In Contention

Author: Guy Lodge

  • CANNES: ‘The Kid With a Bike,’ ‘House of Tolerance,’ ‘Michael,’ ‘Footnote’

    Perhaps lulled by the twin effects of the Côte d’Azur sun and copious amounts of cheap rosé between screenings, I’ve fallen behind somewhat on the reviewing front — but lest you think I’ve only seen one film a day before heading back to the swimming pool at Villa Romance, it’s time for a bit of a Competition catch-up. (I’ll get round to a handful of Un Certain Regard and Critics’ Week titles — a couple of them very strong — as soon as I can.) Tomorrow brings another of my most anticipated titles of the festival, Lars von Trier’s “Melancholia,” which should steer Croisette conversation forward after a low-level day of screenings, over which talk of “The Tree of Life” has remained the dominant hum.

    “The Kid With a Bike” (***)

    “More of the same, but less,” I tweeted immediately after seeing the latest finely-honed study in urban realism from Belgium’s two-time Cannes champs, the Dardenne brothers. It’s a statement I stand by — it’s difficult not to think that after the muted acclaim for “Lorna’s Silence,” their 2008 flirtation with higher-concept storytelling, they’ve retreated to a safe space — even as I admit it doesn’t factor in some subtle novelties in the new film. “The Kid With a Bike” is literally their brightest film to date, for starters, shot mostly in crisp summer sunlight and poppy primary hues, which may also be why it feels like their most uncomplicatedly redemptive.

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  • REVIEW: “The Tree of Life” (***)

    Cannes Film Festival

    Landscape has always been character in the films of Terrence Malick. The even, rolling fields of “Days of Heaven,” the sweatily green hill ladders of “The Thin Red Line,” even the dry-toast mesa of “Badlands”: all expansive, overwhelming environments that dictate the behavior of the films’ human occupants through sheer force of presence, for it’s often all they have to live in and live with. It’s an approach that, across 33 years of widely-spaced work, has drawn as many accusations of vacant pictorialism as it has rapt devotion — without the mystique Malick has accrued through his slow-loris work patterns, it’s difficult to say which camp might have emerged dominant — but it’s made for an oeuvre with a stylistic and textual throughline that belies its scattered production.

    Until, that is, “The Tree of Life,” Malick’s long, long delayed fifth feature that is at once his most interior work and his most grandiosely conceived. A fractured, impressionistic memory album documenting the roots of familial estrangement in a middle-class 1950s household in the director’s hometown of Waco, Texas, it arrives on the screen surrounded by bookends within bookends: scenes depicting the present-day social alienation of the family’s grown eldest son (Sean Penn), bracketed by vastly scaled sequences addressing more generalized concerns of theology, evolution and mortality.

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  • SHORT TAKE: “The Artist” (***1/2)

    Cannes Film Festival

    “Please be silent behind the screen,” requests a sign in the cinema where silent movie star Georges Valentin’s latest work is screening, near the beginning of “The Artist,” Michel Hazanavicius’ semi-sweet paean to pre-talkie cinema.

    It’s a witty clue as to how Hazanavicius is going to run the ship in his own not-quite-silent movie: swooping strings accompany the film-within-a-film’s finale as Valentin (Jean Dujardin) waits confidently in the wings, only for sound to cut out just as the audience bursts into thunderous applause. It’s a neat trick, one the director pulls and reverses a few times in 100-odd minutes that follow, and one that cunningly aims to replicate in negative the disorientation 1920s picturegoers might have felt when films suddenly started speaking.

    If “The Artist” never quite becomes the ingeniously self-reflexive cinematic essay this scene promises, it succeeds on several warmer, more immediate levels: as an infectiously affectionate reminder of a lost art form’s joys, as a lushly imagined exercise in style, and most crucially, as a funny, emotionally connected entertainment in its own right. As in his pair of hit “OSS 117” films — droll spoofs of 1960s spy cinema, the casual pleasures of which his latest considerably builds upon — Hazanavicius’ approach to pastiche is exacting but not academic: story remains the top priority here, and he has settled on one that is snugly predicated on the film’s very own formal conceits.

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  • CANNES: ‘Polisse,’ ‘Habemus Papam’

    “Polisse” (***) That the title for “Polisse” reportedly derives from writer-director-star Maïwenn’s misspelling of the word “police” aptly summarises both the charms and weaknesses of her third feature, a garrulous, chaotic, intermittently hot-wired ensemble soap braiding the personal and professional lives of officers in the Paris police department’s Child Protection Unit.No doubt the product of much earnest first-hand research into that environment — the numerous individual cases portrayed here are all rooted in fact — the film nonetheless feels creatively informed to a greater degree by the rhythms and structures of TV procedural drama.

    If that reads as a slight, it is and it isn’t: Maïwenn (the tearaway French star who had Luc Besson’s child at 17 and was allegedly the inspiration for Natalie Portman’s character in “The Professional,” so perhaps she knows more about CPU than most) gets what makes such shows propulsive, as she restlessly scurries between multiple crises rendered in cinematic shorthand, patly completing some strands and leaving others hovering for future episodes that will never get made. Casually bed-hopping and entering volcanic shouting matches at the drop of a hat, her characters don’t behave quite like human beings so much as the heightened reflections of them dictated by short-form storytelling; in some respects, Maïwenn’s writing is as phonetic and overheard as her spelling.

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  • SHORT TAKE: “Restless” (*1/2)

    Cannes Film Festival
    Un Certain Regard

    “What can you say about a 25 year-old girl who died?” Written by Erich Segal before being plaintively voiced by Ryan O’Neal, this presumably rhetorical question is the opening gambit of “Love Story,” the simple but phenomenally successful weeper in which a young couple’s relationship is prematurely halted when the girl contracts leukemia — a bummer at any stage of life, but particularly so when you’re young and in love and have Ali MacGraw’s very nice hair.

    As it turned out, the film didn’t have an awful lot to say about the 25 year-old in question, beyond the indirect observations that love is sweet, death is sad and that neither one of those truths alters the other. Gus Van Sant’s new film “Restless,” meanwhile, asks the same question — just with a slightly lower number replacing the 25 — and, as laws of both algebra and Hollywood would have it, asks it to somewhat lower returns.

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  • REVIEW: “We Need to Talk About Kevin” (****)

    Cannes Film Festival

    Lionel Shriver’s 2003 bestseller “We Need to Talk About Kevin” is a rare pop novel indeed: a nippy, low-comfort social essay that lures readers into messily untied arguments on topical subject matter the talk-show circuit would have far less trouble resolving. It might have made for a cluttered, stentorian film about things, particularly as the novel’s candid, epistolary format — a series of unreturned letters from an emotionally paralyzed wife and mother to her absent husband — lends itself to reams of dense, subtext-securing voiceover.

    That knowledge makes the already graceful cinematic language of Lynne Ramsay’s film adaptation (the Scottish director’s third feature, and her first in a regrettable period of nine years) all the more remarkable: altering not a jot of narrative detail, Ramsay and co-writer Rory Kinnear have ingeniously hollowed out Shriver’s wordy text into a largely tacit, imagistic memory collage that substitutes sound and vision for dialogue as extensively as possible. The woman who had a similarly unlikely literary hit, Alice Sebold’s “The Lovely Bones,” taken out of her hands by commercially-minded producers has exacted her revenge in the most rewarding of ways.

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  • SHORT TAKE: “Sleeping Beauty” (***1/2)

    Cannes Film Festival

    “My vagina is not a temple.” So says terse, inscrutable college student Lucy, her dry conviction belying an edgeless china-doll face, immediately after being told (instructed, even) otherwise by an employer with a less-than-honorable stake in the matter. It’s a loaded line, one that reveals she knows much more than her elders think she does — yet much less than she thinks she does — and it’s one of several moments in “Sleeping Beauty,” Australian novelist Julia Leigh’s unnervingly precise directorial debut, that denude sex of any movie mystique it usually carries.

    If that makes the film sound explicitly carnal, it isn’t: the words “no penetration” are repeated so often in the script as to became a mantra, and it sticks to that promise. But in telling the story of a girl falling into the most eerily art-directed prostitution ring this side of a Freemason hazing ceremony, Leigh’s way revisionist fairytale bluntly points out the ways in which our society has over-designed sexual experience even as it has undervalued raw human contact; “Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex, But Were Afraid to Touch” might have been a more specific title.

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  • REVIEW: “Midnight in Paris” (**1/2)

    Cannes Film Festival
    Opening Night

    “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” Nobody actually quotes L.P. Hartley in “Midnight in Paris,” Woody Allen’s often charming if largely over-explicated ode to the healing and deceiving properties of nostalgia. If they don’t, however, that could just be because a spring breeze stole the last few pages of the script at some point on the shoot of this amiably unfinished choux-pastry film, and Allen didn’t feel much like rewriting them.

    Up until that point, Allen hasn’t exactly shied away from obvious references or externalized subtext — this is a film that trades in emphatic cultural and historical caricature, a picture-book approach that will delight some viewers even as it strikes others as aggravatingly twee, but one Allen commits to with the take-it-or-leave-it dispatch of a 75 year-old master working in quick-sketch mode.

    Either way, the tourist-style filmmaking that surfaced in such recent Allen films as “Match Point” and “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” feels more thematically motivated in “Midnight in Paris,” a study of a character not merely a traveller in his physical surroundings, but his generational ones too. I kept wondering if the film’s narrowness of perspective was that of Allen or Owen Wilson’s Allen-substitute protagonist, and what textual difference the distinction even makes.

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  • Cannes kicking off

    I’ve been in Cannes less than 12 hours and already I can feel the sleep deficit kicking in, so I’ll keep this post short. It’s been an administrative day, anyway: unpacking, registering, collecting my press badge (in the rigid Cannes class system, I’ve been upgraded from a yellow badge to a blue one, so I guess Thierry Frémaux received my muffin basket) and moving into the apartment (improbably named Villa Romance) that I’ll share for the next 12 days with US critics James Rocchi and Aaron Hillis. (Karina Longworth joins our household tomorrow. There’s a decidedly niche sitcom waiting to be made here, folks.)

    You may have noticed that this evening, and not a moment too soon, I completed my Cannes Check series breaking down the individual titles in Competition — you can catch up with all 20 entries here.

    One more plug, while I’m about it: I’m taking part in Ioncinema’s 2011 Cannes Critics’ Panel, in which a selection of 16 international critics will rate the festival’s major films on a daily basis. Like an expanded version of Screen Daily’s traditional poll, it’s a handy way to monitor the consensus hits and misses; check out the full panel here.

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  • CANNES CHECK: ‘Drive’

    The director: Nicolas Winding Refn (Denmark)

    The talent: Ryan Gosling and Carey Mulligan — the latter making her first significant foray into multiplex territory — are the star attractions here, but the supporting cast isn’t too shabby, either: Albert Brooks, Ron Perlman and current TV darlings Christina Hendricks and Bryan Cranston are all on board. The screenplay, adapted from a James Sallis novel, has a rather unexpected name attached to it: Hossein Amini, an Oscar nominee for 1997’s “The Wings of the Dove.” Reliable Hollywood workhorse Newton Thomas Sigel (“Three Kings,” “X-Men”) is the DP; Cliff Martinez, best known for his collaborations with Steven Soderbergh, did the score.

    The pitch: The most overtly mainstream film in Competition this year, “Drive” seemingly marks subversive Danish genre stylist Winding Refn’s shift into the realm of slam-bang Hollywood action, via the classic subgenre of the car-chase thriller. Gosling plays a movie stunt driver moonlighting as a hired getaway driver for assorted Los Angeles criminals. After one botched job for the husband of his attractive neighbor (Mulligan), he is forced to drive for his life and hers. The synopsis (and indeed the little footage we’ve seen) promises an old-school, hard-boiled entertainment in the vein of early Walter Hill or Michael Mann; not the sort of thing we usually expect to see vying for the Palme d’Or, and no less welcome for that.

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  • CANNES CHECK: ‘Melancholia’

    The director: Lars von Trier (Denmark)

    The talent: After the lonesome two-hander that was “Antichrist,” von Trier is back to the all-star ensemble form of “Dogville” — and an eclectic ensemble at that. Taking on the traditionally punishing duties of von Trier’s female lead (though the man maintains she got off lightly) is Kirsten Dunst. Previous von Trier alumni in the cast include Charlotte Gainsbourg, John Hurt and Stellan Skarsgård, while Charlotte Rampling, Skarsgård’s son Alexander and, most unexpectedly, Kiefer Sutherland join in the fun. (Plus, Udo Kier is credited as “Wedding planner,” which sounds like very good value indeed.) Below the line, the most important thing to note is the switch from von Trier’s regular DP Anthony Dod Mantle to the less familiar Manuel Alberto Claro (“Videocracy”).

    The pitch: The film’s official one-line synopsis may well be one of the most brazenly off-balance I’ve ever read, so I see no need to paraphrase: “Two sisters find their relationship challenged as a nearby planet threatens to collide into the Earth.” (Well, yes — planetary collisions have a way of complicating things.)

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  • CANNES CHECK: ‘This Must Be the Place’

    The director: Paolo Sorrentino (Italy)

    The talent: Sean Penn (a Best Actor winner at Cannes back in 1997 for “She’s So Lovely”) pops up in his second film of the Competition, though this time in a clear lead role. Frances McDormand makes it two Oscar-winners on board, while the eccentric supporting cast includes Harry Dean Stanton, Judd Hirsch, Talking Heads frontman David Byrne (guess he sanctioned the film’s title, then) and Eve Hewson — the 19 year-old daughter of Bono.  Byrne also contributed the film’s score, with original songs by US folk star Will Oldham (aka Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy). Overall, however, the crew remains heavily Italian; Sorrentino’s regular (and regularly flashy) cinematographer, Luca Bigazzi, is also on board.

    The pitch: Sorrentino’s first English-language feature — hardly a surprising move, given how his previous features toyed with Hollywood forms — sounds like a decidedly odd duck on paper. If you think the film’s various connections to rock royalty seem thematically related, you’d be right: Penn plays Cheyenne (!), a former Goth rock star living in wealthy retirement in Dublin, shaken out of his self-involved stupor by his estranged father’s death.

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  • CANNES CHECK: ‘Michael’

    The director: Markus Schleinzer (Austria)

    The talent: An actor and accomplished casting director — whose credits in the latter field include several films by his compatriots Michael Haneke and Jessica Hausner — 39 year-old Schleinzer has cast his debut feature as writer-director with several actors he previously tapped for other directors’ films. Lead actor Michael Futih won’t be an especially familiar name to international audiences, while his young co-star David Rauchenberger is a newcomer. Overall, the film has less name appeal than of its Competition rivals, making it one of the lineup’s more intriguing prospects.

    The pitch: This may disappoint you, but Schleinzer’s debut isn’t an arthouse remake of Nora Ephron’s 1996 Travolta-as-angel romcom of the same title. Something rather more somber awaits. Only a one-line synopsis has been issued, describing the film as a study of “the last five months of 10-year-old Wolfgang and 35-year-old Michael’s involuntary life together.” That coy “involuntary” evidently refers to a kidnapping: the film is allegedly inspired by the real-life case of Natascha Kampusch, the Austrian girl abducted at the age of 10 and held captive for eight years. With Austria having been rocked both by this and the Josef Fritzl case in recent years, Schleinzer’s film looks likely to touch on a few nerves.

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  • CANNES CHECK: ‘We Need to Talk About Kevin’

    The director: Lynne Ramsay (United Kingdom)

    The talent: Reigning arthouse-crossover queen Tilda Swinton leads the cast of Scottish director Ramsay’s third feature; filling the other two key roles are John C. Reilly, shifting gears from his recent run of comedy roles, and 18 year-old Ezra Miller, an effectively gangly presence in “Afterschool” and “City Island.”

    Ramsay adapted Lionel Shriver’s 2003 novel with British actor (and first-time writer) Rory Kinnear, while the film’s long list of producers and executive producers includes Steven Soderbergh and Luc (son of Nicolas) Roeg. Oscar-nominated DP Seamus McGarvey (“Atonement”) is on lensing duty, breaking Ramsay’s early-career partnership with Alwin Kuchler. Most excitingly of all, Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood extends his select but impressive film-scoring CV (“There Will Be Blood,” “Norwegian Wood”).

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  • CANNES CHECK: ‘We Have a Pope’

    The director: Nanni Moretti (Italy)

    The talent: As in most of his films, writer-director-producer Moretti also takes one of the leading roles, but the film is principally a showcase for 85 year-old French legend Michel Piccoli, playing the Pope of the title. A previous Best Actor winner at Cannes (for 1980’s “Leap Into the Void”) who has worked with everyone from Buñuel to Godard to Hitchcock, the veteran’s very name brings a kind of just-add-water authority to proceedings. Co-producer Domenico Procacci, meanwhile, has been behind a number of recent Italian crossover hits, including “Gomorrah” and “The Consequences of Love.”

    The pitch: “‘The King’s Speech’ goes to the Vatican!” is how many pundits responded to the synopsis for “We Have a Pope” (or “Habemus Papam,” to use its more evocative Latin title) — and glib as such comparisons tend to be, it’s easy to see where they’re coming from in this case. Moretti’s comedy-drama stars Piccoli as a frail cardinal facing a crisis of confidence when, against his wishes, he is elected Pope. Moretti plays the kindly speech therapist psychiatrist assigned to help him accept his responsibilities. The film has predictably aroused controversy within Italy’s Roman Catholic set, but it doesn’t appear to be particularly contentious material.

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  • Tell us what you thought of ‘Thor’

    I guess the summer movie season has officially kicked off (or did so last week, depending where you live) with the release of Kenneth Branagh’s take on Marvel’s “Thor.” For my money, it’s a pretty respectable start — an uneven but refreshingly uncynical popcorn adventure that announces a major star in the shape of Chris Hemsworth. You can read my full take on the film (seconded by Kris) here, but we want to know what you think. Have at it in the comments.

  • CANNES CHECK: ‘Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai’

    The director: Takashi Miike (Japan)

    The talent: Leading man Ebizô Ichikawa is a well-regarded Kabuki actor with a short screen résumé. International audiences are likelier to recognize his more senior co-star, Kôji Yakusho (“Shall We Dance,” “Babel”), who worked with Miike on the recent “13 Assassins” (currently in US theaters, reviewed here). Also returning from Miike’s last samurai epic is Oscar-winning producer Jeremy Thomas (“The Last Emperor”). He’s not the only Oscar-winning “Emperor” alumnus here: revered composer Ryuichi Sakamoto is on board. Finally, a note for trivia buffs: costume designer Kazuko Kurosawa is Akira’s daughter, so I’m guessing she knows her samurai.

    The pitch: After this year’s Berlinale effectively sanctioned the union of 3D and the arthouse, Cannes is following suit: Miike’s latest is the first 3D film to play in Competition. That gimmick aside, “Hara-Kiri” sounds classical enough. Based on a Yasuhiko Takiguchi novel that was previously filmed in 1962, the film centers on a failed samurai whose request to commit ritual suicide is dismissed by his commander — the starting point for a tangle of backstories leading to (what else?) “a tense showdown of vengeance.”

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  • CANNES CHECK: ‘The Source’

    The director: Radu Mihăileanu (France)

    The talent: Two hotly-tipped young French actresses head up proceedings: Leïla Bekhti, who made an eye-catching breakthrough in “A Prophet,” and Hafsia Herzi, who won a slew of newcomer awards in 2007 for “The Secret of the Grain.” (Herzi looks to be one of the faces of this year’s Competition — she also has a prominent role in Bertrand Bonello’s brothel-set drama “House of Tolerance.”) Also in the cast, and perhaps a more familiar face to US viewers, is Hiam Abbass (“The Visitor”). The film’s army of producers, meanwhile, includes none other than Euro-blockbuster merchant Luc Besson.

    The pitch: With his cutesy 2010 crossover hit “The Concert” still fresh in our memories, Romanian-born Frenchman Mihăileanu returns with a comedy that appears cut from similar feelgood-sentimental cloth. Set in the present day, in parched North African village, the story centers on the community’s put-upon womenfolk: weary of daily treks to and from a mountaintop spring, the ladies declare a no-sex strike until their husbands bring running water to the village. Bekhti plays the group’s Norma Rae ringleader. The synopsis suggests a blend of farce and Up With People sincerity, though the line between feminism and sexism in such material can be a fine one.

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