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report date: May 12, 2001By JOHN HARKNESS CANNES - Just got back from the screening of Claire Denis's new film, Trouble Every Day. Or should I say I just got back from sitting in the theatre for 15 minutes waiting for it to start, until the flack came out and announced that the screening was cancelled because the projector was giving the film a slight greenish tint - probably the result of an aging Xenon bulb, which will do things like that - and the director would not have the film shown under those conditions. This being Saturday, of course, they couldn't run out and just buy a new one. This being the Cannes Festival, they didn't anticipate that they might, on occasion, need to replace a projector lamp. And to think I could have gone out and seen American actor Arliss Howard's debut feature, Big Bad Love, down at the Hilton. Something I pondered while I waited was that the world's premier film event takes place in so many badly designed rooms. For all the good things one can say about Cannes, and I'm sure I could think of a couple, given a week and sufficient inducements, it's remarkable how many of their principal screening rooms are the wrong shape. The Grande Salle Lumière (on TV, when you see people going up the red carpet, that's where they're going), the Salle Debussy, the Salle Luis Buñuel, all in the Palais, and the Salle Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, home to the Directors Fortnight in the basement of the Noga Hilton, are all much wider than they are deep, and much wider than their screens. Put it this way: you can be so far to the side in the balcony of the Debussy that you'll have keystoning problems. The angle is so severe that your perception of the shape of the screen is affected. It's like sitting off to the side, second row, in the Uptown 1. (For non-Toronto readers, that's a very bad place to sit.) I wonder if they've considered building a 12-plex with stadium seating? As long as they don't get the guy who did the Paramount to do the lobby. EYE OF THE HAWKE - Ethan, that is, who showed up to open the Directors Fortnight with his directorial debut, Chelsea Walls (Last Word On Paradise), based on what seems to be a very bad play about the denizens of the famous New York artists' flop. Like most actors making a first film, Hawke is able to call in tons of favours and has assembled a good cast - Uma Thurman (Mrs. Hawke), Kris Kristofferson, Natasha Richardson, Vincent D'Onofrio, Steve Zahn - who spend the film's apparently endless running time being downbeat bohos and having meaningful encounters. And it's shot in rather murky digital video, which means Hawke either wanted the whole thing to look ostentatiously under-lit or he didn't care about the flat visual field. At the Apocalypse Now Redux press conference, triple Oscar winner Vittorio Storaro, cinematographer for The Conformist, Goya In Bordeaux, The Last Emperor, Reds and, of course, Apocalypse Now, made some very strong statements about shooting on video being a desecration of the possibilities of the cinema. I'm glad someone agrees with me. KUROSAWA - NO, THE OTHER ONE - Kiyoshi, that is, finally got to the Official Selection at Cannes a dozen films and at least one masterpiece into his career. Korei is about dread, with ghosts driving people to despair and self-destruction. (Apparently, George Romero was wrong. When there's no more room in hell, the dead will surf the Web.) Not as genuinely frightening as his 1997 thriller, The Cure, in which a withdrawn loner drives the people who encounter him to murder, Korei (Pulse, is how the sub-titles translate the title) has a haunted tone that is uniquely Kurosawa's - it has a lot to do with the way he frames his characters to isolate them in space. At the same time, the film veers wildly between Expressionist horror mannerisms, as if he'd spent the whole pre-production period screening The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari, and his character's quiet despair. It was odd to see Korei the day after James Toback's Harvard Man, a non-masterpiece with some bizarre casting choices: Joey Lauren Adams of Chasing Amy as a Harvard philosophy professor, Rebecca Gayheart as an FBI agent. In Harvard Man, a romantic comedy about having sex with your prof and fixing basketball games for gangsters, people talk about dread all the time, and the script is littered with references to Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein. By contrast, Korei manages on occasion to get at the real thing, and never talks about it.
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