59th Cannes Film Festival

[rs98762001]

Has anyone here actually seen the damn movie?

[Antoine Doinel]

I'm not sure why everyone is runnning around pretending Cannes is some sort of bastion of artistic integrity and then acting shocked when they fete a "popular" film or filmmaker.

Perhaps more disheartening is the "if it's obscure it's better and if it's popular it sucks" strain of blind criticism that seems to be developing especially based on vague press. Just because a filmmaker/studio happens to have a decent marketing/PR team behind them doesn't make his or work more or less valid.

[Grimfarrow]

Has anyone here actually seen the damn movie?

Hey - don't ruin the fun!

I'm officially excited about tomorrow - some really interesting films to premiere. SILK I think will be really quite entertaining, judging from the 10-minute promo I saw. SUBURBAN MAYHEM will hopefully be electric, and of course the new Lucas Belvaux. Oh, and that Coppola woman. Wong wasn't the biggest fan of LIT, so let's see what he thinks of her latest.

[Noir of the Night]

media hype and fashion is in favour of Inarritu (and the numerous other energetic studio journeymen who somehow pass for serious auteurs these days). I am judging him on his past work, in the same way that Dumont's hat-trick of past masterpieces make the failure of FLANDRES inconceivable.

So, your essential argument is that because Dumont's films have all been masterpieces (at least in your opinion), it's impossible for him to make something that isn't profoundly brilliant? I'm sorry, but that's ludicrous. If anything, this festival has been a demonstration (if we are to rely on the industry press that you so vehemently despise) of how even the most respected of filmmakers can underwhelm from time to time.

[Anonymous]

If anything, this festival has been a demonstration of how even the most respected of filmmakers can underwhelm from time to time.

Hmm, which filmmakers are those? Dumont is the only filmmaker In Competition with a distinct natural talent, akin to an Antonioni or Bresson. Not yet operating on that level, mind, but the potential is certainly there. Real filmmakers do not make bad films. Flawed films - most certainly.

It's true, I'm not very interested in 'analysis' as the best cinema ultimately defies description. Even Godard would be playing boule right now if it wasn't for his inherent sense of mis-en-scene.

[Noir of the Night]

If anything, this festival has been a demonstration of how even the most respected of filmmakers can underwhelm from time to time.

Hmm, which filmmakers are those? Dumont is the only filmmaker In Competition with a distinct natural talent, akin to an Antonioni or Bresson. Not yet operating on that level, mind, but the potential is certainly there. Real filmmakers do not make bad films. Flawed films - most certainly.

It's true, I'm not very interested in 'analysis' as the best cinema ultimately defies description. Even Godard would be playing boule right now if it wasn't for his inherent sense of mis-en-scene.

The filmmakers I was thinking of are Kaurismaki, Linklater, and Loach, all of who I (and many others) would consider to be natural talents. In addition, your feeling that great cinema defies description doesn't really excuse your refusal to provide anything more than derisory remarks about "inferior filmmakers" and casual condescension.

[rs98762001]

media hype and fashion is in favour of Inarritu (and the numerous other energetic studio journeymen who somehow pass for serious auteurs these days). I am judging him on his past work, in the same way that Dumont's hat-trick of past masterpieces make the failure of FLANDRES inconceivable.

I don't see how you can so easily dismiss something like AMORES PERROS, and then proclaim the laughably bad 29 PALMS as a masterpiece. Each to his own, I guess, but please try and understand that at the very least numerous people don't share your views on what makes a serious film (and I would argue both Inarritu and Dumont are serious filmmakers, with varying degrees of success).

Real filmmakers do not make bad films. Flawed films - most certainly.

Then I guess you don't consider Scorcese (CAPE FEAR), Coppola (JACK), Woody Allen (too many to mention), John Huston (ANNIE), Bertolucci (THE DREAMERS), etc, real filmmakers? And these are just a few off the top of my head, I'm sure there's a pretty comprehensive list of bad films made by "real filmmakers."

[Noir of the Night]

Even your beloved Antonioni was responsible for that unspeakably bad third portion of Eros.

[Noir of the Night]

I'm not sure why everyone is runnning around pretending Cannes is some sort of bastion of artistic integrity and then acting shocked when they fete a "popular" film or filmmaker.

I think that illusion died permanently when Shrek 2 was in the official competition a few years back and Vera Drake was rejected.

Perhaps more disheartening is the "if it's obscure it's better and if it's popular it sucks" strain of blind criticism that seems to be developing especially based on vague press. Just because a filmmaker/studio happens to have a decent marketing/PR team behind them doesn't make his or
work more or less valid.

I agree. I'm especially tired of the contigency of people who loathe Steven Spielberg due to his continued popularity.

[Anonymous]

Antonioni's portion of Eros may be slight, but many of the images are indelible. it's the only one of the three segments of any note. no-one can make cinema like Antonioni, even at 92.

> Then I guess you don't consider Scorcese (CAPE FEAR), Coppola (JACK), Woody Allen (too many to mention), John Huston (ANNIE), Bertolucci (THE DREAMERS), etc, real filmmakers?

Certainly not in the A-league. I mean, there are different types of cinema... Scorsese and Huston have made some great narrative films, that's a somewhat different thing.

[franco]

I mean, there are different types of cinema... Scorsese and Huston have made some great narrative films, that's a somewhat different thing.

Wow, that seriously reads like something I would write 4 years ago, when I was just becoming proud of my taste in European cinema. Scary. Really scary. But I am also quite happy that I was fished out of that mental state long ago by several insightful essays from someone who is now too busy to write here.

On the other hand, the reception to the new movie by Nuri "stupid talk or writing" Ceylan seems quite lukewarm. I guess he is, much like his Taiwanese counterpart, making the same kind of movie over and over again (although it's only his 3rd?). No degree of negative criticism, however, will reduce my excitement.

Paolo Sorrentino's new movie is still yet to open. Can't wait to read reviews!!

[rs98762001]

Certainly not in the A-league. I mean, there are different types of cinema... Scorsese and Huston have made some great narrative films, that's a somewhat different thing.

By any chance, are you a first-year undergrad film student going through your first Euro-snobbery phase?

[Anonymous]

I'm glad that a couple of essays deflected your superficial interest in form...

Simply, there is a candyfloss quality to Scorsese's work. A sheen and an energy that draws you in, but leaves you ultimately unsatisfied. This is despite some great material and finely delivered performances. My favourite Scorsese would be Mean Streets, for its personal qualities, and After Hours, as un-complicated enjoyment. As for Huston, his career is so patchy, great films like Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The African Queen, dreck like Moby Dick and Casino Royale... Judge Roy Bean feels more like a Mlilius movie than a Huston movie, which perhaps cuts to the heart of the matter. So no, neither director is on a par with Antonioni in my (long-held and unswerving) opinion. if that makes me a 'Eurosnob' then so be it... (though call me a student again and sparks are going to fly... 8-[ )

Perhaps it is idealistic, but I would like to believe that Cannes can still be a showcase for uncompromising auteur-driven cinema. Of course, there have been questionable selection and jury choices since the conception of the festival. But in what other venue at what other time of year can a film by, say, Amos Gitai fill a 2000+ seater screen, with the world's press paying attention and hundreds begging for tickets at the door? Ceylan, for example, deserves to be at Cannes, even if I find myself underwhelmed by his work (there was control in Uzak but a lack of inspiration). But the way this Paramount Brad Pitt movie has stomped over Dumont... that it is entirely predictable does not make it any less depressing.

nb. for the avoidance of doubt, my favourite Competition films from Cannes '05 and '03 happened to be American...

[Noir of the Night]

I'm glad that a couple of essays deflected your superficial interest in form...

Simply, there is a candyfloss quality to Scorsese's work. A sheen and an energy that draws you in, but leaves you ultimately unsatisfied. This is despite some great material and finely delivered performances. My favourite Scorsese would be Mean Streets, for its personal qualities, and After Hours, as un-complicated enjoyment. As for Huston, his career is so patchy, great films like Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The African Queen, dreck like Moby Dick and Casino Royale... Judge Roy Bean feels more like a Mlilius movie than a Huston movie, which perhaps cuts to the heart of the matter. So no, neither director is on a par with Antonioni in my (long-held and unswerving) opinion. if that makes me a 'Eurosnob' then so be it... (though call me a student again and sparks are going to fly... 8-[ )

Perhaps it is idealistic, but I would like to believe that Cannes can still be a showcase for uncompromising auteur-driven cinema. Of course, there have been questionable selection and jury choices since the conception of the festival. But in what other venue at what other time of year can a film by, say, Amos Gitai fill a 2000+ seater screen, with the world's press paying attention and hundreds begging for tickets at the door? Ceylan, for example, deserves to be at Cannes, even if I find myself underwhelmed by his work (there was control in Uzak but a lack of inspiration). But the way this Paramount Brad Pitt movie has stomped over Dumont... that it is entirely predictable does not make it any less depressing.

You're a EuroSnob because you refuse to believe that the "Paramount Brad Pitt movie", as you call it, could possibly be better than something by Bruno Dumont. It's completely reasonable to be a huge fan of Dumont, but it's not really valid when you completely dismiss the fact that his latest movie might be bad, and that a movie with (gasp!) Brad Pitt might actually be better. Maybe there's more to it, but you seem to be prejudging this work just because you don't seem to like Hollywood actors, or Innaritu. Is it not possible that he's made a great film here? In addition to this, when the word from Cannes is that Babel is indeed the superior film, you decide that press is just going for the less challenging picture, instead of believing that, maybe, somehow, the critics from Hollywood Reporter and whatever other publications disparaged Flandres know their stuff when it comes to film.

[Anonymous]

you're obviously very naive about how the US/British press works. it'll be somewhat more interesting to see the reaction in the French press over the next few days, they tend to be more honest and varied.

[Noir of the Night]

Listen, I'm not saying that because the press is crying "Palmes D'Or!" for Babel it means that it's definitely a masterpiece, but I also think that their opinions at least count for something.

[GringoTex]

It's true, I'm not very interested in 'analysis' as the best cinema ultimately defies description.

Untrue. It's described all the time. Google "Bresson" to find it.

[Anonymous]

The classic way for a critic to feel important; a film doesn't exist until it has been broken down and analysed in some way or another... but if you can capture a film in words, why make the film in the first place? Why not just release a screenplay with camera directions? As for Notes on the Cinematographer, this is not description/analysis but a personal M.O., an interesting curio but the films stand alone.

[Antoine Doinel]

So in the place of intelligent analysis in which one can discuss the merits of a film, general blanket statements are better?

[Antoine Doinel]

The NY Times on both Flandres and Babel. Ahem:

One Auteur's Bumpy Trajectory Through a Decade of Cannes Festivals

By MANOHLA DARGIS and A. O. SCOTT
Published: May 24, 2006

CANNES, France, May 23 — Consider the strange case of Bruno Dumont. In 1997 Cannes showed that French filmmaker's feature debut, "Life of Jesus," outside the main selection in the parallel program, Directors' Fortnight. The film, which follows a group of unemployed young people in a desolate town in Normandy, received a special mention and subsequently hit the festival rounds. Like critics, festival programmers tend to have a proprietary relationship with directors they feel they have had a hand in discovering, so when Mr. Dumont was invited back to Cannes two years later with his second film, "Humanity," it was no surprise that this time he was welcomed into the main competition.

During its first press screening "Humanity" suffered a fair share of critical derision, telegraphed with choruses of giggles, but nonetheless picked up three major awards. Cannes understandably passed on Mr. Dumont's follow-up film, "Twentynine Palms," a violent folly about two Europeans tooling around the California desert in a symbolically overloaded Hummer. Now Mr. Dumont is back in competition at Cannes with "Flandres," about a young French farmer named Demester who goes off to fight in some unnamed war in an unspecified Arab country. Once again, the filmmaker's favorite themes and tropes are mostly present, notably the narcoleptic pacing, human faces as cragged as landscapes, ritualistic rutting and, regrettably, allusions to Robert Bresson, one of the art's holy men.

His Bressonian aspirations are evident in the film's uninflected performance style (by nonprofessionals), the unadorned yet carefully framed compositions and a lack of melodramatic incident. Unlike Mr. Bresson, however, Mr. Dumont seems uninterested in spiritual journeys or in representing how the ineffable equally touches the human face, a donkey's ear, a crown of flowers. The only mystery here is how Mr. Dumont has gone so quickly from promising young director to such an unsteady, unhappy talent.

One answer may lie in his characters. As uncommunicative as the animals he keeps, Demester is one of Mr. Dumont's false Everymen, a man whose thick brow and silences are meant to reveal an interior state that the filmmaker has no interest in beyond the decorative and entomological.

If nothing else, Mr. Dumont's nearly 10-year Cannes trajectory from triumph to disappointment indicates that the burden of the auteur hangs over European directors as heavily as it does any digital savant hungry for Sundance. In an interview about 1970's cinema, Francis Ford Coppola once suggested that an auteur was a filmmaker who wrote the scripts he also directed, rather than a filmmaker with a personal vision. It's hard not to wonder how many generations of young filmmakers have been similarly mistaken, not understanding that in cinema the Mac that writes the script is less important than the camera that is wielded as freely as a pen. Mr. Dumont may have something to say off camera, but on camera all he can offer now are fine technical skills and recycled gestures. MANOHLA DARGIS

Speaking in Many Tongues

About 90 minutes into the 8:30 a.m. press screening of Alejandro González Iñárritu's "Babel" on Tuesday, something strange happened. There had already been plenty of startling images and scenes in the movie, which, like Mr. González Iñárritu's previous films "Amores Perros" and "21 Grams," splinters time and leaps across space as it tells four parallel yet connected stories. But at this moment the audience was thrown jarringly backward, as a scene we had witnessed some time earlier seemed to be occurring all over again.

Was this another example of Mr. González Iñárritu playing with chronology? No, it was something much more shocking and, at the same time, fairly banal. At a festival that prides itself on fastidious attention to technical detail, someone in the projection booth had mixed up the reels. The lapse was soon noticed, the audience began to make noise, and the house lights came up briefly before the movie resumed, in proper sequence.

A glitch like this is every director's worst nightmare, literally so in Mr. González Iñárritu's case. "I had this dream three days ago that exactly this kind of thing had happened," he said in an interview later on Tuesday. "I called my friend Guillermo del Toro" — whose own Cannes competition entry, "Pan's Labyrinth," is to be shown on Saturday — "and he said he'd had the same dream." When Mr. González Iñárritu mentioned his premonitions at a technical check the day before the screening, he said that the projectionists assured him that such a mishap was impossible. "They acted like I was insulting them by bringing it up."

But now it was over, the screening had ended with applause, and Mr. González Iñárritu seemed to be in good spirits. He was making the rounds at a poolside press luncheon, along with Gael García Bernal, Cate Blanchett and other cast members, speaking ebulliently about the ideas and emotions that inform "Babel," perhaps his most ambitious film. In each of his movies (all written by Guillermo Arriaga), the scale and scope of the action has expanded, from Mexico City in "Amores Perros," to the United States in "21 Grams," and now to the world. "Babel" takes place in four countries — Morocco, Mexico, the United States and Japan — and, as the title suggests, it speaks in many tongues, including Berber, Spanish and sign language.

The characters are connected in ways not always perceptible to themselves or the audience. A deaf Japanese teenager (Rinko Kikuchi) contends simultaneously with her emerging sexuality and her grief over her mother's death. A Mexican nanny (Adriana Barraza) takes her young American charges to a wedding in Tijuana. A calamity befalls an American couple (Ms. Blanchett and Brad Pitt) traveling in North Africa, and, in general, dire forebodings are borne out.

Each story is full of the intensity of feeling — an unsettling and often potent combination of naturalism and melodrama — that is one of Mr. González Iñárritu's hallmarks. What links them are themes of disconnection, miscommunication and the sometimes catastrophic failure to express love. The vision of "Babel" is a kind of tragic universalism, which its director summed up by revising Tolstoy. "What makes us happy is different," he said, "but what makes us miserable is very, very similar." A. O. SCOTT

[Noir of the Night]

Honeycutt has given Marie Antoinette a positive review, but it's not what I would call a rave. It's sort of cautious praise, at least in my estimation.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr/aw ... 1002465053

[Oedipax]

A report of more booing from the festival crowd at the Marie Antoinette screening: http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/05/2 ... ob73q.html

Linked from Drudge, so take it with a grain of salt, but still.

[Noir of the Night]

Disappointing, if this is true. The trailer had me really looking forward to this one (if only because of the visual splendor, and the fact that it was actually filmed to Versailles, a place I've visited).

Update: THe New York Times has picked up the same story, so, probably true.

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/arts/ent ... ref=slogin

[Anonymous]

Right, so Dumont withers in comparison to Bresson because... his films do not contain 'spiritual journeys'. Please direct me to the spiritual journey in L'Argent.

It's not as if Dumont steals or even borrows from Bresson in any direct way - simply that both directors share a landscape, work(ed) with non-professionals and craft images with pace and precision. Unlike the Dardennes' most recent effort - a self-conscious playschool remake of Pickpocket without the formalism, without the control over the performances, without the subtext and all blandly shot in de-rigeur handheld. yet critics are happy to draw a positive comparison there... And Twentynine Palms, why that must be a folly because it's 'violent' (ie. contains uncomfortable truths that said reviewer would rather not think about). And remember how we all 'giggled' through L'Humanite, how mature and considered! I don't know who's the bigger idiot, the guy who wrote this stuff, the guy who takes it seriously or myself for ever bothering to argue...

[backstreetsbackalright]

Well, for one, a "guy" didn't write it.