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Cannes Report - Wednesday, May 15th
By JOHN HARKNESS
Congratulations are in order for the folks at Yahoo!
In their daily news report, they came up with the
following headline – "Beach screenings make Cannes a
people's Festival". I damn near choked on my croissant
when that one turned up on my home page this morning.
The idea of the supremely industrial environs of the
Cannes film festival, with its elaborate hierarchy of
badges and lists of who can go to which screenings,
its festival headquarters lodged in a building widely
referred to as "The Bunker", and it's rep as both the
Jurassic Park of auteur cinema and the world's largest
outdoor insane asylum/whorehouse as a "people's" film
festival is as surreal as anything in the films of
Jury President David Lynch.
"People's" film festivals do not have yachts moored 50
yards from the main screening room. They are not
covered by upwards of 3000 journalists. Berlin and
Toronto, with their screenings all over town and
massive local audiences, are people's film festivals
Cannes is a festival which features hotels charging
daily rates for 10x10 rooms that would embarrass
slumlords, if the 10x10 room were in a Parkdale
basement rather than in the South of France.
Ironically, with the switch over to the Euro currency,
everything now seems much less expensive – that pizza
which cost 60FF last year now costs 10 euros, the euro
being worth a little less than an American dollar.
Some quick thoughts on the Official Selection.
There's a fair amount of "usual suspect" programming
in the official selection this year, With new films
Amos Gitai, Mike Leigh, Michael Winterbottom, Olivier
Assayas, Atom Egoyan, Abbas Kiarostami, Ken Loach, and
Alksandr Sokhurov it could be any competition from the
last decade. Oh, and Manoel Oliveira has a new film,
setting the bar one year higher on the "oldest
director in the competition" record.
Good news, there's a new Paul Thomas Anderson film,
Punch Drunk Love. Bad news, it stars Adam Sandler. On
the other hand, it's only about 90 minutes, which, in
the wake of Boogie Nights and Magnolia, virtually
qualifies it as a short.
And, of course, there's the new David Cronenberg,
Spider. Given the political slant in the programming
this year – there's a lot of films with a Middle
Eastern slant this year, including the first ever
Palestinian film in Competition (For complete
information on the films in the official selection, go
here).
– the jury is an intriguing mix of the relatively
apolitical (Lynch, Sharon Stone) and the very
political (Walter Salles, director of Central Station,
the Argentine fabulist Raul Ruiz). In another year,
I'd say that having Lynch as Jury president would give
Cronenberg a real shot at a prize, but this year, who
knows – especially as I was on vacation when Ararat
and Spider were screened for Toronto critics heading
for Cannes. It's all guesswork at this point, but
then, I often feel that way twenty minutes before they
hand out the awards.
Went to the new Brian De Palma, Femme Fatale, last
night – it's playing later in the week at the Festival
as a "special screening", but it was also playing
locally in a commercial theatre. Yeah, it was dubbed
in French, but with latter day dePalma, having only a
glancing understanding of the plot and dialogue
usually enhances one's experience of the film. This
one's a thriller starring Rebecca Romijn-Stamos and
Antonio Banderas, and I suspect it will be straight to
home video in North America. However, here in one of
the capitols of world art cinema, where subtitles are
next to godliness, it was impossible to see Femme
Fatale, or, for that matter, the new Almodovar, in the
original language with subtitles.
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