CANNES - The day breaks grey over the Mediterranean. The weather here hasn't made up its mind as to its plans - it's been threatening rain for days, and the only time the mercury's topped 20 degrees lately was on Sunday afternoon for a gorgeous hour around four. Just so you don't think it's all topless starlets and drinks by the beach.
The glamour factor is unusual this year. Traditionally, you can find the French equivalents of EW and People all over the place featuring the official festival babe, be it an import like Nicole Kidman or a domestic like Emmanuelle Beart. This year, the face of the festival is the pudgy mug of Spanish auteur Pedro Almodovar, whose latest, Bad Education, opens the festival. Brad Pitt's coming with Troy, and they're selling Almodovar?
With Quentin Tarantino and legendary Hong Kong producer-director Tsui Hark on the jury, things have taken a surprisingly demonic turn this year. There are two cartoons in competition this year, both sequels - Shrek 2 and Innocence: Ghost In The Shell 2 - and the Official Selection includes Bad Santa, Day Of the Dead, and Breaking News, the latest from HK action director Johnny To.
Of course, it's Cannes, so there's also new films from Godard and Wong-Kar Wai, two films by Abbas Kiarostami, Five and 10 on Ten, the latter a meditation on his last Cannes competition film Ten - great, Kiarostami's generating his own metacinema. For those with a compulsive interest in Middle Eastern Cinema, there's The Gate Of The Sun, a 280-minute adaptation of a popular Lebanese novel. I had dinner Monday with the Cannes correspondent of An-Nahar and a programmer from the Beirut Film Festival, and they were muttering darkly about this film that was going to consume five hours of their lives.
On the one hand, there's a surprising efficiency this year - they actually started handing out accreditation on Monday, exactly when they said they would, and the catalogues for the Official Selection, Director's Fortnight and Critic's Week were all in our hands the day before the Festival started. Both of these are unusual occurrences. Some years, getting catalogues, which are essential for figuring out unimportant things like what films to see, is a haphazard thing. One year, the Official Selection book didn't get out until three days into the Festival. And the Fortnight catalogue came out the day after that.
On the other, there's a higher security alert level than I've seen since 86, when they were expecting the Libyans to do something in retaliation for American bombing. Apparently they're worried that unemployed "cultural workers" - what the rest of the world calls "waiters" are going to try and stop the festival with protests. Or perhaps they're just nervous about the new Michael Moore film.
One Down, Thirty-Six to Go
With no previous screening - that is, no one in the theatre, nothing to tidy up - security kept us waiting in the street until 15 minutes before the scheduled start time, then slowly let us in in small groups so they could check our bags and run the metal detector wand over us, then startws the screening exactly on time - I walked in as the room went black, leaving a couple of hundred people behind me in the line.
The film was Almodovar's Bad Education, and I can't claim to be amused.
Anybody remember when Almodovar was noted for his skill at directing women, and the dazzling female casts that populated his films? Where are the Carmen Mauras, the Penelope Cruzes, the Rossy DePalmas, the Victoria Abrils? In his last movie, Talk To Her, the two principal female characters were comatose. In Bad Education, there are no female characters, just unconvincing drag queens and the men who obsess over them. (I'd love be an alien anthropologist trying to reconstruct earth culture if the only evidence was Almodovar's films.)
Bad Education is set around 1993, more or less, flashing back to the late 1970s, and sorting through multiple layers of deception as a blocked director reads a story by an old school friend, who isn't really an old school friend, about clerical sexual abuse and how it made the character grow up to be a bad drag queen, drug addict and future transsexual, with a noir-ish subplot about blackmailing the priest. The director wants to rewrite the ending when the "real" - and "real" in this film is a very slippery term - villain shows up to tell him the "truth".
Like most latter day Almodovar, Bad Education is in that unique state of having an overdeveloped narrative in which a whole lot of stuff happens very slowly.
Most ambiguous sentence of the day: "Long summer vacations in Europe and a preponderance of theaters without air-conditioning meant that B.O. in key Euro markets evaporated at precisely the time of year in which Hollywood released its biggest blockbusters." - from Variety, which certainly contextualizes that "B.O."
