Cannes 2013

[Chris Knipp]

CANNES 2013 CLOSING FILM


WHITTIKER AND BLOOM IN ZULU

ZULU (Jérome Salle). It was largely overlooked because it was screened at the same time as an important press conference, I think the one for THE LAST LOVERS ON EARTH (Jarmusch). ZULU is the first English-language film by a French director (like Desplechin's JIMMY P.), and stars Forest Whittiker and Orlando Bloom. "Whitaker and Bloom play two policemen investigating a crime in a film described as part noir, part social study. Adapted from Caryl Férey's novel (also titled Zulu) by Julien Rappeneau, the film is shot entirely on location in South Africa" (GUARDIAN, Ben Child).

VARIETY: Justin Chang's lead summarizes it thus: "The unhealed wounds of post-apartheid South Africa get a brutal but superficial once-over in Jerome Salle's savagely violent cop thriller."

HOLLYWOOD REPORTER: Deborah Young writes (opening a quite detailed review): "The steady invasion of auteur genre films into the Cannes film festival steps over the line with Zulu, a French policier distinguished only by Forest Whitaker’s deeply resonant performance as a detective and its South African setting. Were it not for the star power of Whitaker and Orlando Bloom, one might seriously doubt whether this well-built vehicle would have received the honor of closing le festival."

[Johann]

We have a Winner.
BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR

[oscar jubis]

Which ones are you most curious about?

Most interested, roughly in the following order:

Jimmy P.
A Touch of Sin
Wakolda
The Past
The Last of the Unjust
Bastards
Blue is the Warmest Color
The Golden Cage
The Dance of Reality
Norte, the End of History

[Chris Knipp]

Oscar,
I hope you get to see your wish list soon. You call my attention to one film I had scanned a summary of but not seen any comments on, NORTE, THE END OF HISTORY. I did see a description of Lanzmann's THE LAST OF THE UNJUST but didn't look up reviews; I will now I thought of you when I read about WAKOLDA, which also sounds interesting to me. I'll think of my own list, but to begin with I am quite eager to see some of the more mainstream selections, such as NEBRASKA, INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS. Or course I look forward to seeing BASTERDS, because I like Claire Denis, and I hope it is not a disappointment as some have hinted. JIMMY P. is either really fascinating or a disaster, from the sound of it. It's commercial prospects may be not so good. For sure A TOUCH OF SIN and BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR. I can't wait to see so many of these, especially now that I have heard more about them and seen some of the press conferences. I'm curious about MICHAEL KOOLHAAS because I was so fascinated by Arnaud des Pallières' ADIEU.

NORTE, THE END OF HISTORY (Lav Diaz): SCREEN DAILY: Jonathan Romney writes: "Raskolnikov goes to the Philippines in Norte, The End Of History (Norte, Hangganan Ng Kasaysayan), which takes Dostoevsky’s Crime And Punishment as a springboard for Lav Diaz’s musings on guilt, will and modern Filipino history. Among adepts of so-called ‘Slow Cinema’, writer-director Diaz is reputed as a marathon champ, his films sometimes exceeding the eight-hour mark. By comparison, the four-hour Norte is a miniature, but it’s also an accessible film, a superb piece of focused narrative that’s more immediately coherent than such digressive pieces as 2009’s Melancholia." [He means Laz Diaz's MELANCHOLIA, of course, not Lars von Triers, and IMDb lists it as 2008.


LANZMANN (IN HIS EIGHTIES) IN THE LAST OF THE UNJUST

THE LAST OF THE UNJUST (Claude Lanzmann, of SHOAH). MUBI, Daniel Kasman, writes: "Claude Lanzmann has brought to Cannes a new film whose heart is the interview footage shot for the Shoah project of Austrian Benjamin Murmelstein, the so-called last (and as of the 1975, the only surviving) of the Jewish Elders, those nominally in charge of the Nazis' Jewish ghettos. Filming Murmelstein in exile in Rome in 1975, Lanzmann pulls from the man some consider a Nazi collaborator and some consider a hero long and anecdotal recollections of his experiences working with Eichmann, the various logistical organizational concerns of his pre-war emigration efforts for Jews in Vienna, and his wartime years first as an administrator in the Czechoslovakian “model ghetto” of Theresienstadt and later as its Jewish leader, or "Elder of the Jews.""

I personally just saw SHOAH for the first time a year and a half ago at IFC Center in NYC, so I am primed to see this additional chapter, which takes us to one of the most disturbing aspects of the Holocaust.

Johann,
You know all the winners are on the previous page of this thread, right? The top awards are here.

Palme d'Or: Blue Is the Warmest Color, dir. Abdeletif Kéchiche, France
Grand Prix: Inside Llewyn Davis, dir. Coen brothers, USA
Best director: Amat Escalante, dir. of Hili, Mexico
Jury prize: Like Father, Like Son, Hirakazu Koreeda, Japan
Best screenplay: A Touch of Sin, dir: Jia Zhang-ke, China
Best actor: Bruce Dern, for Nebraska (Payne)
Best actress: Bérénice Bejo, for The Past (Farhadi)
Camera d'Or (best first film): Ilo Ilo, Anthony Chen, Singapore

The Un Certain Regard, Directors Fortnight, and other awards are here.

The top two, Palme d'Or and Grand Prix. were no surprise, all the polls showed them. There was no certainty about exactly how the others Selection jury awards would go.

[Chris Knipp]

BÉRÉNICE BÉJO, ALI MOSAFFA IN THE PAST

THE PAST/LE PASSÉ (Asghar Farhadi), as I should have mentioned earlier, was released May 17 in France, one of those films honored with a simultaneous Paris and Cannes debut. So there are plenty of French reviews. The Allociné press reating is a collective rave, 4.4 out of 5 based on 21 reviews. Some of them commented on the film's neutral, multifaceted portrayal of characters, intense emotion, thriller-worthy suspense, "prodigious" acting by Ali Mosaffa, superb direction of actors. They acknowledge the tight control, this screenplay being in a "direct line" with the last one, and one calls it "overwritten," but the praise is almost universal, including notes on Farhadi's making what is everything a French film should be and avoiding the pitfalls of a foreigner's film about Paris.

By the way as I also might have mentioned Ali Mosaffa's own recent directorial effort (in Farsi), THE LAST STEP, was recently reviewed by me as part of the just-ended San Francisco International Film Festival. Mosaffa wrote, directed, and stars in this film.

GUARDIAN: Peter Bradshaw's "first look" review gives THE PAST 4 out of 5 stars. "Asghar Farhadi's follow-up to the Oscar-winning A Separation is a finely-crafted, sinewy drama that anatomises clotted and complex relationships."

VARIETY: Justin Chang wrote: "Asghar Farhadi may have left his native Iran to shoot a picture in Paris starring Berenice Bejo, but in all the ways that count, “The Past” couldn’t feel closer to home. Like 2011′s Oscar-winning “A Separation,” this is an exquisitely sculpted family melodrama in which the end of a marriage is merely the beginning of something else, an indelible tapestry of carefully engineered revelations and deeper human truths. If Farhadi’s sense of narrative construction is almost too incisive at times, costing the drama some focus and credibility in the final reels, he nonetheless maintains a microscopic attention to character, performance and theme that will make this powerfully acted picture a very classy specialty-division prospect."

[oscar jubis]

Thanks. A lot of good info and review about the films I most want to watch. I need to watch the movie Farhadi directed before A Separation. I'll look for it.

[Chris Knipp]

Thank you. A pleasure to follow Cannes.

Let us know about Farhadi's earlier film if you do see it. It's also interesting that Ali Mosaffa, the male lead of THE PAST (there's also Tahar Rahim, of A PROPHET and FREE MEN -- which I've reviewed here and who was in two Cannes films) directed in his own film, THE LAST STEP, which is inventive and ambitious and which I reviewed as part of the SFIFF this year. You may want to see it some time.

[oscar jubis]

I recently watched Heli, the film that won a Best Director prize for Amat Escalante at this festival. I think it's an improvement over Escalante's Sangre and Los Bastardos, and even better than any film directed by other contemporaneous Mexican directors that have exhibited at Cannes such as Gerardo Naranjo (Miss Bala, Voy a Explotar, Drama/Mex) and Fernando Eimbcke (Duck Season, Lake Tahoe). For me, Carlos Reygadas is the most impressive Mexican director working today but Heli, which he co-produced, is really good. It partakes in the same "drug war" milieu as many current Mexican films (including many cheap films made for national consumption) without relying in tired cliches. I think it helps that the protagonist is a young man who works in a factory and who becomes embroiled with drug dealers through no fault of his own. I have lots of time lately to watch movies, more so than anytime during the past five years when I was working toward my degree. It will change as soon as I start teaching again.

[Chris Knipp]

Thanks but after Mike D'Angelo's fairly detailed AV Club Cannes review of HELI last May I am not keen on seeing it. Have had enough trouble watching David Gordon Green's gratuitously violent JOE. Personallly I love Eimbcke and am impressed by Naranjo's leaps forward. Yes Reygadas can be impressive indeed but he appears very uneven, perhaps out of control. Look forward to your reports of your more frequent viewings during this free period though.

[oscar jubis]

The issue of gratuitous violence is always relevant for me, and almost always something that is open to interpretation and debate. I found the use of violence in Miss Bala, for instance, quite objectionable whereas I don't feel that way about the equally explicit (or even more so) depiction of violence in Escalante's films. There are two scenes in Heli which are particularly difficult to watch and I understand the criticism of them and your not being keen on watching it. Among the aspects of Heli I find commendable is how eloquently it conveys the ways the drug trade affects people outside of it, such as the factory worker, student, and army cadet who are the three principals in the film. Pleasant watch it ain't. Talking about pleasant films: how can anyone resist being charmed by the documentary Dancing in Jaffa, which I watched over the weekend. Have you seen it?

[Chris Knipp]

No I have not seen HELI so finally I can't really say, but I seem to have liked Naranjo all along more than you, so I'm not surprised you find MISS BALA'S violence offensive and Escalante's beatings, tortures, and setting fire to genitals somehow less objectionable though "equally explicit." From the descriptions it would be hard to say which is more explicit but Escalante sounds like he'd get the prize. However, I don't really approve of second-hand evaluations and I was going too much by what Mike D'Angelo said. Nonetheless I see that Scott Foundas called HELI "[accomplished but] singularly unpleasant" and Stephen Dalton of HOLLYWOOD REPORTER called it part of an "austere glumfest of stomach-churning sadism and lowlife misery porn" that followed the initial fun of GATSBY at last year's Cannes Festival.

I saw and wrote a review of DANCING IN JAFFA, in which no genitals were doused with gasoline and torched and instead little sweet girls and boys from Jewish and Palestinian families were taught to be civil and dance gracefully together. A thoroughly positive moment. If you ever want to know, just Google "chris kniipp" plus name of film. That will take you to the review on my website www.chrisknipp.com. Just about anything on Filmleaf can also be found via Google too but it may take a couple of steps, wheras my site is one step, who knows why (it was not my doing, but maybe publishing 2,343 reviews there has had an effect). This little documentary was in the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival last summer. And that is in the Festival Coverage section of Filmleaf We were supposed to "hold review" so I didn't publish the full version till recently; the theatrical release took so long I thought there wasn't going to be any, but apparently there was, here and there.

The SFJFF I never covered before but it contained a lot of good material that you might not find otherwise, some of it with only a vague connection to Jewishness. For example, films about Muhammad Ali and Johnny Cash were included.

http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.p...0642#post30642

When I think of MISS BALA I remember how impressed Edward Lachman, the cinmeatographer, was with the elaborately planned long takes. He came to a another screening of the film to take a second look at it and thought it was, cinematographically speaking, a landmark and worthy of admiration. I think that another sign of how Naranjo has made leaps forward with each film. DRAMA MEX was alive and interesting, but technically and narratively simple. Lachman often sits in the back row right in front of me at Lincoln Center screenings so I get to talk to him sometimes. Since ha has been the dp for some fine films whose variety might surprise you (VIRGIN SUICIDES, I'M NOT THERE, ERIN BROCKOVITCH, FAR FROM HEAVEN, KEN PARK, LIFE DURING WARTIME, parts of PARADISE: HOPE), I figure he may know a thing or two about shooting a movie.

I expect my coverage of Cannes always to be secondhand. The closest I will ever come is to be in Paris while the festival is going on. There is some echo, and Paris newsstands as I've shown in snapshots are full of magazines and papers with stories about Cannes in May.