It's this time of the year again

[Szlia]

The time of the Cannes Film Festival!

[Millie]

Are you going this year? Would love to hear your reports from the festival if you're attending.

[Szlia]

I wish! I only went once, the year I worked in the selection team of the Nifff. Sadly, accreditations are super expensive for professionals and very hard to obtain for the press. On top that, the festival is really not tailored for the non-professional audience (80% of the screenings are in the film market and you need invitations plus a tuxedo for the main competition screenings, so it does not leave much to see... if you manage to find tickets that is...).

A festival like Locarno , nicknamed the biggest of the small festivals or the smallest of the big ones, is much more enjoyable for the average movie-go'er (except for the insane temperature in august).

Anyway, I planed to write a couple lines about each movie after they got showed, but that will be second hand info mostly. Mostly, because some movies are released around here on the same day they are showed at Cannes. I think that will be the case for Gus Van Sant's Last Days at least.

[Szlia]

Dominik Moll is not a director I am familiar with. All I can say is that he is known for being a big Kubrik fan and that his second movie, Harry, un ami qui vous veux du bien (With A Friend Like Harry...), was a huge success thanks to a selection at the Cannes Film Festival.

It took Moll 5 years to complete this third movie; Lemming. Described by the critics as somewhere between The Shinning and Eyes Wide Shut, Lemming follows a young and happy couple (Laurent Lucas, a great actor seen mostly in art-house french movies, and Charlotte Gainsbourg, seen in 21 Grams) whose harmonious life loses its balance. The two detonators are a failed diner with Lucas' boss (André Dussollier, far from the jovial characters he played for years in Alain Resnais' movies) and his wife (Charlotte Rampling, an amazing actress, one of the major figure of european cinema) and the discovery of a lemming...

Dark, tense, psychologically violent and borderline fantastic could describe the plot of this movie, which also has been praised for its razor-sharp film-making.

A potential winner? Way too early to tell. But with long festivals (21 films to see in 10 days), at the time of the deliberation, the jury tends to remember more clearly and fondly the last few films they saw. So being first might very well be an handicap.

[Szlia]

I saw one of the other movies by Masahiro Kobayashi, Bootleg Film, and imagined the guy was a kind of japanese early Tarantino, with a vibrant love for cinema and B movies, many idea but not a lot of money. Let's say I was a little surprised when I discovered Kobayashi must be somewhere in his 50s, if not 60s.

If Bootleg Film was playfull and youthfull, his new movie, Bashing, seems quite the opposite. Bashing follows the difficulties of a japanese women from an humanitarian organization that got kidnapped in Iraq. But the subject here is not the kidnapping or the detention, it is how she is (badly) treated once freed and back in Japan. Hate mail, aggressions, bashing. Not a very pleasant portrayal of the japanese society, especialy when you know it is loosely based on the auto-biography of an ex japanese hostage.

The only critic I read compared the movie to the brilliant Nobody Knows by Hirokatsu Kore-Eda, also loosly based on a dramatic true story, but to say that Kore-Eda managed to give a huge emotional intensity to his film while Kobayashi remains as cold as ice.

____________

The second film of the day was also related with Iraq, but in a more direct way since it's an auto-biographical work from the kurdish director Hiner Saleem. It follows the journey of a soldier of the iraqi army who tries to use an assignement given to him (bring to its family the corpse of another soldier) to flee to Turkey.

It seems the movie was average and inferior to Saleem's previous movie, Vodka Lemon, that I have not seen.

[Angry Amadeus]

Man I can't wait for Deuce Bigalow 2.

[Szlia]

Not that much press on the lastest Atom Egoyan after his disapointing Ararat. He is back in a territoty he knows well, the adaptation of a novel, a crime story, this time in the world of the show-business. A comic duo splits after a girl is found dead in the tub of their hotel room. 15 years later, a journalist tries to understand what exactly happened.

The movie is built like a mosaic, building little by little a truth as seen by the different protagonists. It seems the exercise is of a great mathematical brilliance, but is not very well carried by its actors. The critics were not overly impressed.

___________

Impressed is how Last Days left many of its viewers it seems. Gus Van Sant's movie loosly based on the two last days of the life of Kurt Cobain forms a trilogy with Gerry and Elephant (Winner of the competition in 2003). Here again, a poetical tale of ethereal beauty initiated by real events that remained enigmatic. Miles away from the traditional biopics, Van Sant films Michael Pitt as Burke, a lonely and disoriented rock star. In the forest that surrounds his house, Burke roams, regressing to some sort of primitive state. In his huge house or in bars, where people come to solicite him, he feels estranged.

Cobain's fans might be a little dumbfounded by this radical yet elegant approach, but certainly moved by Pitt's performance. Just by watching the trailers you can see he manages to do something extremely unsettling, something akin to an apparition, a mirage. A serious contender for best male lead?

[Szlia]

yeah yeah i gave up on updating that... I blame the fact the server was down on day 4 so I had to catch on 4 and 5 the next day...

Anyway, the show is over and we have the winners:

Special Jury Price: Shangai Dreams by Wang Xiaoshuai
The chronics of a familly from shangai living in a rural area. They were sent there by governemental policies and the parents dream of a bright future for their children by sending them back to shangai. But the children are growing and falling in love in the country... The critics are a tad surprised by this prize for a movie that sounded if not bad, at least minor.

Best Scenario: Guillermo Arriaga for The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.
Best Male Performance: Tommy Lee Jones in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.

TLJ's directorial debut gets a double nod, but ironicaly not one for direction. Anyway, this kind of modern western, where a corpse is brought from texas to mexico (a little reminiscent of Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia), was hailed as solid.

Best Female Perfomance: Hana Laszlo in Free Zone
An american women (Natalie Portman) travels through Israel in a cab with Hanna (Hana Laszlo) as driver. This kind of initiatic journey bring them to a free zone at the border of Jordan.
This movie is signed by the israeli director Amos Gitai, who is never better than when he brings his fictions in the realm of documentary. Camera on the shoulder, we get through the difficult realities and confusions of the area.
The three main actresses (the palestinian Hiam Abbass joins the two others in the free zone) were all praised (an opening sequences focused on Portman's face is said to be amazing) but in this friendly confrontation it seems Hana Laszlo came up on top. This middle-aged, short, round and energic woman is well known in Israel for her stand up comedy acts and is a revelation in this dramatic performance.

Best Direction: Michael Haneke for Caché (Hidden)
No similarities with the 80s cult classic The Hidden, but some similarities with Lynch's Lost Highway as a couple (Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche) is receiving video tapes in their mail that sugest they are spied on. If the premise is lynchian, the rest has the philosophical depth and cold social violence of the early Haneke's works. Here, what is hidden is not only the mysterious person filming the couple, but also the crime that is at the root of it all.
Some saw Caché as a potential winner.

Grand Prix: Broken Flowers by Jim Jarmush
An aging bachelor goes in a journey to find his son. The problem is that he just learned about it in an anonymous letter and do not know which one of the seven women of his life could be the mother.
Jarmush is here more accessible than ever with this movie tailored for the Bill Murray we all love. The critics were pretty mixed, because, as always, Jarmush reduces his scenario to a serie of little scenes that work by themselves, preventing the movie to have a flow, a solid spine, on its whole duration.

Palme d'Or: L'Enfant (The Child) by the Dardenne brothers
A young woman gives birth to a child. The father is a little crook that can't seem to be emotionaly involved with it and decides to sell it, because "if we want to, we can make another".
With this price the Dardenne enter the very tiny club of directors who got 2 Palmes d'Or (Shohei Imamura - who would have 3 if Kanzo Sensei was not put out of the competition in 98 - Emir Kusturica - this year's president of the jury - Francis Ford Coppola - for Apocalypse Now and the great and not well known The Conversation - and, god knows why, Bille August with two insipid danish period movies). In a sense, the Dardennes are even the most awarded ever in Cannes because not only did Rosetta won the Palme d'Or in 1999 but its actress, Emilie Dequenne, won best female. On top of that, in 2002 the great Olivier Gourmet won best male for his perfomance in Le Fils (The Son), another amazing movie signed by the Dardenne.
Is that a little too much? Some critics think so as Rosetta, Le Fils and L'Enfant share, if not similar story, at least similar universes (the lower of the lowest in belgium), themes (working, being a father, struggling to live) and aesthetic (camera on the shoulder, near the bodies, following the actors). Apocalypse Now was very different from The Conversation, Unagi (The Eel) was very different from Narayama Bushiko (The Ballad of Narayama), so maybe they could have saved this price for a time the Dardennes would reinvent their cinema.
This feeling is mostly motivated by the fact some immense directors who were in the competition never got the Palme d'Or. Notably Hou Hsiao-Hsien whoes film in competition, Three Times, is said to be both ambitious and stunning in its grace and beauty. He has consistenly been in the Cannes Film Festival and got only crumbles (he got a Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1989 for City of Sadness though).

Other high points of the festival according to the critics were A History of Violence by David Cronenberg, Last Days by Gus Van Sant and Batalla en el cielo (Battle in Heaven) by Carlos Reygadas and to a lesser degree Keuk Jang Jeon (Tales of Cinema) by the master of narrative puzzles Hong Sangsoo.

No way I am proof-reading all that!