Festivals & Awards

Tree of Life: Lyrical, spiritual, kitsch

Terence Malick’s long-awaited “The Tree of Life” premiered in competition today, with an 8:30 am press screening. I anticipated seething crowds, so headed off to the Palais a little early. Entrance areas were jammed, and the Grand Theatre Lumiere was nearly full at only 7:55 am. A friend who had been holding a seat for me estimated that he had been about 200th in line when arriving at 7:30 am.

“The Tree of Life” was announced for last year’s Cannes festival, but withdrawn when it wasn’t completed in time. Although Malick has directed only four features in his more than 40-year career as writer/producer/director (“Badlands,” “Days of Heaven,” “The Thin Red Line,” and “The New World), his cult reputation is such that many here were itching to declare “The Tree of Life” a masterpiece before the first frame ever hit the screen.

I think at least a few hopes were dashed this morning. As the film reached its conclusion there was a fadeout that turned out to be a false ending. People immediately jumped to their feet to exit in the dark, as always happens here, and a few dozen loud boos erupted from points all over the theater. Another image came on and those leaving stopped in their tracks and fell silent until Malick’s director credit appeared. Applause followed, along with an equal amount of booing.

December 14, 2012

Iranian filmmakers take center stage

Barbara Scharres

May 18 — Some Cannes traditions never die. In the years I’ve been coming to the festival, the same music has been playing in the Grand Theatre Lumiere before the early morning press screening. It’s always jazz, and it always seems to be the same selection every morning, every year. I’ve started to imagine that there’s some ancient reel-to-reel tape recorder in a distant control booth, and that a guard is assigned to rewind and start the old tape at 8:00 am each day.

Sound or more specifically, language is central to Jean-Luc Godard’s “Film Socialism.” Roger has commented so thoroughly on that film that I’m not going to add much, except to say that Godard remains one of the grand tricksters of world cinema. With his French dialogue, minimal and cryptic subtitles in so-called “Navajo English” (this in itself seems a tongue-in-cheek fiction on his part), and bits of a few other languages thrown in, he creates a Babel that I believe was made to baffle and intrigue one and all, no matter what your native tongue. It’s a kind of rarefied fun to try to decipher, and maddening at the same time. Meanwhile, Godard the magician, like the wizard in “The Wizard of Oz,” gets to hide behind his screen, sending out big ideas and big images.

Above: Abbas Kiarostami (AP photo)

December 14, 2012

Overturning expectations: The ups and downs

Barbara Scharres

May 16 — Sunday was a day of highs and lows, of new discoveries and dashed hopes. Bertrand Tavernier and Takeshi Kitano, two directors whose films I had most anticipated here, did not live up to my expectations with “The Princess of Montpensier” and “Outrage,” respectively. Hungarian Agnes Kocsis, a director who had only made one previous feature in 2006, blew me away with her insightful “Adrienn Pal.”

December 14, 2012

Palme d’Or loves “Amour”

Barbara Scharres

The 65th Cannes Film Festival’s eleven days of prediction, wild speculation and gossip, some of it centering on the notoriously cranky personality of this year’s jury president Nanni Moretti, came to an end Sunday evening in festival’s business-like awards ceremony (or Soiree de Palmares, as the French call it) that traditionally lacks the extended let’s-put-on-a-show aspect of the Oscars. The jury was seated onstage in a solemn group, and the awards given with a modest amount of fancy-dress formality, a bit of unrehearsed fumbling, and acceptance speeches that were short, dignified and to the point.

The foul weather that has marred the usually sunny festival continued to the end, and elite guests and movie stars alike walked a red carpet tented by a plastic roof as the rain fell on the multi-colored umbrellas of the surrounding crowds. Festival director Thierry Fremoux personally held an umbrella for Audrey Tautou, star of Claude Miller’s closing night film, “Therese Desqueyroux,” as she headed up the famous steps in a calf-length ivory lace gown with a bodice heavily embroidered in gold.

Actress Berenice Bejo, an international sensation since her starring role and subsequent Oscar nomination for “The Artist,” performed mistress of ceremonies duties in a white, bridal-looking strapless sheath with long train, her only jewel an enormous heart-shaped emerald ring. Just about the only prediction this year that turned out to be accurate was the one that advised that all was unpredictable under the jurisdiction of the pensive and often-scowling Moretti.

December 14, 2012

Almodovar’s limp noodle, Panahi’s home movie

Barbara Scharres

This morning, Pedro Almodovar, Spain’s biggest big-cheese filmmaker, handed us a limp noodle with “The Skin I Live In,” his entry in the Cannes competition. The film stars Antonio Banderas (who began his career in Almodovar’s early films) and Elena Anaya, who looks like a cross between Penelope Cruz and Audrey Hepburn. Even a second-best Almodovar film has its delicious moments, but “The Skin I Live In” is flat compared with his best work, including “Broken Embraces,” “Volver,” and his Oscar winner “All about My Mother.”

Typical of Almodovar, the film is a melodramatic farce. Although it’s based on the novel “Mygale” (“Tarantula” in English) by Thierry Jonquet, the story is also strongly reminiscent of the 1960 French horror classic “Eyes without a Face” by Georges Franju. In the Franju film, a surgeon kidnaps women in order to graft their faces onto the head of his disfigured daughter. In “The Skin I Live In,” a plastic surgeon is engaged in highly experimental work in order to create synthetic skin as a tribute to his dead wife, who was burned to death in a car crash. He subsequently uses the results of his research in service of a unique punishment for his daughter’s rapist.

This story has a lot of twists, and the element of surprise is important. I don’t want to give away too much, especially since it’s due to open in the U.S. in the fall. I haven’t read “Mygale,” but I understand that the narrative is fragmented into sections that all come together in the end. In this, Almodovar appears to have followed the structure of the book, perhaps too closely. One of the principle weaknesses of “The Skin I Live In” is that the story is scattered in pieces. Characters and subplots are introduced then dropped. They are loosely but not completely tied together in the end.

December 14, 2012

TIFF #4: Darwin walks out on Genesis

Roger Ebert

During the first press screening here of “Creation,” during a scene when Charles Darwin walks out of church during a sermon on the first book of Genesis, an audience member stood up and walked out. Was he offended by the film? There’s no way to say. There were an unusually large number of walk-outs, but who knows if they were leaving for theological reasons, or to get in line for the screenings of “Bright Star” or “Fish Tank,” or because of boredom? I hope it wasn’t boredom. Although it’s a movie with a good deal of talk, at least no one shouted out, “You lie!”

Charles Darwin as Paul Bettany

This will adamantly not be a review of “Creation,” which will await its opening. It will be a discussion of some of the thoughts it inspires. I expected the film to be focused on Darwin’s theory of the origin of species and the controversy it provoked in mid-19th century, but it is primarily about his domestic life, centering on Down House, Bromley, where he and his wife Emma lived from 1842 until until his death in 1882.

December 14, 2012

Cannes #5: Waiting for Godard

Roger Ebert

When I began as a film critic, Jean-Luc Godard was widely thought to have reinvented the cinema with “Breathless” (1960). Now he is almost 80 and has made what is said to be his last film, and he’s still at the job, reinventing. If only he had stopped while he was ahead. That would have been sometime in the 1970s. Maybe the 1980s. For sure, the 1990s. Without a doubt, before he made his Cannes entry, “Film: Socialisme.”

The thousands of seats in the Auditorium Debussy were jammed, and many were turned away. We lucky ones sat in devout attention to this film, such is the spell Godard still casts. There is an abiding belief that he has something radical and new to tell us. It is doubtful that anyone else could have made this film and found an audience for it.

December 14, 2012

TIFF #6: Oy vey, such a film you should see

Roger Ebert

There is something about the Jewish way of humor and storytelling I’ve always found enormously appealing. I memorized material by Henny Youngman and Myron Cohen at an age when, to the best of my knowledge, I had never met a Jew. I liked the rhythm, the contradiction, the use of paradox, the anticlimax, the way word order would be adjusted to back up into a punch line. There seemed to be deep convictions about human nature hidden in gags and one-liners; a sort of rueful shrug. And the stories weren’t so much about where they ended as how they got there.

The serious man is consoled by the friend who has stolen his wife

December 14, 2012

TIFF #5: The man who didn’t land

Roger Ebert

It was two years ago on Saturday night that Jason Reitman’s “Juno” had its world premiere here at Toronto. The standing ovation that night was the most spontaneous and joyous I can remember. Still vibrating, Reitman stood on the stage of the Ryerson Theater and vowed, “I’m gonna open all of my films right here in this theater at Toronto.” True to his word, his new film “Up in the Air” played the Ryerson at 6 p.m., Saturday–same time, same place.

It stars George Clooney in one of his best performances, as a frequent flyer. His ambition is to pass the 10 million-mile mark in the American Airlines Aadvantage Program, something very few ever do. Asked on an airplane where he lives, he replies, “Here.” He’s a Termination Facilitator. He fires people for a living. When corporations need to downsize quickly, he flies in and breaks the news to the new former employees. In a lousy economy, his business is great.

December 14, 2012

TIFF #2: “Antichrist” redux

Roger Ebert

Lars von Trier’s “Antichrist” is poised to detonate at the Toronto Film Festival. This willfully controversial director will inspire, as he often does, a storm of controversy, debate, critics clamoring to get into advance screenings that are already jammed, and a contentious press conference. Of the 400 or so films at TIFF this year, “Antichrist” was the first that sold out in advance. It was the same last May at Cannes, and that was before it has even been seen.

Von Trier was nothing if not canny in his title for the film. By naming it “Antichrist,” he provides a lens through which to view its perplexing behavior. By naming his characters only He and She, he suggests the dark side of an alternative Garden of Eden, and then disturbing his ending becomes a mirror image of Christ welcoming the faithful into the kingdom of heaven. The title instructs us where to begin. If he had named the characters John and Mary, and titled the film “A Nightmare,” what conclusions might we have arrived at?

December 14, 2012

TIFF #3: Some of the films I’ve seen

Roger Ebert

I have a quirky policy about writing of films from a film festival. In the early years, I tried to avoid an actual “review,” especially negative, because I believed a film deserved a chance to open before I laid into it. This was grandiose–as if the world was awaiting my opinion. Then I began suggesting my thinking, without going into detail. Then, being human, I allowed that approach to enlarge into specific descriptions of films I really loved, or hated.

Alex Vo, editor of Rotten Tomatoes: No Meter when he needs it most.

That’s now the strategy I use, with amendments. I can only review a film for the first time once, and if I’ve used all my energy in rehearsal, what have I saved for opening night? I’ll reflect the general reception of certain films, however, if only in the spirit of providing news coverage. The first year I was here, I was one of four members of the American press. These days, with half the audience members filing daily blogs and twittering immediately after a film is over, it’s simply all part of the festival process.

December 14, 2012

TIFF #1: Darwin, Herzog, the Coens and the Antichrist

Roger Ebert

I’ve just finished combing through the list of films in this year’s Toronto Film Festival, and I have it narrowed down to 49. I look at the list and sigh. How can I see six films a day, write a blog, see people and sleep? Nor do I believe the list includes all the films I should see, and it’s certainly missing films I will see. How it happens is, you’re standing in line and hear buzz about something. Or a trusted friend provides a title you must see. Or you go to a movie you haven’t heard much about, just on a hunch, and it turns out to be “Juno.”

Nicolas Cage in “Bad Lieutenant”

I can’t wait to dive in. Knowing something of my enthusiasms, faithful reader, let me tell you that TIFF 2009’s opening night is a film about the life of Charles Darwin. The festival includes the film of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road.” And new films by the Coen brothers, Todd Solondz, Michael Moore, Atom Egoyan, Pedro Almodovar, Hirokazu Kore-Eda, Alain Resnais and Guy Maddin–and not one but two new films by Werner Herzog. Plus separate new films by the three key talents involved in Juno: The actress Ellen Page, the director Jason Reitman, and the writer Diablo Cody.

Okay, I’ve already seen two of those. They were screened here in Chicago (Page as a teenage Roller Derby in “Whip It,” Cody’s script for “Jennifer’s Body,” starring Megan Fox as a high school man-eater, and that’s not a metaphor). I already saw more than ten of this year’s entries at Cannes, including Lars on Trier’s controversial “Antichrist,” Jane Campion’s “Bright Star,” Gasper Noe’s “Enter the Void,” Almodovar’s “Broken Embraces,” Bong Joon-Ho’s “Mother,” Lee Daniels’ “Precious,” Mia Hansen-Løve’s “The Father of My Children,” and Resnais’s “Wild Grass.” A lot of good films there. Not all of them, but a lot.

December 14, 2012