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Cannes Report Thursday, May 16
BY JOHN HARKNESS
CANNES Given what’s at stake when a film premieres
at an international film festival these days, one of
the festival traditions that’s been lost is the ‘film
surprise’ a scheduled film where no one knows in
advance what the film will be.
As films now arrive at festivals trailing clouds of
publicists and stars, and so many films clamour for
the attention of audiences, buyers and press, no one
seems willing to take a chance on nobody showing up
for a film without a preliminary publicity barrage. So
it was a treat yesterday afternoon to find that, in
the pre-festival doldrums, John Sayles and Sony
Classics had decided to sneak a screening of his
latest film, Sunshine State, in the pre-market
blankness of the schedule, with the only announcement
being a stack of invitations sitting, unremarked, by
the press mailboxes on the third floor of the Palais.
Of course, Sayles did much the same thing a decade ago
with City of Hope, where the only announcement for the
world premiere of that most underrated film was a
handlettered sign posted by the press club on the
third floor of the Palais.
Sunshine State is one of Sayles’ issue films the
villains, such as they are, are developers trying to
expropriate a slash of rundown Florida beach occupied
by an old hotel-restaurant and a brace of black
families old enough to remember when it was the only
beach in Florida that welcomed them. In other words,
it’s the movie that Limbo started out to be before it
wandered off to that Island.
Being a John Sayles film, the issues are wrapped in a
family reconciliation drama as Angela Bassett’s
Desiree comes home to confront her long estranged
mother (Mary Alice). Meanwhile, Edie Falco, who runs
her father’s restaurant, meets up with Timothy
Hutton’s landscape architect, who works for the bad
guys without being one.
It’s always strange to see Sayles’ movies get dropped
into the summer schedule Sony has this one scheduled
for late June with their low-key approach to drama
and exquisitely detailed characters Sunshine State
has tremendous performances from Bassett, Falco, Jane
Alexander, Bill Cobbs and Mary Steenburgen they are
exactly the sort of films that seem doomed to get lost
in the tsunamai of gigantic effects films. Even at
Cannes, where one would expect better, much more ink
was spilled about Woody Allen’s press conference or
today’s big room digital screening of Star Wars:
Episode 2: Attack of the Clones than was or will be
devoted to Sunshine State there were barely a
hundred people at the screening. I’ll have more to say
about Sunshine State when it opens, but pencil it into
your movie schedule it’s really worth seeing.
INSECURITY
The various security guards around the Festival get a
big self-esteem boost this week, what with the
enhanced security around the Festival. Usually
delegated to telling people which line they should
stand in and making sure nobody with a yellow press
pass ever sees the first five minutes of the movie,
this year they get to tell people to open their tote
bags and wave around those metal-detection rods,
elevating them to the exhalted level of airport
security guards. Scan me, baby as we all know,
middle-aged white guys are the greatest security
threat at film festivals, especially if we don’t get
to interview jury member Sharon Stone.
I’ve seen this behaviour before, in 1986, when Cannes
went into paranoia over the fact that Reagan had
bombed Libya and all the Americans stayed home, except
for Jim Jarmusch. Going on past history, I’m setting
the over/under at four days before security relaxes to
its previous state.
SPEAKING OF GUNS
With Bowling For Columbine, Michael Moore becomes the
first filmmaker to put a documentary into the
Competition in 46 years, when The Silent World and The
Mystery of Picasso both picked up prizes. Indeed,
there are an unprecedented eight documentaries in the
various sections of the Festival, including Rosanna
Arquette’s interview doc, Searching For Debra Winger,
and D.A Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus’ Only The Strong
Survive, which asks the musical question “What becomes
of the broken-hearted?” (Okay, I made that last part
up. It’s actually about the great R&B acts of the 70s,
in a “where are they know?” format.
Moore’s problem has always been a matter of tonal
control his heart is generally in the right place,
but he tends to use contempt as a default mode.
While there’s some slippage here, and the picture is
still funny, he really has developed a sense of tone
for the film. Taking on American gun culture in the
wake of Columbine and September 11 he goes out into
America to talk to people about guns and too look at a
culture ruled by fear. He even gets some intelligent
and perceptive observations out of Marilyn Manson. He
is also, so far as I know, the first person to ask NRA
President Charlton Heston on camera what he thinks of
the NRA’s habit of dropping in and holding big rallies
in towns (like Denver) which have just suffered from a
big gun-related tragedy. Definitely worth a look when
Alliance-Atlantis releases it later this year.
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