A paralyzed Pope and Talmudic thrills

By Brian D. Johnson - Saturday, May 14, 2011 at 9:40 AM - 0 Comments

Actor-director Nanni Moretti (left) and Michel Piccoli in 'Habamus Papam'

There’s a narrative flow to this festival, as if each of the 20 features in competition is the chapter of a secret novel. TIFF, which presents some 300 films, is a different animal. Most of the action is packed into the opening four or five days, as we are force-fed a glut of potential Oscar nominees. In Cannes, the momentum builds with a dramatic arc that spans the course of the festival. It’s a competition, after all. And, as in figure skating, some of the most potent contenders are often positioned near the end of the event, to leave the strongest impact on the jury. There’s a subtle thematic composition as well. Three films by women were front-loaded into the first two days—a tad patronizing perhaps, as if to dispense of them before getting down to the serious business of male auteurs—but they were all provocative, intriguing and oddly related.

Now it’s back to the male ego with a vengeance. Yesterday we saw two competition entries, from Italy and Israel, that both dealt with biblical orthodoxy and the burden of conferred glory.  Nanni Moretti’s Habemus Papam stars 85-year-old French legend Michel Piccoli as a cardinal who’s elected Pope and is paralyzed by performance before he can get to the window overlooking St. Peter’s Square.  Footnote (Hearat Shuylayim), by Israeli director Joseph Cedar is a tale of two Talmudic scholars, a father and son, whose rivalry is inflamed when one of them receives a major prize–I know, the premise sounds deadly, but it’s an exhilirating film, and the I’ve seen here that’s really excited me.

I’m a longtime Nanni Moretti fan. His Caro Diaro (1993) is one of my all-time favorites, and this comedian’s detour into drama, The Son’s Room, won the 2001 Palme D’Or for its raw portrait of a couple facing the death of a child.  Habemus Papam presents a delicious premise: the Pope who feels he’s unworthy for the job. And the movie has brilliant, hilarious and tender moments. Moretti casts himself as a non-believing shrink who tries to psychoanalyze the new Pope in the Vatican, with all the Cardinals watching. It’s such a delicious set-up that you’re dying to see that relationship take over the film. But then it would become The Pope’s Speech; not Moretti’s style. Instead, the Pope escapes into the streets of Rome, rides the bus incognito, and contemplates his failed ambitions as an actor. The film become The Old Man and the (Holy) See. And as the narrative takes some perverse turns, it’s almost willfully underwhelming.

Shlomo Bar Aba as the father in 'Footnote'

Footnote, on the other hand, makes magic from a more dubious premise. It’s hard to describe what’s so good about this Talmudic intrigue, the story of a purist father who resents his son’s success. But with stunning visuals, a  stabbing score reminiscent of Hitchcock composer Bernard Herrmann, and some devastating twists, there is nothing pedestrian about Footnote. Laced with comic irony, it has the kinetic thrust of a noir thriller, while plumbing the bottomless depths of parental conflict and the quicksand of moral relativism. It even adds some sly grace notes about Israel’s culture as an armed camp, with scenarios of high security at the gates of academe. Footnote unfolds like an O’Henry story on steroids, and is almost certain to win something before the festival is over.

Bonfire of the Vanities: the Diana conspiracy film

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, May 13, 2011 at 4:41 PM - 0 Comments

Sometimes the press conference is better than the movie. Vastly better in the case of Unlawful Killing, a controversial documentary that suggests Princess Di was murdered and tries to prove there was a conspiracy to cover up the facts of her death. The British press has already created huge buzz around the film with outraged reports that it includes a photograph of Diana in the car wreck that was deemed unfit for publication in the U.K. Consequently a high-powered crowd of press showed up for the film’s premiere in the Cannes market—it’s not in the festival’s official program, and now that I’ve seen it, I can understand why.

The photograph is a red herring. It’s just a fleeting image of Diana in the wrecked car, and is not in the least exploitative. But the film is another story. Without actually accusing Prince Philip of plotting Diana’s demise, it paints him as a former Nazi bedfellow—and the shadowy villain behind a racist mafia of a monarchy that wanted her out of the picture. The epic inquest into Diana’s death is portrayed as a sham, and the media are pilloried for ignoring scandalous evidence and misrepresenting the jury’s verdict. Even if such views are music to your ears, it’s hard to warm to Unlawful Killing.

Neither good journalism nor good filmmaking, it’s a shrill, shabby polemic that does a disservice to its own point of view. Serving up interviews with Piers Morgan, the late Tony Curtis and a psychologist who diagnoses Philip as a psychopath, it unearths no fresh evidence—something British director Keith Allen freely admitted at a press conference that turned into a total circus. It took place at the lavish Grand Salon of the Carlton Hotel, the same regal venue where Angelina Jolie held court for Kung Fu Panda 2 the previous day. Clearly, this is one of those fishy documentaries with serious money behind it. The first question was: whose money?

Mohamed Al-Fayed’s money, as it turns out. After failing to get financing from U.K. broadcasters, Al-Fayed paid for the entire budget of Unlawful Killing. How much was that? The director, who also had to be prompted to remember names of prominent characters in his film, said he had no idea. Then, out of the wings, a heavy-looking Brit who said he represented Al-Fayed suddenly appeared to inform us that the Arab tycoon, and father of Diana’s late suitor, put up £2.5 million (roughly $5 million).

Shortly before that, I’d asked the director: “As a filmmaker doing a ‘forensic’ piece,’ why did you not indicate your relationship with Mr. Al-Fayed in the film, and the fact that he financed the film?” Allen looked baffled, as if it had never occurred to him that a lack of transparency would mar the credibility of a movie that portrays its benefactor as a grossly maligned saint. He said mentioning Al-Fayed’s involvement would “interrupt the flow.” Then he added: “I think you’ll find that there are an immense number of films coming out in America that were financed by the Mafia and there’s no reference [in those films].”

I went on to ask Allen about a scene in which Al-Fayed burns the royal coats of arms that once adorned his Harrods store, in view of his son Dodi’s mausoleum. It appears that the film crew is the only “media” on hand to capture the bonfire.

“That was a set up for the film, no?” I asked.

“No, he was going to do it, and I filmed it,” said the director. “The action didn’t take place because I was making a film. I actually recorded what happened.”

“But if you wanted to present a credible forensic analysis,” I asked, trying a new tack, “Why were you so strident in your condemnation of the monarchy as ‘gangsters with tiaras’?”

“It’s an observation.”

To be fair Allen—an actor who’s also the father of singer Lily Allen—admitted he wasn’t trying to do journalism or documentary, just raise some questions.

But the fun was just starting. Next, British author Martyn Gregory, author of Diana, the Last Days, stood up and launched into a diatribe: “I must say I was really, really disappointed with the film. It regurgitates everything Mohamed Al- Fayed has being saying since the year 2000.” Throughout the press conference Gregory kept jumping up to quarrel with Allen, until the moderator had to give him a lecture on the value of English civility.

In the film, Allen brands all British journalists as establishment toadies controlled by sycophantic employers vying for knighthoods. There were a lot of Brit journalists in the room, and one of them made the valid point that they wouldn’t be there if they were as censorious as he suggested. And one politely asked why there were no dissenting views in the film, at least to give it the impression of balance.

Allen said he thought they’d get expressed without his help. He also wondered if his film would ever play commercially in the U.K. His lawyers have asked for 87 cuts to make it palatable to insurers. A number of them concern accusations that the inquest into Diana’s death was a deliberate cover-up, which leads him into contempt of court territory.

The most jaw-dropping moment in the press conference occurred when a British journalist, curious about the director’s personal stake in the material, asked him if he’d ever met Diana. No, he had not. “But my son and daughter have. Years ago my ex-wife, Alison, had produced a movie called Hear My Song which was chosen as a royal premiere. And bless his heart, Alfie, my boy, it was the first time he had ever worn a suit, a little black velvet suit. He was putting on his trousers and he caught his cock in his zip. I had the awful job of having to unzip him and pull his penis out. Very painful. And I’ve got a wonderful photograph of Princess Di bending over and talking to Lily and Alfie, and laughing. I asked why—my son had told her about what had happened to his penis.”

Cherchez la femme—and Angelina, crayoning femme fatale

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, May 12, 2011 at 7:46 PM - 3 Comments

Emily Browning at the 'Sleeping Beauty' press conference in Cannes / photo by Brian D. Johnson

Each year we come to Cannes, hoping to be shocked, surprised, possibly blown away—but expecting at the very least to see the values of conventional cinema turned upside down. That usually happens here, up to a point. In Cannes, high art is placed on an Olympian altar, while Hollywood fare provides the tacky floor show, safely sequestered out of competition. But one area where Cannes has too often fallen into lock step with Hollywood is in its deference to the pantheon of Male Genius. Last year there was not a single female director in the main competition. Ah, an oversight, no doubt. This year, as if to shake up the optics, if nothing else, the competition has opened with three movies in a row from female directors—Sleeping Beauty, We Have to Talk About Kevin, and Polisse—each of which throws down a provocative gauntlet to conservative notions of motherhood and sexuality.

And we’re not even counting The Beaver, Saint Jodie Foster’s ritual cleansing of Mel Gibson, which is programmed out of competition. Or Kung Fu Panda 2, which DreamWorks showcased in Cannes this week, even though it’s not even dignified by an out-of-competition slot in the official selection. It, too, is directed by a woman, Jennifer Yu, and marketed by the unparalleled celebrity of Angelina Jolie.

Cherchez la femme. At the end of Day Two, that could be the rallying cry of Cannes. Last night I collared festival director Thierry Frémault at the opening night party at the Majestic Beach for Midnight in Paris. I asked if he was making a statement with this opening fusillade of films by women. It was midnight, and Frémault—in a hurry to get to the VIP area, where Rachel McAdams and Michael Sheen were exchanging fond looks—seemed as if like he was about to brush me off. Then he shrugged, grinned and said, “Oui, un peu!”

The trifecta of women’s films kicking off the festival are attention-getting. Sleeping Beauty, a feature debut by Australian writer Julia Leigh, is an erotic/narcotic, fable that doubles down sexual taboos by exploring a pedo/necrophilia demimonde. An endlessly naked Emily Browning stars as a twentysomething waif who looks 15, in a Story of O/Belle de Jour tale of a university student who is paid to be drugged unconscious and ravished by filthy rich dirty old men. (If a male director, like Atom Egoyan, had made this film, he would have been crucified.) Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, adapts Lionel Shriver’s prize-winning novel about the tormented mother of a demon-seed boy whose idea of high school excellence is mass murder. And Polisse, by French actress-director Maiwenn is about a raucous squad of child services police in Paris who investigate pedophilia while negotiating their own torrid relationships. (I could have done without the lingering shot of the teenage rape victim’s stillborn baby.)

'Sleeping Beauty' director Julia Leigh

At a press conference for Sleeping Beauty, Browning, 22, said she had no problem whatsoever with being naked on screen, as if it barely warranted talking about—although the film has fetish gear to rival Eyes Wide Shut and more arty nude tableaux than anything by Peter Greenaway. I asked director Julia Leigh a question about the the male gaze, and how her film tried to redirect that, which she never quite answered. Midway through, Leigh pointed out that Browning’s mentor, Australian director Jane Campion, was sitting among the journalists. Later she told me that even though this was Leigh’s first film, she’s an ardent cinephile and knows way more about movies than herself.

This morning, I was forced to choose between the Panda 2 press conference and one for We Need to Talk About Kevin, featuring the lethally articulate Tilda Swinton as the mother-in-hell. I thought the latter would be more interesting, but like any self-respecting media slut, I obeyed the summons of Hollywood royalty and headed down to the Carlton Hotel to pay homage to Queen Angelina, who was flanked by competing jokers Jack Black and Dustin Hoffman. Continue…

Woody wanted Rachel McAdams "at any cost"

By Brian D. Johnson - Wednesday, May 11, 2011 at 4:27 PM - 1 Comment

Woody Allen and Rachel McAdams at the Cannes press conference for 'Midnight in Paris'/ photo by BDJ

Day One at the Cannes Film Festival is jam-packed. We begin with a press screening for the opening night gala, Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, followed by three back-to-back press conferences. The French used to believe in lunch. Hey, it’s a new world. Woody explains how he struggled to come up with a script to match his title, Midnight in Paris; then Bernardo Bertolucci, recipient of an honorary Palme D’Or, mused fondly about Last Tango in Paris; finally we had our ritual audience with the Cannes jury, whose president, Robert De Niro, was about as responsive as a waiter in Paris, as he lived up to his legendary capacity to say absolutely nothing in as few words as possible.

Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, by the way, didn’t show. The French First Lady, who has a recurring cameo in Allen’s film as an amiable tour guide, sent her regrets. When Allen was asked how he came to cast her, he said, “One morning I was just having breakfast with the Sarkozys and she walked into the room and she was very beautiful and very charming and charismatic. I said ‘Would you like to be in a movie? A small role, just for fun.’ She said I would like to be in one of your movies because I’d like to tell my grandchildren one day I was in the movie.’ She was everything I hoped she would be. She’s not a lawyer or a diplomat even though she’s married to a political man. She’s from a show business background. She came in and did the part very gracefully. It was fun. It was a nice experience for her, I’m happy to say. She was very happy with how the film came out and very happy with the way the cameramen filmed her.”

We never got to ask Woody how he just happened to be having breakfast with the Sarkozys.

For Woody Allen, Cannes is by now almost as familiar as Manhattan. Midnight in Paris, his 44^nd movie, is his fifth to open the festival. Like Vicky Cristina Barcelona, it’s another postcard-pretty valentine of auteur tourism, with Americans falling into foreign hands, though it lacks the character work (or fireworks) of VCB. But it was warmly received here. With its unabashed francophilia, it could have been made for Cannes, and who knows, maybe it was. Midnight in Paris is, quite proudly, a mere bagatelle, a lightly satirical conjuring of 1920s Paris, set in the context of a crumbling 2010 marriage between two well-heeled American tourists, Gil (Owen Wilson) and Inez (Rachel McAdams). Time travel makes it happen.

Wilson’s naturally disingenuous, slightly stammery delivery makes him a perfect Allen surrogate. McAdams, who has a habit of being consistently better than her material, shines in an unsympathetic role as his nagging fiancé—Canada’s sweetheart is cast against type as a Republican who’s overly impressed by their shallow friend, pedantic know-it-all played by Michael Sheen. Wilson plays a familiar Allen protogonist, a frustrated novelist who worships the past and is aching to escape the hackdom of Hollywood screenwriting success. He deserts Inez and her friends each each night to walk the streets of Paris—where at the stroke of midnight he’s magically spirited away into the émigré salon-monde of the ‘20s. He mingles with the likes of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dali, Buñuel, Picasso and Gertrude Stein, and falls for a dreamy Marion Cotillard, the next best thing to Edith Piaf. Aside from the abrasive chemistry between Wilson and McAdams, the movie’s pleasure lies in its greatest hits parade of coy cameo impersonations, from Alison Pill’s Zelda Fitzgerald to Adrien Brody’s Salvador Dali. Around every burnished corner of this closeted period film is a fresh surprise. Welcome to Woody Tussaud’s House of Wax.

Allen has become a casting virtuoso. He can get Oscar winners like Brody, Cotillard and Katherine Bates to fill out minor roles. But at the press conference he positively gushed about landing Owen Wilson: “Owen is the opposite of me. I’m very Manhattan, very East Coast. Owen is very West Coast. He personifies that in his whole demeanour. He’s relaxed and he’s a beach lover and this gives the character an enormous dimension that I could never have given it, nor could I have written it for another actor.”

I asked Allen if Wilson’s rom-com romance with McAdams in Wedding Crashers had anything to do with him pairing them again. “I’d seen Rachel in a film with Owen years ago,” he said, as if the title escaped him, “and I thought she was sensational. She was beautiful and sexy and funny and a wonderful actress, and I wanted to work with her. And the opportunity came up. I didn’t like the fact that they had worked together before. That was a negative to me. I figured people will think, ‘Oh, it’s Owen and Rachel again.’ But I felt there’s nothing I could do about it. They’re both great and I want them both. I wanted to get Rachel at any cost, and I was very lucky to get Owen. I’ve always been lucky with casting. The truth in casting is to hire great people, let them do what they do, don’t interfere with them too much, and then when they’re great, take credit for it. I’ve done this for many years and it works like a charm.”

Juliette Binoche talks about 'orgasmic' takes in Certified Copy

By macleans.ca - Friday, March 25, 2011 at 1:40 PM - 0 Comments

Opening weekend: Wall Street 2, Never Let Me Go

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, September 24, 2010 at 12:16 PM - 0 Comments

You can see Carey Mulligan, the Oscar-nominated star of An Education, in two movies opening this weekend: she has a thankless supporting role opposite Shia LaBeouf in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps and lead role in Never Let Me Go. They’re wildly different, and there’s not question which is the better film. Oliver Stone’s Wall Street sequel is a messy, bombastic spectacle—a morality tale as midway ride. Its chief asset is Michael Douglas, whose remarkably shaded performance somehow survives Stone’s sledgehammer direction. Based on the Kazuo Ishiguro novel,  Never Let Me Go is a sublimely measured, achingly beautiful drama, anchored by superb performances from Mulligan, Keira Knightley and Andrew Garfield.

I saw Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps last May in Cannes. The morning after the film’s premiere I joined Stone, Douglas and Mulligan in round-table interviews in a windblown cabana at the opulent Hotel Du Cap. Here’s my video of the gang, who were clearly in morning-after mode, especially Stone:

And here are more candid clips of Carey Mulligan, who seems unsure about the movie after seeing it the night before in Cannes:

There’s a lot of of talented actors onscreen in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, but they’re defeated by Stone’s heavy-handed script.  Aside from Douglas’ shape-shifting reinvention of Gordon Gekko, which is almost worth the price of admission, the other characters are steamrolled into stereotypes, from LaBeouf’s ambitious trader to the Gekko 2.0 tycoon played by Josh Brolin. The brilliant Frank Langella has an incandescent but short-lived role as the old-school mentor to the young trader played by Shia LaBoeuf.  Mulligan, cast as Gekko’s estranged daughter—and LaBoeuf’s girfriend—is wasted. That said, even though Stone rivals Michael Moore as a propagandist, and overloads his dialogue with so much aphoristic messaging that it ceases to be credible, he’s a compelling visual showman. And there’s a curious paradox here: Stone’s movie is a putative critique of capitalism gone mad, yet it revels in the opulence of the world it’s trying to tear down. Like a bloodthirsty anti-war movie. That said, there’s some fun to be had in this over-ripe melodrama, and no matter what you think of Money Never Sleeps, at least it’s not dull.

Never Let Me Go

(from left) Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley and Andrew Garfield in 'Never Let Me Go'

Here is an exotic hybrid. We’ve got Alex Garland, the writer of The Beach, adapting a celebrated dystopian novel by Kazuo Ishiguro. I haven’t read the Ishiguro novel, but those who have are a bit shocked to see that the story’s horrifying premise, which remains mysterious for much of the book, is explained at the end of the first act. I suppose that makes it fair game for plot summaries, but I’m not going to do that here, because I appreciated the jolt of revelation that came early in the film.  Let’s just say that the story is set in England, and concerns a love triangle among three former school mates (Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley and Andrew Garfield) who acquiesce to a grim and preordained destiny. The three leads are superb. Mulligan’s performance doesn’t come as a surprise, but who knew that behind the Pirates of the Caribbean damsel lurked  such an intriguing actress. (David Cronenberg, who cast Knightley in his Freud/Jung biopic, A Dangerous Method, has been raving about her, and here you can see why.) As for Garfield, he’s the next Spider-Man, but between his performance in this film and in The Social Network (opening next week), he may be overqualified for franchise work. Never Let Me Go is science fiction that plays as pure realism, with no techno gimmickry, and barely any explanation of the premise. Director Mark Romanek conjures visions of mortality via elegiac images of England’s cozy landscape and haunting architecture. He lets the film unfold as a delicate mood piece, sustaining a tone of aching beauty with remarkable control. This is a film you don’t watch so much as inhabit.

Noomi Rapace, Dragon Girl

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, July 8, 2010 at 10:59 AM - 0 Comments

Noomi Rapace stars as Lisbeth Salander in the Swedish adaptations of Steig Larsson’s Millenium trilogy—including The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (now out on DVD) and The Girl Who Played With Fire, which opens July 9. Last May I filmed her as she held court on a balcony in Cannes.

Talking about how ‘We never talk’

By Brian D. Johnson - Monday, May 31, 2010 at 12:59 PM - 0 Comments

Everett Collection

Cinema never gets more serious than it does in Cannes. This year’s festival (May 12-23) was dominated by movies on a mission, including a spate of political dramas that subverted clichés about terrorism—Fair Game, Route Irish, Of Gods and Men, Outside the Law and Carlos. But perhaps the most radical trend to emerge from Cannes, at least among English-language films, was the raw exploration of a more intimate, but equally volatile, political arena: love and marriage.

If you go to the multiplex looking for emotional truth, you usually have to fight your way through the contraption of a romantic comedy, or the sludge of a chick flick. So it’s a thrill to come across movies that offer pure, stripped-down scenarios of domestic life. That was the case with some of the strongest entries in Cannes, notably Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine, Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy, and Mike Leigh’s Another Year. In each case, though the directors are men, female characters drive the agenda, which tends to address the most chronic complaint in a marriage: we never talk.

Continue…

A Thai ghost story wins the Palme d'Or

By Brian D. Johnson - Sunday, May 23, 2010 at 3:22 PM - 2 Comments

A scene from Palme D'Or winner 'Uncle Boonme Who Can Recall His Past Lives'

It was a victory of dream over reality.  At the closing ceremony of the Cannes Film Festival, a jury led by Tim Burton awarded the Palme d’Or to the most surreal of the 19 features in compeition: Lung Boonmee Raluek (Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives). Directed by Thai filmmaker  Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Tropical Malady), it’s Thailand first film to win the top prize in the 63-year history of what amounts to the Olympics of world cinema. The runner-up Grand Jury Prize went to Des Hommes et des dieux (Of Gods and Men), directed by French filmmaker Xavier Beauvois, based on the true story of the 1996 murder of seven Christian monks  in Algeria by Islamic extremists. The unofficial prize for the competition entry that received the most critical acclaim yet was competely snubbed by the jury goes to Mike Leigh’s Another Year, a masterpiece of domestic realism.

I didn’t see it coming, but in retrospect it makes sense that Burton would annoint a film about magic, populated by phantoms, forest creatures and spirits. In accepting the Palme D’Or the Thai director inverted Oscar protocol: instead of thanking God, he thanked “all the spirits and all the ghosts in Thailand–they made it possible for me to be here.” (In fact, as I noted in a previous blog, the director’s visa was trapped in the red zone of Thailand’s civil war. I’m not sure which ghost released it, but at one point Cannes executive Thierry Fremault asked one fo the producers if he’d like him to phone President Sarkozy. ) And at the dinner where the producer regaled us with that anecdote, he seemed strangely confidant that his film would, in fact, win the Palme. It certainly will need all the help  it can get to find an audience in North America. The Thai movie unfolds as a slow-paced, animist hallucination–challenging art house fare of the first order. What did I think of it? Well, it’s the kind of film I would love to like. But while I was impressed by its rigour, ambition and beauty, it left me unengaged. Just not my cup of Thai.

Burton’s jury, meanwhile, split the Best Actor award between  Javier Bardem for Biutiful directed by Alejandro GONZÁLEZ IÑÁRRITU and Elio GERMANO in La Nostra Vita (Our Life), directed by Daniele LUCHETTI. Which is mystery to me and an insult to Bardem. Although not everyone was a fan of Biutiful, it’s a virtuosic display of talent. Like a lot of critics, I thought Our Life was dreadfully mediocre, and Germano’s acting simply wasn’t in the same league as Bardem’s towering performance. But the highlight of Bardem’s acceptance speech, and of the night, was his passionate valentine to Penélope. Calling her “my friend, my love,” Javier finally made it official as Cruz watched beaming from the audience, controlling her tears.

The prize for Best Actress went to Cannes royal Juliette Binoche–her photograph adorns the festival’s official poster this year. Binoche won it for her performance in Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy , which was indeed quite the feat. As she told me in an interview a couople of days ago, she felt she was driving the whole film. And no wonder. Her  Iranian director didn’t speak English (the language of the script) and her co-star in this walking-talking two-hander had never acted before. Like several others at the Cannes podium, Binoche produced a card bearing the name of Kiarostami compatriate filmmaker Jafar Panahi, who is in the ninth day of a hunger strike in an Iranian prison.

Among the other awards, the best director prize went to Mathieu AMALRIC for TOURNÉE (On Tour), who directed his own starring role as a French impresario who takes an American burlesque troupe on raod in  France. Giving his cast credit for co-directing it, he brought five of these Felliniesque women onstage to share the honour. The second runner-up Jury Prize went to the first movie from Chad ever to play in Cannes,  Un Homme qui crie (A Screaming Man) directed by Mahamat-Saleh HAROUN.

The stagecraft of the awards presentation–unlike the rest of this elegant festival–is always charmingly awkward, a spectacle of missed cues and bumbling exits. Bilingual host Kristin Scott Thomas, a Cannes regular, presided over the ceremony. And one of the funnier moments occurred as Atom Egoyan, chair of the Cinefondation short film jury, waited to announce the prize with co-presenter Michelle Rodriguez. As Rodriguez rattled on semi-coherently about this and that, beginning with a reminder that she was the helicopter pilot in Avatar–”You probably caught a glimpse of me in this 240-minute short film set in Pandora”–Egoyan looked on with an increasingly perplexed expression on his face, before finally getting his chance to launch into French and announce the winners.

For the complete list of Cannes winners, go to: 2010 Cannes Awards.

Glourious basterds and martyred monks

By Brian D. Johnson - Sunday, May 23, 2010 at 12:54 PM - 0 Comments

A monk (Michael Lonsdale) tends to an wounded terrorist in 'Of Gods and Men'

Toward the end of the Cannes festival, which will announce its awards in a hour or so, an indisputable theme began to dominate: international terrorism. I just caught up with Des Hommes et des dieux (Of Gods and Men), by French director Xavier Beavois, which has emerged as a strong contender for the Palme d’Or, although no single film has really broken ahead of the pack this year. Of Gods and Men is loosely based on events leading up to 1996 Tibhirine massacre, in which seven Cicstercian monks were held hostage then beheaded by Islamic fundamentalists in Algeria’s Atlas Mountains. This sensitive drama, filmed imbued with a reverential calm,  takes us into the quiet beauty Monastery World, where the daily rituals of singing hymns, tending gardens and giving medical aid to the villagers is distrupted by the mounting threat from terrorists, who have started cutting throats of infidels in the village. The middle-aged and elderly monks are, well, as adorable as the Seven Dwarves.

A scene from 'Outside the Law'

France’s colonial  history in Algeria, which remains an open wound, reared its ugly head again in Hors de la loi (Outside the Law), but from a radically different viewpoint. Directed by Rachid Bouchareb, this fictional drama follows the fate of three Algerian brothers who emigrate to France after the Second World War–as the war ended, 15,000 to 45,000 Algerians (depending on your source) were  massacred by French troops at independence rallies. The movie opens with a horrifying sequence of the massacre, then turns into a kind of terrorist gangster movie as the three brothers become involved in an armed protest movement in France. They are the Good, the Bad and the Ugly of the Algerian revolution. One is a blunt intrument with a good heart, another a cold Leninist mastermind, and the third is a club owner and pimp in Pigalle who is trying to live the dream.  Unlike the monastic Of Gods and Men, the movie unfolds as a virtual action picture, with the terrorists serving as its flawed but glorious Godfather heroes.  No wonder it was controversial. The evening of its premiere on Friday, the Croissete was lined with paddy wagons as hundreds of riot police prepared for right-wing demonstrations. There were only scattered protests, but the security was extra tight at the Palais that night.

The terrorist theme, meanwhile, has surfaced in two more films in competition: Douglas Liman’s Fair Game, an American movie starring Sean Penn and Naomi Watts, which tells the story of the Valerie Plame/Joseph Wilson WMD scandal, and Route Irish by leftie Brit filmmaker Ken Loach, a tale of dirty tricks within the ranks of military contractors in Iraq. But by all accounts the best movie about terrorism in this considerable field of revolutionary drama is Carlos, from French filmmaker Olivier Assayas, which played out of competition. It’s a five-hour saga about Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, aka Carlos, whose terrorist career blossomed in the 1970s and 1980s, taking  him from pro-Palestinian activism to the Red Army, and finally into refuge under Sudan’s Islamic dictatorship. To my regret, I never found the five hours to watch Carlos. But it will no doubt be coming to the Toronto International Film Festival in the fall.

Now the awards beckon. Rather than going to the stiff black-tie ceremony, critics traditionally to watch a live video feed in an adjoining theatre, where they consummate the festival experience by howling catcalls at the screen. I’ll make my time-stamped predictions now, to be proved right or wrong very shortly. I expect the Palme D’Or to go to go to Of Gods and Men. I think Tim Burton’s jury will award Best Actor to Biutiful‘s  Javier Bardem for his virtuoso performance as as drug-dealing illegal-immigrant landlord who has terminal cancer–Mexican director Alejandro GONZÁLEZ IÑÁRRITU (Babel) throws everything at the screen in this visceral melodrama. The response to it was so polarized I’d be surprised if it wins the Palme D’Or. But I’ve heard it on good authority that Burton liked it. So you never know.  As for Best Actress I predict, and hope, that it will go to Junghee Yun for her extraordinary performance as a Korean grandmother in Poetry. Now it’s time to watch the awards. Outside I can hear the screams from the mob gathered in the street as the stars make their way up the red carpet . . .  stay tuned.

Shooting Jagger

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, May 21, 2010 at 12:25 PM - 3 Comments

My video of Mick Jagger fielding questions after the Cannes premiere of ‘Stones in Exile’. As one viewer pointed out to me, at the end Mick seems to have had a senior’s moment. When asked to name a favorite film he picks Apocalypse Now, saying that it came out the same year as Exile on Main Street. Not true: Exile came out in 1972, Apocalypse in 1979. But when you’re the Rolling Stones, that decade is probably just one big acid flashback.

Iraq politics, Asian poetics, and sex with a talking catfish

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, May 21, 2010 at 11:25 AM - 0 Comments

Naomi Watts and Sean Penn in 'Fair Game'

I gorged on four films yesterday, covering all the food groups. They included two aggressive political dramas about Iraq war cover-ups—Doug Liman’s Fair Game from the U.S. and Ken Loach’s Route Irish from the U.K. Fair Game is another message movie courtesy of Participant Media (Inconvenient Truth, Countdown to Zero), America’s designated voice of cinematic liberalism. It’s a ripped-from-the-headlines drama about Joseph Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame Wilson—respectively the ex-diplomat and CIA spy who became targets of a White House smear campaign after Wilson became a whistleblower exposing WMD fraud. You would think that the politics would be the most compelling aspect of a movie like this, which is based on the couple’s respective books. And to be sure, the official narrative sprints along with the hopped-up, jittery energy of a political thriller. But the political story has been told. Curiously, the most explosive acting from Sean Penn and Naomi Watts occurs in the scenes of domestic tension, and ultimately in a flat-out marital fight. Fair Game is no Mr. And Mrs. Smith, but it does present an extreme example of two working parents with wild jobs. Plame’s character takes the heroism of the working mom to a whole new level—as a mother of young twins who jets around the world doing undercover work in one hot spot after another. She’s almost too good to be true, the all American spy/mom. When not running dangerous covert operations, and keeping her husband’s temper in check at dinner parties, she’s the one who has her eye on the kids in the brief nanny-free interludes at home. Penn, meanwhile, portrays his character as enough of a grandstanding blowhard that, while we’re expected to appreciate his heroism, we have to wonder how happy Joseph Wilson would be with his own portrayal.

Ken Loach’s Route Irish is more extremist stuff. It’s a fighting-fire-with-fire tale of dirty tricks among private military contractors in Iraq. The hero is an angry young Brit, an ex-soldier who suspects foul play in the death of his best buddy from a roadside bomb on the road to Baghdad airport. The story isn’t about the war on terror, but about the war within the war on terror. And it features a novel conceit—one of the good guys who resorts to torturing his own kind. But again, it seems no Iraq message movie is complete without a domestic firefight, as the hero and his dead buddy’s wife engage in some torrid sexual hostilities. Continue…

When the Stones were truly stoned

By Brian D. Johnson - Wednesday, May 19, 2010 at 7:37 PM - 6 Comments

Images from 'Stones in Exile'

“We were young, good-looking and stupid. Now we’re just stupid. Nixon was in the White House, the war in Vietnam was going on, and we didn’t know anything about that because we were stuck next door in Villefranche Sur Mer making this record.”

Mick Jagger had the patter down pat, and recited it twice, first in French, then in English. Taking the stage to wild applause in the Theatre Croisette, that’s how he introduced Stones in Exile—a documentary about the 1972 recording of Exile on Main St. in Keith Richards’ rented Villa Nellcote mansion a stone’s throw down the coast from Cannes. Mick seemed pleased as punch. Looking dapper in a sleek grey suit, the 66-year-old elder statesman of rock generated more heat in Cannes than any movie star who’s touched down here all week. After all, there are stars, then there are icons.

After the screening, Jagger, with gentlemanly poise, sat down to entertain questions from the audience with director Steven Kijak and the some of the crew. Given that the film documents one of the most debauched period in the history of one of the world’s most debauched bands, the discussion was rather tame, though Mick did have a bit of a giggle about the cute eight-year-old blond kid who served as the house drug smuggler at Villa Nellcote while the band made music history. I’ll get back to that Q & A later in this post, and by tomorrow I’ll hope to post some video that I shot from the fourth row (as soon as I can find a suitable cable to download it). Meanwhile, here are some notes on the film, which I guess is  old news back home. It’s already been shown on TV. And I just talked to my 92-year-old mother on the phone who knew all about it. She’d seen Mick on Larry King. Continue…

Waiting for Mick

By Brian D. Johnson - Wednesday, May 19, 2010 at 10:52 AM - 0 Comments

Thumbing this blog on my Blackberry while standing in line for the ‘Stones in Exile’ documentary, premiering in the Directors’ Fortnight program in Cannes. Got here 90 minutes before the start time and there was already a crowd. The movie is less than an hour long. So this must be the first time I’ll have spent more time in a movie line-up than in the movie. The attraction is that Mick Jagger will be doing a Q and A after the screening. He’s doing so little press—30 minutes rationed among 4,000 journalists—that this is our only point of access. The line is building; half a dozen cops are standing by, expecting. . . Qui sait?

The film documents the time the Rolling Stones spent in 1972, just up the road from Cannes, recording their now legendary double album, Exile on Main Street, in the dank basement of Keith Richards’ mansion amid drug deals, thefts and the sudden wedding of Mick and Bianca. The Stones are behind the film, so I assume it’s sanitized, to an extent, unlike Robert Frank’s raunchy verite doc, Cocksucker Blues. We’ll see.

It’s now 4 pm. One hour to go. I wonder if things will get ugly. . .

In other news, I had dinner with a group that included the Brit producer of a Thai film that premieres in competition Friday. He was worried the director wouldn’t make it, because his visa was stuck in the Red Zone of Thai combat. The producer said Thierry Fremault, the director of Cannes, asked him: “Would you like me to call Sarkozy?” In the end, the director got his visa without presidential intervention. But as the producer said, “What other festival director in the world could offer to do that?” For the record, for those who enjoyed the phonetic riddle of the Icelandic volcano, the Thai director is named Apichatpong Weerasethakul and his movie is Lung Boonme Raluek Chat. That’s a lot of thumbing.

4:20 p.m. More crowds. More cops. More cameras. Holy Altamont! Will Mick have the Hell’s Angels escort him through the mob?

4:35 p.m. Screams from the mob of fans and paparazzi in the street. Can’t see him but clearly Jagger has arrived. He’s now in the building; I’m not.

4:50 p.m. I’m in! Sitting next to a NY Daily News columnist who says he named his cat after Bianca Jagger. Says he knows Bianca, and she was not amused. Neither was Aretha Franklin when he named a previous cat (a fat one) after her. OK, enough live blogging. . . Later.

Godard makes his absence visible

By Brian D. Johnson - Wednesday, May 19, 2010 at 8:43 AM - 3 Comments

A scene from Jean-Luc Godard's 'Film socialisme'

The Internet is awash with lies. I had promised a daily blog from Cannes, but between the vortex of the festival and magazine deadlines, I seem to have lost a day, at least. Time to catch-up. Where were we? . . . Oh yes, anticipating Jean-Luc Godard’s new film, and his press conference.  Godard’s inexplicable picture,  inexplicably titled Film Socialisme, is a dream in progress.  As avant-garde as anything the iconic auteur has ever done, it unfolds as a cool delirium of images and  words that stubbornly deflect meaning or  interpretation. The first part is set mostly on a giant cruise ship, a candied Las Vegas world of laquered colours. Some of the images are shot in lucious, liquid compositions; some in  pixilated low-rent video. The camera finds tragic beauty on a grey, heaving sea,. There’s no discerable narrative.  The second part of the film revolves around  a gas station, again painted in toytown colours.  A white llama and a black donkey stand hitched to the pumps by a red car, and next to them a woman reads Balzac’s Illusions Perdus. Dialogue, voice-over and block-lettered text telegraph inscrutable penseés. Perversely, to the frustration of some Anglo viewers, the English subitles offer mere fragments of the French dialogue: “Spanish gold stolen . . . noneed fear Moscow . . . space is dying. . . don’t talk about the invisible show it a smile that dismisses the universe”  I undertood the French, but found the eliptical titles more true to the spirit of the film. There are flashing allusions to historical epicentres–to Odessa, Palestine, Hellas, Naples, Barcelona and Egypt. Occasionally, in the flood of imagery, I’d find myself drifting in and out of sleep. But without guilt. Whatever random shutter speed my eyelids applied to the film would just be another level of Godardian elision. I’ve looks at dreams from both sides now. . . . I’m sure it was the Master’s intention that at least parts of his movie should be watched while sleeping.

After the film a crowd gathered for Godard’s press conference, until we were told he was a no-show. He would not be there to explain an inexplicable film, true to the words spelled out by its final block-lettered title: NO COMMENT.  So I perused to the press notes, looking for answers. There were none. Just a Q & A that was as elliptical as the film. . .

Q Cinema and films – the difference?
A The same, cinema is not necessarily to be found in films. . .
Q Static shots only?
A The chemist doesn’t do tracking shots in front of his microscope nor petrol companies when drilling into the sea bed. . .
Q Blogs and SMS?
A In a way, behind this young thinking similar to an earthworm, one thing matters to all these passionate Phoenixes: to survive and find in the depths of chaos a chance to resurrect (cf. Prigogine).
Q Politics again?
A Yes, as modern democracies, by rendering politics a domain of separate thought, are predisposed to totalitarianism.
Q And images?
A The old magus Bachelard spoke about implicit and explicit images. We might cite Jules Renard’s image of silence: snow falling on the water. . .

Well, I guess that just about covers it.

Latest photos from Cannes

By macleans.ca - Monday, May 17, 2010 at 2:09 PM - 0 Comments

MORE PHOTOS
Aaaand action!— Pictures from the opening of the 2010 Cannes Film Festival

Quebec's boy wonder lives the dream

By Brian D. Johnson - Sunday, May 16, 2010 at 1:25 PM - 2 Comments

Xavier Dolan, Niels Schneider and Monia Chokri in 'Amours imaginaires' ('Heartbeats')

Xavier Dolan’s career erupted out of nowhere last year in Cannes with the triumph of his award-winning first feature, I Killed My Mother, which premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar. Now, just a year later, he  is back with a second feature, Les Amours imaginaires (translated as Heartbeats in English, for reasons that escape me), and with it he has climbed another step on the Cannes red staircase, with a spot in the more prestigious sidebar program, Un Certain Regard. Unable to attend the advance press screening, I saw it at last night’s premiere, where it received a rapturous standing ovation by a crowd, who followed him and his co-stars all the way out into the lobby. This movie is made for Cannes. Les Amours imaginaires is a vibrant expression of youthful passion, an energetic explosion of style that does look and feel like a film made from start to finish in less than a year.  It’s a cinematic water-colour, with a thin narrative and more visual elan than dramatic depth. But it confirms that Dolan is a phenomenal  talent–a director who has a great eye and is fired with that unique combustion of tender naivete and precocious erudition that only the young can possess. He is 21 years old.

Monia Chokri

Les Amours imaginaires is a reverie of mad love involving a gay man (Dolan) and a hetero woman (Monia Chokri) who are infatuated with the same elusive mirage of narcissism–a golden-haired Adonis played by Neils Schneider, who also co-starred with Dolan in his first feature. Like so much contemporary pop music from Dolan’s generation, the film is a retro reinvention of vintage Sixties style that feels classical and modern all at once. As a whimsical tale of a love triangle, this high-style romance is reminiscent of Truffaut’s Jules et Jim but Monia Chokri is coiffed and costumed as dead ringer for Godard’s Anna Karina.  Meanwhile, the film’s fetishized sense of fashion, and its dreamy slo-mo sequences of her walking, set to Sheila’s Bang Bang, could be right out of Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love.

Godard muse Anna Karina

The film is a romance, but it’s ultimate object of desire is cinema itself. Out-Frenching the French, it’s the kind of ultra-Nouvelle Vague piece that even the Euopeans don’t make any more. That may be partly why Dolan–its wunderkind writer/director/star is being embraced with such exhuberance here. He’s a voice from the new generation who’s bringing fresh blood to the altar of auteur cinema by honouring the past.

I interviewed Dolan on the beach a few hours ago. Looking oh-so-French in a striped marin jersey, he seemed right at home. Having fielded too many questions about his influences, he’s already defensive about his originality. But he happily confesses that the Anna Karina homage is deliberate. As for Wong Kar-Wai, he says he doesn’t see why the Asian auteur should have the monopoly on slow-motion shots of ”asses in beautiful dresses.” His adoration of Godard and Truffaut is honestly expressed and feels oddly fresh. If Jean-Luc and Francois are, respectively, the Stones and the Beatles of the French New Wave. So, I asked, which is favorite? Dolan paused a long, long time, unable to decide. And then, the moment the tape recorder was switched off, he said: “Godard!”

Well, well. Jean-Luc will be in Cannes tomorrow. The old oracle of the New Wave will be holding court at a press conference for his new movie, Film Socialisme. I wouldn’t miss it for the world.

Suicide watch in Cannes

By Brian D. Johnson - Saturday, May 15, 2010 at 9:15 PM - 2 Comments

We’re always looking for trends in Cannes. Well, here’s one: I’ve seen six suicides in three movies within the span of 24 hours. Bummer. So as not to spoil anyone’s future viewing enjoyment, I won’t reveal exactly who killed themselves in which movies. But here’s the tally so far: a woman stepped off a building ledge; another leapt through a window; two guys in two different films threw themselves in front of trains; a girl hung herself; and finally, in a piece-de-resistance of self-annihilation, a woman hung herself and burst into flames all at once. Now there’s something you don’t see every day. I wouldn’t want to read too much into this mini-epidemic, but it makes me wonder if creative suicide is the art-house equivalent to the Hollywood car crash: the violent implosion. There’s still more suicide on the horizon. Tomorrow there’s a midnight premiere of Gilles Marchand’s Un autre monde (darkened to Black Heaven in English), a French film about an online femme fatale who coaxes folks to commit suicide—a phenomenon we’ve already seen in an ungainly Japanese movie called Chat Room.

Today, the theme of depression—which matches the unseasonably chilly weather here—continued with a vengeance. This morning we saw back-to-back movies about messed-up, unloved Englishwomen—Mike Leigh’s Another Year and Woody Allen’s You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger. The Leigh film begins with a haggard Imelda Staunton begging a lady doctor for sleeping pills. She is referred to a lady psychologist, who asks her to rate her happiness on a scale of 1-10, and she says, “One.” In the Allen film, a matriarch swallows 40 sleeping pills in a failed suicide attempt after being dumped by a Viagra-popping Anthony Hopkins, who gets remarried to a gold-digging hooker (Lucy Punch). With no real plot aside from ultra-real relationships that unfold on a delicate knife-edge of wit and pathos, Another Year is a quiet masterpiece—a pitch-perfect study of the “quiet desperation” that, to quote Pink Floyd, “is the English way.”

Leigh has been refining this study for a long time, and here he distills it to the pure essentials. This deft ensemble piece revolves around a needy, flighty, middle-aged divorcee (Lesley Manville) who is desperate for love, and who clings to a happily married and infinitely tolerant couple (Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen). It’s a gentle yet ruthless portrait of common garden angst (as opposed to the existential French variety),  lubricated by dinner-party alcoholism.

Anthony Hopkins and Naomi Watts in 'You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger"

Viewed right after it,  Woody Allen’s buoyant confection comes as a tonic. It, too, involves a middle-aged divorcee, and it was a breeze to watch. But after Mike Leigh, Woody’s shameless contrivance seems awfully broad, as it jockeys between a parody of Viagra entitlement (Anthony Hopkins) and old-fashioned fantasies of adulterous lust (Naomi Watts, Antonio Banderas and Josh Brolin). The actors are a pleasure to watch. But in Woody Allen’s prolific canon, the film is average, just another gig from the compulsive auteur who makes a movie a year, rain or shine. He, in fact, could have used Mike Leigh’s title, Another Year.

Woody, meanwhile, did some sedentary stand-up at a Cannes press conference with his characteristic meditations on mortality:

“My relationship with death remains the same. I’m strongly against it. I find it a lousy deal. There is no advantage to getting older . . . I’m 74 now and you don’t get smarter, you don’t get wiser, you don’t get more mellow, you don’t get more kindly. Nothing happens. But your back hurts more, you get more indigestion, your eyesight isn’t as good and you need a hearing aid. It’s a bad business getting older and I would advise you not to do it if you can avoid it.” Relatively speaking, that’s a sunny outlook in this year’s Cannes: it does, at least, preclude suicide.

Wall Street: Oliver never sleeps

By Brian D. Johnson - Saturday, May 15, 2010 at 8:58 PM - 1 Comment

Shia La Beouf, Josh Brolin and Michael Douglas in 'Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps'

Trying to catch up to the blog in the early hours of Sunday morning, though it’s still yesterday back home. Saturday was a long day, with two movies in the morning, two at night and a full afternoon spent down the coast at at the fabled Hotel Du Cap—shivering on the seaside in cold, rainy weather doing  press junket interviews with Oliver Stone and the cast of Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps in an outdoor cabana. It was a weird place to get an economics lesson, from movie stars no less. And from a rambling semi-coherant Oliver Stone, who looked utterly exhausted after last night’s premiere party. According to Michael Douglas, “he burns the candle at every end.” More on that later, in the magazine.

Meanwhile,  a few words on the movie. Wall Street is the only Hollywood picture in official selection, and though it has had a mixed reception, it has attracted a lot of attention. Canadian media at the press conference were tickled to hear Oliver Stone praise the Royal Bank for opening up its doors to his crew while various American institutions refused. Ah, gotta love those Chavez-loving money men at RBC! You’ll be hearing a lot more about Wall Street in coming days and months–it doesn’t open commercially until September. But as a quick primer, I’ve compiled a list of homilies that pop up in the dialogue of the film almost as frequently as the product placements (the most blatant is Michael Douglas asking  Shia La Beouf, “Would you like a Heineken?” in a restaurant —followed by a close up of a Heineken.)

Top 10 Wall Street aphorisms:
1.  “I once said greed is good. Now it seems it’s legal.” [Huh, wasn’t it always legal?]
2. “We take a buck and we shoot it full of steroids and we call it steroid banking.”
3.  “The mother of all evil is speculation–leveraged debt.”
4.  “Money is a bitch that never sleeps, and she’s jealous.”
5.  “Money is not the prime asset in life; time is.”
6. “It’s not about the money it’s about the trade.”
7.  “Parents are the bones on which children sharpen their teeth.”
8. “You stop telling lies about me and I’ll stop telling the truth about you.”
9. “Privatize the gains, socialize the losses.”
10. “Green is the new bubble.”

Is Cannes losing ground to TIFF?

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, May 13, 2010 at 7:52 PM - 2 Comments

The pilgrims who come to Cannes each May seem a bit grumpier than usual this year. And it’s not just because of the volcanic ash clouds that played havoc with their flights, or the chilly weather and the wind-whipped beaches that are ruining the Riviera illusion of paradise. Even before anyone had seen a single film, critics were grousing about the festival selection. You can’t judge movies before seeing them (or I’d be out of a job), but on face value the program didn’t generate excitement. Those of us from North American were chagrined to see so few English language movies in competition. There are a couple of Brit features from stalwart social realists Mike Leigh and Ken Loach. And there is just one American movie competing for the Palme d’Or, Doug Liman’s Fair Game, starring Sean Penn and Naomi Watts. The other major U.S. dramatic features in Cannes are what hard-core Cannes watcher call “window dressing”—Oliver Stone’s Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps and Woody Allen’s You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger. They’re playing safely out of competition, which is like going to Olympics and deciding not to compete for gold. There’s a reason for that. Cannes juries have not been kind to Hollywood over the years. So the studios are wary.

PHOTO GALLERY
Aaaand action! — PHOTOS from the opening of the 2010 Cannes Film Festival

But this is the festival that launched game-changing American movies like Easy Rider, Apocalypse Now, sex, lies and videotape and Pulp Fiction. We still show up hoping to have our minds blown by something that will take cinema by storm. That’s an increasingly rare occurrence, which may not just reflect the culture of Cannes, but of cinema itself. But even last year, there was Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds,  which welded the art house to the multiplex with incendiary mischief. There were also two superb movies by women, Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank and Jane Campion’s Bright Star. This year there’s not a single feature in competition by a female director. Even the French have been complaining about the selection—some critics here are outraged that new films by Jean-Luc Godard and Olivier Assayas have been relegated to the Un Certain Regard sidebar. Not only that, Cannes director Thierry Frémault told interviewers that he was crushed not to get the premiere of Terrence Malick’s new movie and promised next year will be better.

If Cannes is losing some of its lustre, the Toronto International Film Festival may be picking up the slack. Tonight I talked to TIFF CEO Piers Handling, who was politic enough not to gloat, yet did agree that TIFF may have assumed a dominant position in the marketplace. When I asked him if a non-stellar year in Cannes will help TIFF, Handling said: “I’ve seen this before in Cannes, and to be honest it’s no reflection on what’s going to happen in the fall.”  But then he added: “There are a whole bunch of films that did not make it here — by Paul Haggis, Robert Redford, Clint Eastwood, Terry Malick —that are definite possibilities for Toronto.”

So is Cannes losing ground to Toronto?

“Both festivals have very different philosophies and missions,” he said. “Because it’s a public festival, Toronto has always plugged into the commercial marketplace—what’s going to play. And let’s be frank, September is perfectly placed to set up the awards-season films.

“Cannes has set itself up as the ivory tower of cinema. I really admire that, but there are drawbacks in setting themselves up that way. The key art house filmmakers in the world come here. For them the holy grail is to be in Cannes. I love those films. But a lot of them don’t play well in the commercial marketplace.  You have to be grounded in the reality of the industry you’re working within. Toronto has managed to accomplish that because it’s more of a populist event. A lot of the films that have opened at the festival have gone on to play in a significant way. Like Juno, like Crash, like Slumdog Millionaire.

Still, Cannes remains unique. The reason the pilgrims keep coming back is that, for a couple of weeks a year, it turns into a fairytale town where the Hollywood  romance seems more real than in Hollywood. All the usual showbiz values are inverted: people at least pretend to believe in cinema as art.

Today I saw masterful Korean film that was sheer pleasure to watch—a brilliant, dark, sexy and stylish Gothic drama called The Housemaid. It’s the ruthless tale of  a rich and handsome cad whose impregnates his naïve new maid just as his doll-faced wife is about to give to birth to twins. It may not turn out to be a hit, or win an Oscar. But then some of the best films never get popular.

There’s a lot of business done in Cannes, of all kinds. Every level of B-movie is for sale in the market, and the hotels are plastered with crass movie posters. But as night falls and the red carpet lights up and the streets fill with thousands of fans, the marketplace gives way to the kind of absurdly elegant red-carpet ritual that only the French are capable of.

Tonight I walked home along the Croisette, by  the beach where a crowd sat  in folding chairs on the sand watching a black-and-white Frank Sinatra  in From Here To Eternity. Suddenly a massive display of fireworks set to Chinese music lit up the Mediterranean sky and drowned out the soundtrack. Another night of art to burn in the magic kingdom of Cannes.

Aaaand action!

By macleans.ca - Thursday, May 13, 2010 at 3:42 PM - 0 Comments

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Latest photos from Cannes

Robin Hood, enemy of Fox News?

By Brian D. Johnson - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 at 5:43 PM - 16 Comments

They must have had a deal worked out. In the absence of Robin Hood director Ridley Scott, who was a no show in Cannes because of knee surgery, Russell Crowe and Cate Blanchett were left holding the fort, explaining his movie for him at the press conference before the opening night premiere. The deal, by the sound of it, is that Crowe would do the explaining and Blanchett would play the movie star, looking dreamy (as always), and lightly flirting with her co-star. Crowe, a producer on the film, took charge, elaborating detail about the movie’s “version of history”—  how “indolent egotist,” King John, is pressured into signing the first draft of the Magna Carta “and that to me is the fertile ground where a resistance fighter and rebel hero could rise up and apply that pressure. . .”

“With the love of a good woman,” Blanchett chips in.

Then Crowe made a crack about what trees in the forest are good for.

There were inevitable questions about retro-fitting the Robin Hood legend with politically correct contemporary references, notably an impassioned speech by Robin to Richard the Lionheart decrying a massacre of innocent Muslims by the crusaders. That made Crowe bristle, accusing the questioner of “making a grand assumption that people then had no empathy.” Touché. He went on to say that “there’s an element of Robin Hood lying in the heart of all of us.”

Then, asked what Robin Hood would be doing today, he said: “I’ve been asked this question a lot. Would Robin Hood’s aim be political? Would it be economic? Would he be looking at Wall Street and the huge sums of money that people would be patting themselves on the back with, and the sub-prime mortgage collapse and all that? Or would he be looking what you guys are do for a living and realize that the truth wealth lies in the dissemination of information. My theory would be, if RH was alive today, that he would be looking at the monopolization of media as the greatest enemy.”

Well, doesn’t that sound like fun—firing flaming arrows at Fox News.

Crowe said the history was just a point of entry. “You have to do enough – just enough accurate history to pique people’s curiosity,” he says. “The main shift that we made, if you want a revolutionary shift, is Richard the Lionheart rides in and we kill him in the first scene. That signals to anyone who’s a fan of previous Robin Hoods that it’s a different game.”

And later, when pushed about the ratio of historical fact to fiction, Russell basically threw in the towel: “Apart from the year and a couple of names, we made it all up.”
As for the prospect of a franchise, and a long-term commitment by him and Blanchett—that was my question to both of them—Crowe said, “Obviously there’s a bigger story to be told. There’s no grand planning. But if we do get the opportunity to do it again, with Ridley and Cate. . . I think the cool thing about the relationship between Robin and Marian is that there’s a very adult moment there. They come to each other slowly. And we still haven’t seen the love scene in the forest, the dappled light coming through the trees. . .”

Blanchett’s retort was drowned out by laughter. When I asked her about how far she would like to this merry woodland romance, she played coy: “I haven’t been asked.”

Robin Hood fights the French on the beaches

By Brian D. Johnson - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 at 12:47 PM - 3 Comments

Russell Crowe in 'Robin Hood'

This morning we saw a press screening of Sir Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood, which opens the Cannes Film Festival tonight and hits  Canadian theatres Friday. We also watched its stars, a good-humoured Russell Crowe and a flirtatious Cate Blanchett, hold court in the festival’s first press conference. More on that performance later. But first some impressions of the movie. (Forgive the early judgment, but when you open Cannes, you can’t expect to keep the world’s opinions under wraps.)

To begin with, there was no small irony in seeing Robin Hood premiere in a French beach resort. Sir Ridley has rebooted the well-worn legend with an origins story, recasting him as a war hero leading the English in an epic battle against France. The French are the bad guys, and they’re  portrayed with a vitriol that would warm the heart of any Freedom Fries-loving American, as a gang of snide, sneaky, rapacious villains. The movie’s French title is Robin des bois (Robin of the forest). The action, however, is not set in Sherwood Forest. Robin doesn’t even get there until the final scenes. No, this is essentially a medieval war movie, full of pillaging, castle-sacking, battering rams and boiling oil–with occasional shades of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The legend has also been retrofitted with contemporary resonance,  from references to atrocities against Muslim civilians in the Crusades to the tax-burden of a country drained by its military.

The new and improved Robin Hood is no mere common outlaw. A veteran of King Richard’s long and costly war against Islam, he emerges as an English Braveheart, a national resistance fighter, galvanizing popular sentiment against the cruel, tax-happy King John (who’s a dupe for the French). Fulfilling the legacy of a father he barely knew, Robin is a liberator who, in a flourish of historic invention, presents the treacherous King John with an early draft of the Magna Carta. . . and (spoiler alert) he leads British troops into battle as France invades England’s beaches with a vast armada of 13th- century landing craft. The scene plays like D-Day’s Normandy Invasion in reverse.  For a moment there, I thought I was watching Saving Private Robin. As if inspired by Winston Churchill, our hero is actualy fighting them on the beaches.

Sir Ridley is on familiar turf here. This epic,  which is a bit bloated at two-and-a-half hours, bears the distinctive stamp that he brought to both Gladiator and Kingdom of Heaven–gritty, sword-slashing combat mired in mud and fired with old fashioned romance. A lot of it is good fun. Even if the Merry Men interludes seem contrived, Sir Ridley knows how to shoot a bow and arrow, so to speak. And one thing is certain: its Australian star, Russell Crowe, makes a far sturdier Robin Hood than the laughable Kevin Costner (Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves). The filmmakers have roughened up Robin, giving him rugged leather breeches as opposed to tights. And they’re thrown some modern twists into the story. Blanchett’s headstrong Maid Marian  is quite the warrior in her own right, even if Robin does get her to strip off his armour after she runs him a bath. And Marion’s blind, ailing father-in-law, Sir Walter Loxsley (Max von Sydow), essentially asks Robin Longstride to impersonate her slain husband, which is how he becomes Robin of Loxsley.

Robin Hood, clearly sets the stage for a franchise. Sir Ridley, who’s recovering from knee surgery, couldn’t make the trip to Cannes, so he was not at the movie’s press conference to explain strategy. But when I asked Crowe (who’s a co-producer)about their ambitions for sequels, he told me they explained the film was originally mapped out as a seven-and-a-half our saga. Which means we’ve seen the first third of it. . . Hey, I’ve got to get to another movie, but more on that press conference in the next blog . . .

Goodbye Hot Docs, Hello Cannes

By Brian D. Johnson - Tuesday, May 11, 2010 at 11:49 AM - 1 Comment

Juliette Binoche graces Cannes in Abbas Kiarostami's 'Copie Conforme'

I’m writing from Cannes, this otherworldy spot on the French Riviera that plays host to the mother of all film festivals. After the reality blitz of Toronto’s Hot Docs festival, now it’s time for some serious fantasy. The hoopla begins tomorrow, with the premiere of Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood, or Robin des Bois as it’s known here. I expect nothing less than venison kebabs on flaming arrows at the opening night party. It wasn’t easy to get here. My plane had to circumnavigate some volcanic ash, adding hours to the trip and screwing up connections. Unless you think I’m complaining, or (worse still) gloating, about this hardship assignment on the Riviera, let me reassure you that I feel lucky to be here, and humbled. Cannes does that to you—even the stars feel humbled at the high altar of cinema. And if it’s any solace, it’s cool and cloudy in paradise,  and front-end loaders are working to repair the beaches, which have been ravaged by Mediterranean storm surges. Hey, it’s no earthquake, but that’s what passes for catastrophe in these parts, aside from the Greek meldown—I keep waiting for the Euro to crash, but so far a cup of coffee in Cannes is still the price of breakfast back home. Not much changes. There’s always a mignonne French woman of a certain age with a fake tan and a miniature dog strolling down the Croisette past a yacht called Octopussy.

Juliette Binoche, the Official Cannes poster,

Juliette Binoche is ubiquitous here. She’s literally the Cannes poster girl, adorning  the festival’s official affiche, which is unusually garish. She also stars in a competition entry by Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami–a Tuscan romance that takes her back to English Patient territory. Talk about world cinema: an Iranian auteur makes a romance about an English writer who takes a young French woman to Italy.  I’m curious.

In  preparing for Cannes, I never had a chance to wrap up coverage of Toronto’s Hot Docs festival, which closed on the weekend. It was the richest Hot Docs on record, and proof that the documentary is thriving as never before. Glad to see the jury awarded  its $15,000 prize for best Canadian feature to In the Name of the Family, by Shelley Saywell, a searing investigation into the murder of teenage girls by family members in so-called honour killings. Continue…