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Cannes Report - Friday, May 17
BY JOHN HARKNESS
CANNES, France I hadn't planned on seeing Intacto,
the Spanish film screening as a Special Presentation
in the Critics' Week. For one thing, the Critics'
Week has one of the lowest batting averages of any
programme at Cannes. For another, it was only
screening at the Espace Miramar, which is way to hell
and gone down at the West End of the Croisette and is
also a small screening room with the least adequate
air conditioning of any venue in Cannes aside from the
balcony of the Salle Jacques Doniol-Valcroze in the
basement of the Noga Hilton. (The thing with French
air-conditioning is that they seem to set it so that
an empty room will be the perfect temperature. Then
you put two or three hundred warm human bodies in the
room, and, of course, the room gets warm.
Then I read a synopsis that mentioned gambling and
casino themes, for which I'm a sucker, then it got a
rave review in Variety, though not from any Variety
viewer whose tastes I know, so I trekked out to the
Miramar with a friend and stood outside while they
"prepared" the room. I've no idea what this means,
though a Lebanese journalist attending the screening
with me was sure that the earlier screening of a
Palestinian film meant that the French felt compelled
to sanitize the "Arab germs" out of the room. I think
that was meant as a joke. (Yes, the French stood up
and voted against LePen during the recent election.
Which means only 20 percent of the French are racist
xenophobes and Cannes is deep in the heart of LePen
country. Very reassuring.)
Anyway, just to prove that you can't believe
everything you read in Variety, or more to the point,
anything you read during the Cannes Film Festival,
Inacto was a great big flea-bitten dog of a movie,
with a bad disposition and bladder control problems.
Intacto is mind-numbingly pretentious, structurally
inept, and features at least two of the dumbest things
I've ever seen people wager money or their lives on
and I've seen people bet on which raindrop would get
to the bottom of a window first. If only the Variety
reviewer hadn't praised the pacing. At one point, I
realized that I hadn't seen the minute hand on my
watch move for what seemed like an hour. At that
moment, Max Von Sydow, playing the casino boss with an
ungodly amount of luck, told his latest challenger
that "If you look hard enough, you can see the minute
hand move on your watch." Not in this movie, Max.
OH, IT'S TOUGH BEING A MOVIE ACTOR Rosanna Arquette
showed up with sister Patricia and Sharon Stone to
premiere her documentary, Searching For Debra Winger,
a coffee-klatsch in the form of a film, with various
distinguished actresses showing up to complain about
Hollywood's sexual politics and how tough it is to be
an actress and turn 40something in the Hollywood
system.
It's tempting to dismiss this as a movie sorry, "A
Rosanna Arquette Experience" -- where a bunch of
privileged women who don't have any problems sit
around and complain about their problems, but what's
really depressing, aside from the apparent ineptitude
of Melanie Griffith's plastic surgeon and the erratic
lighting, is how the actresses in the film a roster
that include Meg Ryan, Ally Sheedy, Daryl Hannah,
Stone, Whoopi Goldberg, and many, many more decline
to think outside the box of the Hollywood system.
There's so many venues to work that aren't inside the
Hollywood system indie films, theatre, television
that complaining about " system" without considering
that there are alternatives is simply blinkered
thinking.
Is it possible to have it all" career and family
and everything? God, we boomers are a self-absorbed
bunch. No, it's not. Though one suspects that rich
movie stars have a better shot at it than someone
working two jobs so the finance company doesn't repo
the fridge.
THE TWO MOST COMMON WORDS
In Mike Leigh's latest film, All or Nothing, are "Fuck
off", usually addressed in dead earnest from a grown
child to a parent or putative loved one.
After the magnificent folly of Topsy Turvy, Leigh
returns to the familiar terrain of the dysfunctional
working class family, cast with familiar faces from
the Leigh stock company Lesley Manville from Topsy
Turvy, Secrets And Lies and High Hopes, Ruth Sheen
from High Hopes and Timothy Spall, whose been in five
Leigh films, most memorably as the brother in Secrets
And Lies.
The film takes a while to get going, and tough going
it is, dealing with a group of characters whom, were
they to rationally weigh their options, would blow
their brains out. In a very strange way, now that
we've had more than a decade to become accustomed to
Leigh's working methods and his habits of casting, the
characters in All Or Nothing don't look like
characters ripped bloody from real life, but more like
characters lifted from other Mike Leigh movies.
Exemplary performances though, even if Dick Pope,
who's been Leigh's cinematographer for most of the
last decade, makes the image almost too beautiful
giving exquisite edge-lighting to a character crossing
the trash splatter common ground of a London housing
project is a wee bit over the top.
THE AWFUL TRUTH
Here's the unspoken secret of big film festivals. A
person spends an awful lot of time sitting through
movies that no one will ever see again or remember. I
was cleaning out some files on my computer and found
some short film reviews. I'd plainly written the
reviews, they were on my computer and in my style, and
I'd plainly seen the films details were mentioned.
But I had absolutely no memory of any of the films,
including the titles and these files were, at most,
six years old.
The Critics Week catalogue listed all 41 programmes
they'd scheduled in the history of the series, and
what was astonishing was how few of the films or
filmmakers had stood the test of time. For every
Before The Revolution that got its start in the
Semaine de Critique, there were three Austrian movies
about suicide that no one outside of Austria, and damn
few people inside Austria, ever saw again.
Oh, well, off to that new Lebanese movie in Un Certain
Regard
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