Cannes 2014

[whaleallright]

not sure why anyone would be expecting much from an Egoyan film. he's always been a second-order filmmaker. even his best films—those that are intellectually and emotionally engaging—fall prey to clichés of the European art cinema. his attempts to make commercial thrillers have always fallen flat. in my cabinet des auteurs contemporains, he's on a lower shelf to the left of Mike Figgis.

I'm looking forward to the Sissako film. I guess it's revealing of the film's tonal diversity that certain reviewers sound like they are writing about a different film than the one others have written about.



edited to fix typo

[yoshimori]

The Egoyan was second-rate, even for Egoyan.

The Jessica Hausner UCR film, Amour fou, was a surprisingly subtly funny recounting of the last months of Heinrich von Kleist's life as he desperately proposed to woman after woman not marriage but a double suicide pack. Rigorously shot and scripted -- little movement, reliance on historical texts -- but lots of "laughs of recognition", you know, those moments, to paraphrase Hausner, when things everyone thinks are so significant just crumble under the weight of their own banality.

I enjoyed Mathieu Amalric's La chambre bleue too. An update of a Georges Simenon novel, fractured to all hell, like a new Providence or something.

And file this under critical objectivity: average score for Mr Turner of the 12 "critics" polled in British magazine SCREEN: A- [3.6 out of 4]. Average score for Mr Turner of the 15 "critics" polled in French magazine Le Film Francais: C- [1.9 out of 4]. The truth, iyam, is probably somewhere in between.

Critics at this fest have usually struck me as cheerleaders, like fans cheering on the home team at a World Cup. The Italian's always love the Italian films. The French love the French and hate the British and vice versa. And most films (if they're not too challenging) are overrated. The classic "I saw it here first so it must be good" syndrome.

[John Cope]

not sure why anyone would be expecting much from an Egoyan film. he's always been a second-order filmmaker. even his best films--those that are intellectually and emotionally engaging--are close to pastiche of midcentury art cinema (Renais, Antonioni, etc.). his attempts to make commercial thrillers have always fallen flat. in my cabinet des auteurs contemporains, he's on a lower shelf to the left of Mike Figgis.

I don't agree with this at all (including the casual swipe at Figgis). The early easy rote dismissals of this new film are predictable. I do wonder though, just based on these early reviews/descriptions, whether Egoyan may in fact be doing something more radical with this recent work than he is being given credit for. Chloe, after all, does function beautifully, brilliantly as the inverse to Exotica--the latter transcended the "erotic thriller" genre for which it was pitched by lazy, evasive marketers while Chloe embraced the genre fully and synthesized it with his usual deep intellectual concerns. Maybe The Captive is another inverse, this time to the buried misdirection of the child murder narrative in Exotica, kept removed and repressed there, almost subliminal. And maybe he's doing something quite insular with these recent pictures that recalls the ultra-insular exercises of his first films, using in this case an earlier model as focal point to work off of in a way that splices Hollywood genre mechanics with personal experimentation. I wouldn't put it past him and, given his resources and the impasse he seemed to be at during much of the 00's, it would seem to me to be a productive way to go (and a productive way of considering these recent genre exercises). Though certainly Egoyan is capable of making a film that does not work (e.g. Felicia's Journey, Where the Truth Lies) so I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

[NABOB OF NOWHERE]

The French love the French and hate the British and vice versa.

In the last 50 years the Palme d'Or has been won 7 times by the UK alone and 6 times by France including co-productions.

[aewb]

Critics at this fest have usually struck me as cheerleaders, like fans cheering on the home team at a World Cup. The Italian's always love the Italian films. The French love the French and hate the British and vice versa. And most films (if they're not too challenging) are overrated. The classic "I saw it here first so it must be good" syndrome.

Not being there it feels like the opposite. Critics seem desperate to get on twitter and be first with the pithy put down.

[yoshimori]

Not being there it feels like the opposite. Critics seem desperate to get on twitter and be first with the pithy put down.

What's this twitter you kids're all talkin'bout?

The first 30 minutes of the Bonello YSL pic was fab, doc-like in its focus on the construction of SL dresses … the rest (2 hours!) was a rambling festivals of clichés. Horrible acting throughout. Who knew seduction was limited to striking smoldering poses and twirling a finger around one's lips? And, oh, guess what, rich people did lots of drugs in the 70s.

[Finch]

Mike D'Angelo's third Cannes report

On Ceylan's Winter Sleep

What actually happens, however, is that Aydin spends the next couple of hours indoors, engaged in endless petty bickering with his sister (Demet Akbag), who’s unimpressed by the op-ed columns he writes for a local newspaper, and isn’t afraid to say so, and his much younger wife (Melisa Sozen), who’s grown to despise him, and merely wishes to be left alone with her charitable work. These repetitive, circular arguments last perhaps 20-30 minutes, in real time, and while Aydin reveals himself in each of them as a selfish, passive-aggressive, uncaring, narcissistic asshole, Bilginer’s magnificently unsympathetic performance can’t maintain interest throughout Ceylan’s onslaught of subtext-free yakkity-yak. Considered in retrospect, Winter Sleep is an impressive achievement, admirable in every way, but I’d be lying if I claimed it wasn’t frequently an endurance test. Some movies really are just too damn long.

On Bonello's Saint Laurent

Bonello doesn’t seem particularly interested in the man himself, but neither does he revel in period decadence (the film is set mostly in the ’70s) as much as one might expect from the man who directed House Of Pleasures. Individual sequences are beguiling and amusing—I perked up a bit early on, when the film leaped past the turbulent years of 1968 and 1969 via a split-screen montage that places newsreel footage on the left and runway models on the right—but they don’t add up to a coherent vision, and Saint Laurent’s eventual downslide into drug abuse is extremely Behind The Couture. Only in the home stretch, when Bonello suddenly starts jumping back and forth between the younger Saint Laurent and his elderly counterpart (played by Helmut Berger), does the film finally start to look purposeful. By then, however, more two hours in, it’s too late.

on Szifron's Wild Tales

What Wild Tales is doing in Competition is anybody’s guess, as it’s far too lightweight and frivolous to merit any sort of awards consideration; maybe it was the only Spanish-language option (though Jaime Rosales has a film in Un Certain Regard), or maybe selection honcho Thierry Fremaux just wanted to do some counterprogramming. In any case, it makes for a fine introduction to a heretofore little-known filmmaker (this is Szifron’s third feature), and it’ll be interesting to see what he comes up with when he has to sustain a narrative for more than 25 minutes.

[domino harvey]

Jeez, this is shaping up to be an underwhelming year

[yoshimori]

Jeez, this is shaping up to be an underwhelming year

Yep. Still not quite half way through, to be sure, but I'd say that's an understatement!

Last year, a pretty lackluster year, by this time we'd had The Past, Touch of Sin, the Kore'eda, Borgman, and Inside Llewyn Davis. Even the real disappointment (the Desplechin) at least had the courage of its convictions.

[Finch]

Cannes reviews from Slant

another takedown of The Captive

Atom Egoyan's The Captive plays like the overeager idiot brother to the filmmaker's superior The Sweet Hereafter. Both films share a forbiddingly wintry setting, all the better to draw conspicuous attention to the chilly distances that lie between characters; both feature children in peril (a busload of drowned schoolchildren in the one, a Lolita-esque belle captive in the other); and both employ an ominous, if explicitly subtextual, poem to lend a literary sheen to the proceedings. While The Sweet Hereafter loosely reworks Robert Browning's The Pied Piper of Hamelin, The Captive needlessly shoehorns in some lines from Mozart's The Magic Flute, thus (wittingly or not) reinforcing the general perception that cinematic madman must always be more cultured and better read than the average viewer. (Think Hannibal Lecter—hardly the last whiff of The Silence of the Lambs to be discerned here.) For every way that The Sweet Hereafter makes its generic elements seem fresh and even a trifle mysterious, The Captive finds new ways to render them absurd. Egoyan's latest even throws in a creepy, non-sequitur-spouting Bruce Greenwood just for good measure, hinting at a subplot that may well have been dropped due to sheer pointlessness.

a thumbs up for Mr. Turner

Mr. Turner suggests itself as a more morose companion piece to Topsy-Turvy, Leigh's raucous and outsized treatment of Gilbert and Sullivan's music-hall demimonde. Which isn't to say that the film is an entirely humorless undertaking. Quite to the contrary, Leigh indulges his penchant for splenetic, even churlish comedy. When Turner isn't flummoxing his listeners with floridly baroque circumlocutions, his characteristic grunt speaks even more eloquently as a wicked deflation of social hypocrisy and cant. Mr. Turner hits the traditional biopic beats more routinely than the latter, but at least it refuses to truck with that most irksome generic sawhorse, the emotionally tidy rise-and-fall arc, by a simple expedient: opening at the height of its subject's popularity, and then dwelling with Leigh's characteristically misanthropic relish on the artist's latter-day sufferings and setbacks.

a rave for Wiseman's National Gallery

With Wiseman's films, it's often tempting to try and work out the underlying structure, even while you're watching them, to break them down into discrete sequences, and thereby discern the broader thematic movements or acts (depending on your artistic analogue of choice). National Gallery is hardly an exception: After an overture that offers up a number of famous paintings for the critical gaze of patrons and viewers alike, the film's first hour examines the historical and formal context of the museum's holdings. Wiseman presents extended talks from curators and guides about particular works of art. Classes in art appreciation for young and old, as well as art classes where students sketch from a live model, embody what John Berger famously called the art of looking. In that sense, a film and a painting aren't vastly different. Each can be "read" in a number of ways, and it has always been one of Wiseman's greatest strengths that he can present his material in a way that leaves it most open for individual interpretation.

[Finch]

Jonathan Romney's summary of Cannes' first week is only unexpected in the sense that he mounts a defense of The Captive.

Vanessa Thorpe writes about mounting unhappiness with this year's festival.

[repeat]

reinforcing the general perception that cinematic madman must always be more cultured and better read than the average viewer

For a moment there I thought this referred to the director and not the villain Daniel Kasman finds a lone redeeming quality in the casting department:

...the film's saving grace ironically turns out to be its anomalous, over-the-top villain. Kevin Durand is so grotesquely physically insinuating, pallid, slimily mustached and bizarrely affected that he broadcasts "tortuous pervert" in every frame of the film, both inside the surveillance-prison lair in his North by Northwest-style house, and out and about in society, where you think most people would run screaming from such a man. His comic book presence rubs against the sincere endeavors of the genre-and-trauma relay players (...) all of whose pedestrian roles have the unpleasant effect of making me want to see more of The Captive's arch-pedophile.

Sorry to hear about Saint Laurent - I like Bonello well enough, but on the other hand can easily imagine him misstepping into the sort of self-indulgence described above. The Blue Room keeps getting more exciting the more I hear about it, hope it gets picked up for international distribution!

[Finch]

Mike D'Angelo's fourth day dispatch

on It Follows:

Mostly, though, It Follows just goes to town with its spectacularly creepy conceit, which requires constant scanning of the frame for innocuous-looking extras who might be on the right trajectory. This is basically Look Out, It’s Right Behind You!: The Motion Picture, and if it doesn’t quite deliver on every level—Mitchell does very little with the idea, floated early, that the thing sometimes takes on the form of people you love, just to torment you—it nonetheless demonstrates anew that true horror requires neither gore nor jump scares, just vulnerability.

on The Wonders:

It’s a glancing, episodic picture, with none of the crass symbolism or stern moralism that tarred Rohrwacher’s previous effort, Corpo Celeste. A subplot involving the arrival of a sullen German foster child (Luis Huilca Logroño, looking not the least bit German; tellingly, he never speaks), taken in to provide the family with some extra income, only winds up distracting from such casual pleasures as the two smallest girls giddily splashing through puddles. A minor work, but thoroughly enjoyable.

on Tommy Lee Jones' second film as director, The Homesman:

The Homesman is just a Western iteration on the tried-and-true buddy flick, featuring two diametrically opposed characters who come to respect each other. It’s 1855, and three women (Miranda Otto, Grace Gummer, and Sonja Richter) in the Nebraska Territories have gone insane, though it’s not clear whether this is due to some unspecified epidemic or is just the natural outcome of being female in that time and place. (The latter possibility contributed to my tentative feminist reading, and does appear to have been intended, at least to some degree.) Unmarried, childless farmer Mary Bee Cuddy (Hilary Swank) volunteers to transport the loonies to Iowa, where they can be properly cared for, and more or less blackmails a grizzled claim jumper (Jones) into assisting her on the five- or six-week journey. She’s pious and uptight, he’s vulgar and mercenary, and it’s just a matter of time before the hardships they jointly experience bridge the gulf between them. About two-thirds of the way through the movie, however, something unexpected occurs (I honestly can’t remember the last time I was caught so off guard by a narrative development), which seems to push it into much nervier territory, especially with respect to a superb scene featuring James Spader as a politely obnoxious hotel manager. Subsequent events don’t really bear that interpretation out, though, and the way Jones’ newly dandified character is treated in the finale suggests that The Homesman views him and Mary Bee as kindred spirits—an admirably humanist viewpoint, to be sure, but not the angry ideological earth-scorcher that would have provoked interesting conversations.

on Jessica Hausner's Amour Fou:

The film’s title is meant ironically: Kleist asks women to commit suicide with him as if he were inviting them to dinner, and he and Vogel speak of their “love” for each other with the studied, uninflected demeanor of two university students quizzing each other for a psychology exam. The disjunction between the gravity of their plan and the casualness with which they discuss it is bleakly funny at first, but quickly becomes repetitive, and the film as a whole is so predicated on their blasé indifference to life that a corresponding indifference seems the only rational response. When the strikingly patterned wallpaper in Vogel’s house has more personality than anybody onscreen, it’s a sign that the filmmaker may have taken deliberate impassivity a little too far.

[Finch]

Mixed take from Slant on the Jones

The film was adapted by Jones and two other screenwriters from the novel by Glendon Swarthout, whose works have previously provided source material for the John Wayne swan song The Shootist and, perhaps more telling given The Horseman's unwieldy mix of earnest intentions and batshit craziness, Stanley Kramer's Bless the Beasts and Children, wherein a ragtag bunch of misfit campers derogatorily labeled the Bedwetters take on Great White Hunters involved in a wild buffalo safari. All this is to say that no doubt some of the problems inherent with The Horseman's abrupt shifts in tone can be laid at the doorstep of the original novel.

For a while, it seems the film intends something uncommon: to speak for the experiences of frontierswomen caught in the clutches of harsh terrain and even harsher menfolk and driven thereby beyond the brink of sanity. But therein lies the rub. The Horseman speaks for its female characters, but, with the notable exception of Hilary Swank's upright and uptight Mary Bee Cuddy, never lets them speak for themselves. Even worse is Meryl Streep's Methodist matriarch, who doesn't even want to hear about the women's plight. When asked, reasonably enough, if she has the skill set to care for their needs, she replies rather ominously: "I think this room can hold them." (As though the Black Mariah that serves as their transport from Nebraska to Iowa weren't indignity enough.)

[Finch]

Korean thriller A HARD DAY (showing in the Director's Fortnight) is getting very good notes from Twitch and The Playlist and Screendaily

Refreshing and ultimately a great deal of fun, A Hard Day, finds the right balance in addressing issues such as corruption while also paying close attention to what makes a film compelling and engaging through its clever execution and witty script, and though it ends up following the same pattern as other South Korean thrillers, its opening half especially, is intelligently and skillfully crafted allowing it to break out as it premieres in the Cannes Directors’ fortnight.

Hollywood Reporter likes it a lot as well:

A Hard Day is full of smart surprises and darkly funny lurches. The script includes some familiar cop-movie ingredients, including a team of crooked anti-hero detectives facing an Internal Affairs probe and an all-powerful villain whose shadow empire includes drugs, prostitution and Yakuza gangsters. But Kim treats these big-screen cliches as mere rocket fuel to ramp up tension levels from ominous rumble to deafening roar.

A Hard Day is swept along by Mok Young-in's poundingly percussive score and Kim Tae-sung's elegant cinematography, which includes some eye-catching rooftop shots and handsome hillside vistas around Seoul. In accordance with genre rules, it also features explosions, shock fatalities and more jumpy false endings than Fatal Attraction. Kim's classy cop caper is certainly not the deepest movie in Cannes, but it is a dynamic and highly enjoyable rollercoaster ride.

[ianungstad]

Early reviews for Maps to the Stars seem to be very positive. Hopefully the film gets a better US distribution deal than eOne USA.

[Finch]

Early reviews for Maps to the Stars seem to be very positive.

One of them is from Peter Bradshaw

David Cronenberg's new film here at Cannes is a gripping and exquisitely horrible movie about contemporary Hollywood – positively vivisectional in its sadism and scorn. It is twisted, twisty, and very far from all the predictable outsider platitudes about celebrity culture. The status-anxiety, fame-vertigo, sexual satiety and that all-encompassing fear of failure which poisons every triumph are displayed here with an icy new connoisseurship, a kind of extremism which faces down the traditional objection that films like this are secretly infatuated with their subject. Every surface has a sickly sheen of anxiety; every face is a mask of pain suppressed to the last millimetre. It is a further refinement of this director's gifts for body horror and satire.

Maps of the Stars has been written for the screen by Bruce Wagner whose Hollywood novels have the same sociopathically uncompromising quality, a gift for Tinseltown nightmare which makes Bret Easton Ellis look like Nicholas Sparks. At other times, this reminded me of Kenneth Anger, of Steven Bochco's pulp classic Death By Hollywood — which muses on the award-statuette as murder weapon.

[Finch]

B+ from The Playlist for the Cronenberg

[HistoryProf]

And the hissing continues in print: Guardian, Sight & Sound, Screen Daily, doubtless many others.

Ouch. I didn't think it was possible to out-suck Diana, but it sounds like they've given it a solid go. Currently at 5% on Rotten Tomatoes - to Diana's gracious 8%.

[yoshimori]

> Early reviews for Maps to the Stars seem to be very positive.

Variety and Hollywood Reporter reviews, less so.

Some of the film's individual moments are interesting, but the parodic performances (especially Moore's) fall flat for me, and I'm too dense to see how the plot revelations and their resolutions have any connection to the whole Hollywood send-up that DC's attempting. Relatively engaging, but hardly thrilling. And stylistically generic.

[Finch]

5 stars for Foxcatcher from Bradshaw

Perhaps Foxcatcher may yet create a new genre to match the boxing movie: the "wrestling movie" – the kind that Barton Fink was trying to write in the Coens' film. Certainly Mark's rage in his hotel room at losing – smashing his head against the mirror and then eating himself into a porky stupor – must have been inspired by De Niro's Jake LaMotta.

It is a gripping film: horrible, scary and desperately sad.

[Jeff]

Foxcatcher seems to have the best overall reviews so far. I've seen it compared to The Master and to 70s Rafelson. The trades and award bloggers seem ready to give Carell the Oscar right now.

Some are calling this Bennett Miller's best film, and Megan Ellison's streak looks to continue unabated. It appears that their strategy if sitting out last year's crowded award season, fine-tuning, and holding it until Cannes has paid off. The only shrugs I've seen so far came from Mike D'Angelo and David Poland.

[Finch]

Would appear the US critics are less keen on Maps to the Stars; D'Angelo doesn't rate it either.

His reaction to Foxcatcher and the Cronenberg and a quick summary of how critics rated the films of the festival so far

Slant not not keen on Foxcatcher, puts the blame firmly at the director's feet

Enervated to the point of somnolence, Bennett Miller's Foxcatcher squanders inherently intriguing material—the murder of Olympic gold medalist David Schultz by eccentric scion John E. du Pont—by sapping it of any dramatic or satiric potential in favor of a smothering mood of muted solemnity. And I do mean muted: Miller favors repeated sequences where the diegetic sound dips to the threshold of audibility so that composer Mychael Danna (the same culprit behind The Captive's bombastic score) has free reign to do his best Arvo Part impersonation. What we're left with is a sluggish, molasses-y storyline showcasing two solid actors (Mark Ruffalo and Channing Tatum as brothers Dave and Mark Schultz), and Steve Carell, hiding behind a Mr. Burns-esque prosthetic nose and the beady, carrion-eager eyes of a peregrine falcon, doing what amounts to a feature-length SNL impression. Vanessa Redgrave turns up briefly, just long enough to advise John as to the terribly "low" nature of his preferred sport and then to glower disapprovingly at the grappling combatants.

A director other than Miller, whose nose for Oscar bait is every bit as predatory as some of ornithologist du Pont's glass-enclosed specimens, might have decided (sensibly enough) to play to Carell's strengths and fashion the material into a dark comedy. In an alternate universe wherein the cinema gods aren't crazy, Steven Soderbergh might have turned this into a curdled companion piece to his Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra. Instead, we're treated to the Miller method: numerous long-shots of characters sitting alone in their rooms like insects trapped in amber, brooding about the terrible intensity of it all, and even more portentous close-ups of du Pont and his thousand-yard-stare glaring out a window, seemingly registering absolutely nothing at all. Once in a while, almost as though by accident, a character will do or say something remotely amusing, which, without fail, will be Miller's cue to bring the sound down and slather on some more Danna from heaven.

One of Sight & Sound's critics rallies behind Maps to the Stars.

[jindianajonz]

Slant not not keen on Foxcatcher, puts the blame firmly at the director's feet

At least they got the name of the film correct this time, unlike the review you linked above for the "Horseman"!

[Finch]

They fixed that overnight.