In Contention

Tag: Steve Evets

  • SHORT TAKE: “Looking for Eric” (**1/2)

    Looking for EricIt’s been a long time, if ever, since Ken Loach made a film that could legitimately be called a crowd-pleaser, but this is precisely what he has made in “Looking for Eric.”

    Gentle, undemanding and buoyed by the effortlessly charismatic presence of the titular football god – it’s certainly the first Loach film to possess anything approaching star power – it’s less overtly comedic than the marketing campaign would have you believe, but also warmer and less agenda-driven than most of his work this decade.

    With that said, Loach’s renewed emotional engagement has sadly come at the expense of any tonal cohesion whatsoever. As the veteran filmmaker fumbles for the buttons to alternately tickle and touch his audience, his film lurches wildly from a jolly working-class jaunt in the vein of “The Full Monty” to reflective character-oriented miserabilism à la Mike Leigh.

    Paul Laverty, Loach’s longtime screenwriter, wields neither the broad drollery of the former, nor the penetrating human insight of the latter, so roughly halfway through, he finds a third way: falling back on the earnest social commentary of his and Loach’s own “Sweet Sixteen.” With the film shifting its story emphasis through each of these multiple personalities, any sense of narrative continuity slips through the cracks.

    If it sounds like I’m being overly harsh on a film for which the placatory adjective “nice” might have been invented, it’s because not enough people are doing the same: that such a minor-key and formally slapdash film should have played in competition at Cannes is generous enough, but the multiple festival reviews hailing it as some kind of paean to the human spirit are a little puzzling.

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  • What will take the Palme d’Or?

    Abbie Cornish and Ben Whishaw in Bright Star It’s all over bar the voting. Tomorrow, Cannes jury president Isabelle Huppert will meet with her formidable, female-dominated team of eight – including the diverse likes of Robin Wright Penn, Asia Argento, James Gray and Hanif Kureishi – to pick over the 20 Competition titles they have seen over the last fortnight and select their collective favorites.

    As I’ve said before, the most surprising thing a Cannes jury can do is not to surprise: to hand the Palme d’Or to the critical and/or popular favorite. It can happen, of course – critics and pundits alike called it for “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” the day it screened in 2007, and were proved right – but the list of upsets is long and illustrious.

    As you’ve probably heard by now, if the bookies have their way, French auteur Jacques Audiard will be brandishing the Palme this time tomorrow, his prison drama “A Prophet” having wowed critics and audiences across the Croisette. I’ll be delighted if he does, but I’ve questioned whether a French production can win two years running, after a two-decade drought to boot.

    Of course, such streaks aren’t unheard of: the U.S. held onto the Palme for three years between 1989 and 1991. Other questions running through my mind are whether Frenchwoman Huppert might want to avoid making the festival too much of a local affair, and whether Audiard’s all-male film will resonate as strongly with a mostly female jury.

    If not, there are a number of alternatives. By my count there are six titles seriously in the hunt for top honors. Michael Haneke’s “The White Ribbon” is fancied by many to finally land the director the top prize. Earlier today, the film made its presence felt by claiming the FIPRESCI critics’ prize for best in show, though it should be noted that the jury’s and FIPRESCI’s choices have only lined up three times this decade.

    (More speculation, and my final predictions, after the cut.)

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