In Contention

Tag: Catherine Deneuve

  • LONDON: French femmes on form

    “I think the French have always enjoyed older women, and they’re right to do so,” Kristin Scott Thomas told me in an interview nearly two years ago, when asked about the range of opportunities for actresses over 40 in the French film industry. “A life has been lived. There’s so much more at stake. The French get that, and as an actor, I’m glad for it.”

    She’s right, of course. Whereas every Hollywood victory for a middle-aged actress — be it Sandra Bullock’s Oscar win, Meryl Streep’s box-office clout or the year-long buzz for the two-pronged attack of “The Kids Are All Right” — is accompanied by assorted talking heads and op-eds proclaiming the significance of the achievement, the French see nothing especially remarkable about a fiftysomething woman headlining a major production.

    Leading ladies in that country tend to remain so for their whole careers — and remain busy at that, dipping into character and ensemble roles while being regularly rewarded with generous individual showcases. This year alone, we’ve seen Juliette Binoche take Best Actress at Cannes for the elaborate thespian gymnastics of “Certified Copy,” while Catherine Deneuve earned plaudits at Venice for “Potiche,” a frothy crowdpleaser that is essentially one huge valentine to the actress.

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  • VENICE: Jury duty – award predictions and preferences

    The Venice Competition lineup officially wrapped today with one of its lightest and most mainstream selections, “Barney’s Version” (reviewed this morning).

    With only the out-of-competition closing film “The Tempest” left to screen before I head back to London tomorrow evening, allow me a moment to sift through the runners and riders for the festival prizes – at the same time as Quentin Tarantino and his (hopefully) merry band of jurors much be contemplating the same thing.

    They have good reason to be merry: as a friend and I agreed this morning, festival director Marco Mueller has assembled a truly outstanding Competition field this year – thoughtfully balanced in terms of highbrow and middlebrow, genre and esoterica, veteran auteurs and younger ascending talents.

    (More thoughts, plus Golden Lion predictions and wishes, after the cut.)

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  • VENICE: ‘Potiche,’ ‘A Letter to Elia,’ ‘Robinson in Ruins’

    Hey, did you miss me yesterday? Don’t answer that. Sorry for the radio silence, but Saturday proved to be both my busiest and most rewarding day at Venice, serving up five films — none of them stinkers, and one of them perhaps my favourite of the fest so far.

    After capping the day’s viewing with a delightful pasta dinner in the company of two of Variety’s finest, I took the water-bus back to my San Marco hotel room in a pleasant fog of good feeling and red wine, only to find the wi-fi in my hotel room had taken the night off.

    As it turned out, it was just as well: today’s festival schedule being a lean and mostly unappetizing one, I rewarded myself with my first lie-in of the week (sorry, Tsui Hark) and began afresh in the morning. Late-night reviewing is fraught with hazard, anyway, as I’d learned the night before when I nodded off in the middle of writing up “The Sleeping Beauty.” (Before you say, “How apt,” let me remind you that there is no beauty in waking up at 5 a.m. with keyboard-face.)

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  • LIFE WITHOUT OSCAR: 1965 and 1966

    Catch up with the idea behind this series here.

    I’m back guys. Sorry for taking a week off but my older brother got hitched and I had a drunken Best Man speech that needed attending to. I trust you spent the week watching all the wonderful movies being highlighted in this column.

    We’re halfway through my favorite decade of film and 1965 is the first time the Oscar telecast came to you live and in color (any readers actually old enough to remember?). Going into the ceremony, bookies were split between “The Sound of Music” and “Doctor Zhivago,” but it was the light-hearted former that waltzed away with top honors.

    The Academy continued to show courageous love to foreign titles with Hiroshi Teshigahara earning a Best Director nomination for “Woman in the Dunes” in ’65 and Claude Leloach doing the same for “A Man and a Woman” in 1966.

    That was the year that Fred Zinnemann’s morality play, “A Man for All Seasons” took Best Picture and five other awards, beating out Mike Nichols’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” which remains one of the greatest film debuts of all time in my book. The Oscars were making some risky choices but they still missed out on honoring these timeless films.

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  • LONDON: ‘Incendiary,’ ‘A Christmas Tale,’ ‘Blind Loves’

    I’ve been swamped with screenings at the London Film Festival, so between watching the films, maintaining some semblance of a day job and occasionally remembering to sleep and eat, my review updates have got a bit behind track.

    Hopefully, I can make up some of the distance tomorrow, when I have a lighter screening schedule, so expect a compilation of capsule reviews shortly, as well as some more in-depth evaluations of titles like Steve McQueen’s fascinating “Hunger.” In the meantime, here are some thoughts on three notable (if not necessarily successful) titles that made their London bow on the weekend:

    INCENDIARY (**)

    Steadily, and with very little fuss, Michelle Williams is growing into a remarkable young actress, as this, the first of three films she has in the festival, makes clear. It’s one thing to shine in a film as immaculately crafted as “Brokeback Mountain,” but it’s quite another to shoulder a project as problematic as Sharon Maguire’s “Incendiary.”

    A wildly confused, schizophrenic film based on a controversial novel, it stars Williams as a working-class London mother whose life is thrown into turmoil when her husband (a bomb disposal officer) and young son are killed in a (fictitious) terrorist attack on Arsenal football stadium. A low-key study of grieving ramps up into convoluted thriller territory when a journalist (Ewan McGregor), with whom the woman is having an affair, senses a cover-up and brings her into the investigation.

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  • No surprises as Cannes jury surprises

    Well, I missed that one badly. As is so often the case, the Cannes jury threw a curveball, handing their top prize to a late-breaking film that had generated very few column inches. Admittedly, I should have paid more attention to “The Class,” French auteur Laurent Cantet’s school-based docudrama.

    I was a huge fan of Cantet’s 2001 film “Time Out,” an ingeniously constructed character study, and while his 2005 follow-up “Heading South” was a major disappointment, Cantet’s name on the competition list should have rung more bells – not least when the very warm reviews started rolling in yesterday. Variety called it “one of the most substantive and purely entertaining movies in competition at Cannes this year.”

    Congratulations to Cantet then, and to France, scoring their first home victory at Cannes since “Under Satan’s Sun” triumphed in 1987. The other awards threw up fewer surprises, with Benicio Del Toro taking Best Actor as I, and many others, predicted. Meanwhile, “Three Monkeys” and the Italian one-two punch of “Gomorra” and “Il Divo” all took home major silverware, if not necessarily in the categories that I anticipated.

    I must admit to being shocked that the widely beloved “Waltz With Bashir” went home empty-handed; an omission for which Sean Penn and fellow juror Natalie Portman seemed almost apologetic. No matter: Ari Folman’s animated war documentary leaves the festival with a dedicated following, and I’m certainly putting it on my Best Animated Feature shortlist.

    The full list of competition winners follows:

    Palme d’Or: “The Class”

    Grand Jury Prize: “Gomorra”

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