Cannes Report - Wednesday, May 22
BY JOHN HARKNESS
On my way out the door this morning, I discovered that Finnish auteur Aki Kaurismäki is staying at my hotel. It gives me slight chills imagining that Kaurismäki's people scouted out Cannes hotels and figured that mine was the one that most closely approximated the experience of being in a Kaurismäki movie, but then I decided that this was unlikely, as one almost never sees drunken Finns in the hotel bar.
SUBTITLES FOR EVERYONE
One of the odd by-products of being in a place where everything is subtitled in either English or French is that certain films in English give French speakers - or readers - an advantage. Lynne Ramsay's Morvern Callar, which stars Samantha Morton (Sweet And Lowdown) as a Glasgow lass whose boyfriend commits suicide, offers Scottish accents thicker than Harris tweed - I'm good with the more obscure UK accents, but this one had me reading the dialogue in French and translating it back. Then there's the problem that comes with giving too many subtitles. In David Cronenberg's Spider, Ralph Fiennes is usually muttering to himself. His dialogue is barely intelligible, and designed as such, but the French subtitles catch every line, which means that the subtitles are in essence betraying the film by making readable what was not in fact meant to be audible.
TECHNICAL CHALLENGES
Abbas Kiarostami's Ten reduces to absurdity the director's artistic means. Kiarostami's recent films like Taste Of Cherry and The Wind Will Carry Us are long automotive journeys - there are scenes played in the car and long, long sequences where scenes are played out on the dialogue track while we watch the car drive through brown hills. In Ten, he allows himself two angles, one on the driver, one on the passenger. No establishing shots. People who like Kiarostami - he generally gives me hives - like it.
Aleksandr Sokurov's Russian Ark - is a single shot through the Hermitage in St. Petersburg - Sokurov (Mother And Son, Whispering Pages, The Days Of Eclipse) explains, "I was tired of editing." Apparently, the one shot - in high-def video steadicam - travels through 35 rooms, involves almost 900 actors and the construction of more than a dozen standing sets. Which seems a long way to go to prove a point. I tried to see it yesterday, but didn't get into the screening. Maybe later, in the market.
IT AIN'T ALL GRAVY
Today we offer a sampling of synopses, just to disabuse people of the idea that hanging around Cannes is all glamour and the great auteurs. The following are reprinted verbatim from Screen International and Moving Pictures International, two of the the six or seven daily papers published around the festival.
UNKNOWN PLEASURES (Competition) - Nineteen and jobless, best friends Ziao Ji and Bin Bin spend lots of time hanging around. 116 minutes.
A MAP OF THE HEART (Market) - All Katrink's attempts to start a new life simply toss her deeper into aimlessness and pain.
CARNAGES (Un Certain Regard) - After a bull dies in an arena, its remains are transported through Belgium, France and Spain, where various characters cross its path.
POLLE FICTION (Market) - A feature spinoff from a TV commercial campaign. The story of a village nerd from Snave in provincial Denmark. (This was in fact the top-grossing Danish film of last year, which led to a curious contretemps when the Danish Film Institute declined to list it in their promotional booklet on the year's production.)
12 HORAS (Market) Twelve hours in the nightlife of San Juan, Puerto Rico. Five parallel and intercut stories of a group of hip youngsters living on the edge. (I liked this better when it was called Go.)
ABOUT SCHMIDT (Competition) - A retired insurance salesman is in the throes of reflection on his mundane and unfulfilled life.
With this last one, of course, the whole process of sneering and dismissal breaks down. About Schmidt is written and directed by Alexander Payne, whose filmography includes the brilliant political satire Election, and Schmidt is played by Jack Nicholson, in a beautiful and quite touching performance, with a supporting cast that includes Hope Davis, Dermot Mulroney and Kathy Bates. The synopsis is accurate - but that's about as far as it goes. Maybe the movie about the two guys hanging around is really good, too.
|
