CANNES - Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar-Wai (In The Mood For Love, Chungking Express) likes to cut things a little close. His new film, 2046, will not be ready in time for Thursday morning's 8:30 am press screening. However, according to an announcement that showed up in our mailboxes, it will be ready for Thursday evening gala screening. What's Cantonese for "My dog ate my homework"?
THE PROBLEM WITH CANADIAN MOVIES - "Goose - A talking goose brings the sparkle back into a little boy's life, but it is a race against time to save the bird from the Christmas cooking pot" - quoted verbatim from the Screen International screening guide. Now, for one thing, you don't cook a goose in a pot - unless you've got a pot a lot bigger than most families. For another, you don't make a movie starring Chevy Chase.
BEST PRESS CONFERENCE - Tom Hanks and Joel Coen for The Ladykillers. Especially for the weird digression into the idea that Russell Crowe was going to do a Three Stooges movies, which led to them casting an all-Australian Stooges with Mel Gibson - a known Stooge fan - and Geoffrey Rush.
"What's really important, of course, is who plays which Stooge". At which point Coen looked at the assembled and rather non-plussed European press and stated "We're Americans. We can talk about the Three Stooges for hours."
NOTRE MUSIQUE (Jean-Luc Godard, Un Certain Regard) - Speaking of standing ovations, and I've got to work on my segues, Jean-Luc Godard got one that lasted for five minutes just for showing up for the screening of his new film. Had someone decided to blow up the Salle Debussy during the screening, they could have decimated the top ranks of European film critics, and gotten a bunch of filmmakers as well.
Not that Notre Musique is going to have much life beyond the Festival circuit. Like most late Godard, it's intensely personal, a philosophical construct rather than a drama, and loaded with reversible raincoat statements. "Killing a man to defend an idea isn't defending an idea. It's killing a man." Divided into three parts, Hell, Purgatory and Heaven, Notre Musique starts with hell, a relentless montage of war footage, both documentary and fictional, its sources ranging from DW Griffith and John Ford to Eisenstein and Sam Fuller.
At the end of Theodore Roszak's great novel, Flicker, which posits that the cinema is a philosophical outgrowth of the Albigensian heresy in 13th Century France, the hero finds himself imprisoned on an island with the filmmaker he'd been seeking, also a prisoner. (Yes, Roszak is riffing on Waugh's A Handful Of Dust.) He finds that the filmmaker has spent years constructing a final film out of the trims and ends that his captors send him, an epic depicting the destructive force of man. Godard has made that film, torturing the image, pixillating it, scratching it, running it through multiple generation video copies to degrade the image as far as possible..
Godard is a sphinx who gives you the answer and then expects you to formulate the questions. "I'll take teleological contradiction for $500, Jean-Luc."
The long middle third of the film, takes Godard himself to Bosnia to give a talk on cinema - Image And Text - to a collection of gobsmacked film students. One assumes they're film students. "Champ/contre- champ" Shot and counter-shot. He holds up two photos, one each of Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell from His Girl Friday. "This filmmaker, Howard Hawks, has taken two shots of the same thing. That's because he can't tell the difference between a man and a woman." Which is certainly a unique interpretation of the Hawksian woman. Of course, Godard, in his romantic period as a director, tended to wallow in the hypnotic Oterness of his first wife, Anna Karina. Hawks likes to reduce the difference as much as possible, liking women like Lauren Bacall and Angie Dickinson who could hold their own with the boys.
Which is my way of saying I know more about Howard Hawks than I do about Bosnia.
There's then a drama about a young translator/student who is a French-Russian Jew who wants to do something about the Palestinian/Israeli conflict.
Godard notes that when the Jew landed in Palestine, "The Jews became the stuff of fiction. The Palestinians became the stuff of documentary."
I rather wish Godard would take the time to organize all the films he's made over the past few years and get them out on DVD - as it stands, one can see them occasionally at Film Festivals and Cinematheque screenings, but they're such dense webs of allusion, philosophy and dazzling montage that they really need to be seen more than once. Of course, maybe that would reveal that Godard's an old crank, the candy shop owner from West Side Story with a Ph.d. from the Sorbonne. But it would be nice to have the chance to find out.
Anyway, I've got to run. Zhang Yimou's new sword movie, The House Of Flying Daggers, is playing over in the Grande Theatre Lumiere, and I read in the catalogue that Zhang Ziyi plays a blind dancer and rebel leader. Now that's entertainment.
