Far be it from me to tell Thierry Fremaux et al how to run a festival – though I’ve programmed some pretty wicked DVD marathons in my time, I’ll have you know – but the scheduling at Cannes this year has been haphazard, to say the least. Today, for example, served up no Competition titles whatsoever, with only two Un Certain Regard titles to keep “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” (which I hardly expected to emerge as my favorite film of the day) company on a Friday night.
Cut to me drawing up my viewing schedule for tomorrow, frantically calculating the pros and cons of around eight different titles I want to see, and I can’t help wishing they’d spread the weekend wealth a little. Mike Leigh’s “Another Year” and WoodyAllen’s “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger” are the two major attractions, of course, but I’ll be sorry to miss Cam Archer’s “Shit Year” in Director’s Fortnight. That’s just the morning menu: later on, we get buzzy new titles from Gregg Araki, Xavier Dolan, Charles Ferguson and Mahamet-Saleh Haroun … there will be, if not blood, some heavy-hearted cross-outs.
Not that I was much in the mood for further screenings after today’s slightly gruelling back-to-back triple-bill, one-third of which found me hunched on the stairs of the Salle Debussy theater as press packed out this afternoon’s screening of Hideo Nakata’s “Chatroom.” (They’d regret their enthusiasm before long.)