musical" (as if Slack Bay wasn't weird enough!) but he couldn't get in to the Dumont screening. He did see and liked Kiyoshi Kurosawa's sci-fi film Before We Vanish though longing for something as creepy or scary as his Cure or Pulse from the days when he was hot.


Still from Sean Baker's Florida Project

[Chris Knipp]

CANNES DAY 9


Hospital shown in doc 12 Jours

Guardian reviewer Wendy Ide gives 4/5 stars to 12 Jours, a documentary about a French mental hospital where decisions are made whether to release patients or not. IT's by Raymond Dupardon, veteran filmmaker whose Journal de France Filmleaf covered in the 2013 Rendez-Vous.

Jordan Hoffman reviews Byun Sung-hun's The Merciless, a South Korean crime drama "so unpredictable it forgets to be interesting" (2/5) but notes the "charismatic young actor Yim Si-wan shows promise." He's a pop singer who goes by "Siwan." The film draws "elements from Donnie Brasco, A Prophet, Heat and Infernal Affairs, has flashbacks and forward and tricky editing.


Yim Si-wan in The Merciless

The "Twin Peaks" screening was a big photo op. Here's the man behind it all.


David Lynch (center), Emily Stofle (left), producer Desiree Gruber (right).

Peter Bradshaw reviews François Ozon's L'Amant double/The Double Lover (opening tomorrow in French cinemas) François Ozon’s "horribly middleweight psycho-suspense thriller whose "softcore silliness and lite-erotic styling"s may gain it "camp classic" status (only 2 out of 5 stars though). In it Ozon pairs Marine Vacth, who he introduced in Young and Beautiful, with Jérémie Renier, who's never been suited up to look so much like a conventional rom-com star before.


Jérémie Renier and Marine Vacth in L'Amant double

[Chris Knipp]

CANNES DAY 11

(I seem to have missed a day. But I am not there.)

Comment by Tweet from Mike D'Angelo:

Mike D'Angelo‏ @gemko 23h23 hours ago
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Huh. How’d they manage to screen the entire Competition by Friday? Always a Saturday morning film every year I went (incl 19-film years).

Two last big ones: Roman Polanski's Based on a True Story (with Eva Green and Emanuelle Seigner) and Lynne Ramsey's You Were Never Really There (with Joaquin Phoenix)


You Were Never Really Here

Lynne Ramsey'sYou Were Never Really Here. Guy Lodge in Variety has high praise: "Lynne Ramsay makes a stunning return with this stark, psychologically raddled hitman thriller, led by a quietly furious Joaquin Phoenix."

a stark, sinewy, slashed-to-the-bone hitman thriller far more concerned with the man than the hit. Working from a pulp-fiction source that another director might have fashioned into a “Taken” knockoff, Ramsay instead strips the classically botched job at the story’s core down to its barest, bloodiest necessities, lingering far more lavishly on the unspoken emotions rippling across leading man Joaquin Phoenix’s face, and the internal lacerations of trauma and abuse they cumulatively reveal.

Based on a True Story

Not so good news of Polanski's Based on a True Story, which Peter Bradshaw of the GUARDIAN says "falls flat." (2/5) It is a fan-obsession suspense thriller, co-scripted with Olivier Assayas from the award-winning French novel by Delphine de Vigan and features Eva Green with Emanuelle Seigner, contains elements "of Single White Female and Stephen King’s Misery – and indeed Robert Harris’s The Ghost Writer, which Polanski filmed in 2010."


Polanski at Cannes photocall