CANNES Festival 2019

[Chris Knipp]

Does anyone recognize those two guys? They are featured in a poster for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino's new movie. It's not ready yet. If it gets ready, it will be at Cannes.

Bruce Lee is a character, also Charles Manson.

[Chris Knipp]

Directors' Fortnight /Quinzaine des réalisateurs announced.

The Directors’ Fortnight runs from 15-25 May. There is some hint of controversy since a Netflix film, Anvari's Wounds, was chosen, and Cannes bars Netflix films. But the Fortnight has been run independently of but concurrently with the Festival since 1969.

Some cool genre variations are featured here. Eggers is the director of the much-admired The Witch (Filmleaf reviewed, 2015). This one casts Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe in a tale drawn from seafarer myths. It's released by A24. Wounds actually debuted at Sundance. It's a psychological horror film starring among others Armie Hammer and Dakota Johnson. Bertrand Bonello's film, set in Haiti in 1962, depicts a return from the dead, a family curse, and sugar plantations. Fabrice Luchini plays the mayor in Pariser's political film. Dogs Don't Wear Pants is a Finnish film about S&M practices. Song Without a Name is about child trafficking in Peru in the Eighties.Guadignino's The Staggering Girl is a 35 min. film directed for the clothing company Valentino and starring Julianne Moore.


ALICE AND THE MAYOR

Directors’ Fortnight lineup
Alice and the Mayor (dir Nicolas Pariser)
And Then We Danced (dir Levan Akin)
Blow It to Bits (dir Lech Kowalski)
Deerskin (dir Quentin Dupieux) – opening film
Dogs Don’t Wear Pants (dir Jukka-Pekka Valkeapää)
First Love (dir Takashi Miike)
An Easy Girl (dir Rebecca Zlotowski)
For the Money (dir Alejo Moguillansky)
Ghost Tropic (dir Bas Devos)
Give Me Liberty (dir Kirill Mikhanovsky)
The Halt (dir Lav Diaz)
The Lighthouse (dir Robert Eggers)
Lillian (dir Andreas Horwath)
Oleg (dir Juris Kursietis)
The Orphanage (dir Shahrbanoo Sadat)
Les Particules (dir Blaise Harrison)
Perdrix (dir Erwan Le Duc)
Sick, Sick, Sick (dir Alice Furtado)
Song Without a Name (dir Melina León)
Tlamess (dir Ala Eddine Slim)
To Live to Sing (dir Johnny Ma)
Wounds (dir Babak Anvari)
Yves (dir Benoît Forgeard) – closing film
Zombi Child (dir Bertrand Bonello)

Special screenings
Red 11 (dir Robert Rodriguez)
The Staggering Girl (dir Luca Guadagnino)

[Chris Knipp]

Ode to cinema … Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio and Al Pacino in Once Upon
a Time in Hollywood. Photograph: Allstar/Columbia Pictures Corporation

Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood will be at Cannes, after all.

Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood to have world premiere at Cannes
Director 'has not left the editing room in months' to complete much-anticipated film in time for festival unveiling

-Headlines for today's Guardian article. You'll find it H E R E.

That's good news for Tarantino fans. Tarantino loves Cannes and really appreciates it as cinema heaven, the global center for everything exciting that happens for the year in movies. The new Tarantino film will be included in Competition for the Palme d'Or, which he won in 1994 for Pulp Fiction.

The festival also announced that Mektoub My Love: Intermezzo, the second part of a projected trilogy by Blue Is the Warmest Colour director Abdellatif Kechiche, and Gaspar Noé’s Lux Æterna have been added to the selection.

The Cannes film festival runs 14-25 May.

[Chris Knipp]

Controversy over that special Palm for French film actor Alain Delon.


ALAIN DELON [VARIETY]

The Cannes Film Festival is going forward with its decision to award an honorary Palme d’Or to Alain Delon despite criticism from the U.S. organization Women and Hollywood over comments that the veteran French actor has made about slapping women, opposing the adoption of children by same-sex parents [he's called it "against nature"] and supporting the rise of the far right in France.
VARIETY

Alain Delon is one of the most glamorous and iconic French movie stars of all time. The French are not amused by the PC American condemnation of Delon's getting an honorary Palme at 83, and call it a reversion to the McCarthyism of the Fifties. When one thinks of Delon one particularly recalls René Clément's classic Patricia Highsmith adaptation Purple Noon/Plein soleil and Jean-Pierre Melville's noir masterpieces Le Samouraï and Un flic. With his cool, hard-edged French male beauty and subtle physical acting, Delon is one of the great ones, whatever bad views he has expressed on talk shows as a sad old man. AS Frémaux said, this is not the Nobel Prize, it's a movie award. He was also chosen by Antonioni to costar with Monica Vitti in L'Eclisse.


ALAIN DELON IN RENÉ CLÉMENT'S PURPLE NOON

[Chris Knipp]

Cannes 2019 Festival opens. Sex, violence, gender parity issues. Netflix. Jury President Iñárritu.


ALEJANDRO GONZALEZ IÑÁRRITU AT CANNES [GUARDIAN]

[Based on opening surveys in the Guardian and Variety]

Tarantino controversies

So Tarantino is coming, with his new film ready for Competition. But will its treatment of the Sharon Tate murders offend taste? QT is in trouble with the #MeToo crowd following rumors of his maltreatment of Uma Thurman while making the "Kill Bill" movies (he apologized; but he has also been quoted as saying that Polanski's 13-year-old sex victim was "down with it"). Another Cannes biggie who'll be present is Ken Loach, with his gig economy drama Sorry We Missed You, likewise Pedro Almodóvar with his film industry memoir Pain and Glory, and the Dardenne brothers with a radicalization story, The Young Ahmed. Terrence Malick's film, A Hidden Life, is about the anti-Nazi Franz Jägerstätter. (Malick has been elusive of late years, and may not even be present at the festival.)

The gender parity issue

The festival directorship itself has no great feminist reputation given how slow it is to bring in more female directors. Despite Thierry Frémaux's signing a gender parity pledge, only 4 out of 23 Competition films are by female directors. Frémaux has said people are asking more of Cannes than of other festivals. In defense of the honoring of the sexist and homophobic Alain Delon, he has declared, "We’re not going to give the Nobel peace prize to Alain Delon. . .He is entitled to express his views. Today it is very difficult to honor somebody because you have a sort of political police that falls on you."

Netrlix and theaters

French distributors were furious at the 2017 Cannes inclusion of Okja and The Meyerowitz Stories, for which Netflix disobeyed the French requirement of holding streaming release for 36 months after theatrical release. Last year Netflix held their prime release ROMA for another festival. There are no Netflix movies in this year's Cannes Festival either (but Martin Scorsese’s mob tale The Irishman and Steven Soderbergh’s Panama Papers journalist investigation tale The Laundromat simply weren't ready in time anyway).

Jury President Iñárritu speaks out

The Jury president Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu (incidentally the first Mexican ever to hold this post at Cannes) has used his position to blast Trump's wall and defend movie theaters against the encroachments of their territory by Netflix. "Cinema was born to be experienced in a communal experience," he said (i.e., not to be watched at home alone). Of Trump's policies, Iñárritu said "As an artist, I can express through my job and with my heart open what I think to be truthful. I think the problem is what is happening is the ignorance. People do not know, it’s very easy to manipulate." He said his selection by the festival is a repudiation of Trump's anti-immigrant policies.


ROHRWACHER, FANNING, N'DIAYE, IÑÁRRITU AT CANNES [GUARDIAN]

[Chris Knipp]

Mel Gibson to star in Rothchild film?


MEL GIBSON

A movie to be shopped at Cannes has casting that sparks controversy: Mel Gibson, who was ostracized from Hollywood for anti-semitic talk, is reported cast as the scion of a very rich New York family named Rothchild. This is the name of perhaps the most famous Jewish family in history. Emily Nussbaum, the New Yorker TV critic, tweeted:

I tend to lean excessively forgiving about a certain amount of addict behavior & bad speech. But Mel Gibson seems like an unrepentant bigot to me & it's honestly shocking to me that he would be in this movie. I truly don't get it.

Seth Rogen tweeted 'Ho-ho-holocaust denier." The film title is Rothchild. That is of course the name of what is known as the richest family in history, which was Jewish. It began with a German Frankfort court factor in the 18th century who was able to pass on his wealth; it established bases in numerous European cities (London, Paris, Frankfort, Vienna and Naples) and was elevated to noble status in France and England. (Guardian story),

The movie is described as "an action-packed cautionary tale [of] wealth and power."

[Chris Knipp]

The Cannes 2019 Competition Jury



Alejandro González Iñárritu, Mexican filmmaker, Jury President (Amores Perros, Birdman)
Enki Bilal, French graphic novel author, artist and filmmaker
Robin Campillo, French filmmaker (Eastern Boys, BPM)
Maimouna N'Diaye, Senegalese actress and filmmaker
Elle Fanning, American actress (Somewhere, Neon Demon)
Yorgos Lanthimos, Greek filmmaker (The Lobster, Killing of a Sacred Deer, The Favourite)
Paweł Pawlikowski, Polish filmmaker (Ida, Cold War)
Kelly Reichardt, American filmmaker (Old Boy, Wendy and Lucy, Night Moves, Meek’s Cutoff
Alice Rohrwacher, Italian filmmaker (Corpo Celeste, The Wonders, Happy As Lazzaro