In Contention

Tag: Il Divo

  • Foreign film race begins… get ready to groan

    Variety carries details of the first official entry that I’ve heard of in the Best Foreign Language Film derby – Denmark has put forward “Worlds Apart,” from director Niels Arden Oplev. The country has a pretty good track record in this category, having won back-to-back in the 80’s with “Babette’s Feast” and “Pelle the Conqueror,” while Susanne Bier’s popular “After the Wedding” nabbed a nomination two years ago.

    “Worlds Apart,” which has already secured US distribution, is a small-scale pic focusing on a teenage Jehovah’s Witness forced to make a difficult choice when she falls in love with a non-believer. It all sounds terribly earnest, but that’s right up the Academy’s alley when it comes to this category. Reviewing the film at the Berlin festival back in February, Variety called it a “provocative, well-turned drama,” and speculated that a US remake could be on the cards.

    Apparently, the Academy has invited 96 countries to enter the race this year, with the submission deadline looming large on October 1. They should be looking to regain some credibility in this category after the embarrassing fiasco of last year’s race, which saw a banner year for world cinema reduced to the most tepid slate of foreign-language nominees in recent memory, as landmark pictures like “4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days,” “Lust, Caution” and “Persepolis” were, one by one, either snubbed or disqualified.

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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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  • Cannes: uneducated guesses

    Well, it’s almost over. The competition films have all been screened, picked over and digested by the world’s critics, and now all that’s left to do is that finicky business of handing out some prizes. Sean Penn and his formidable jury (Marjane Satrapi, Alfonso Cuaron and Natalie Portman are just some of those involved) will be deliberating over a crop of films that has generally been deemed a solid selection, with few outright “Brown Bunny”-style disasters.

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