Festivals & Awards

Sundance New Frontier: The Volcano

“Eyjafjallalokull” is a stunning and moving video art installation that played at Sundance in the “New Frontier” art exhibition space. I visited the piece several times. Nicolas Boritch, director of the AntiVJ visual label and producer of “Eyjafjallalokull” (“The Volcano” for short) wants to put viewers in a space where “they just forget where they are and they forget about understanding anything because we want to leave a lot of space for the audience to create their own story or to find whatever they want to find.”

Getting antsy for amazement

Barbara Scharres

As I approached the Festival Palais early this morning, a light breeze wafted down the fabric of the immense billboard-size banner of this year’s festival poster over the facade. The glamorous photo of a leggy Faye Dunaway, by director Jerry Schatzberg from his 1970 film “Puzzle of a Downfall Child,” was rippling and creasing in a way that made the sleek legs appear to be covered by a pair of ill-fitting tights. Little did I suspect that Faye’s wardrobe malfunction was a bad omen for a seemingly promising day on which three out of the only four films by women selected for this year’s Cannes competition were scheduled to screen.

British actress Tilda Swinton, who gravitates to daring roles, plays Eva, a conflicted New York mother “We Need to Talk About Kevin” by Scottish director Lynne Ramsay, based on the novel by Lionel Shriver. Eva’s son Kevin is portrayed as having a deep animosity toward his mother, virtually from the moment of his birth. As an infant, he shrieks hour after hour when alone with her. As he grows, he exhibits a fierce, focused inclination to evil, and that bent will ultimately make him a Columbine-style killer. Kevin might have been a demon child in another kind of movie, but this is not a supernatural story. “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” is a psychological drama centered on Eva’s guilt.

For me, this was a one-note film. Kevin is thoroughly bad; Eva is thoroughly angry, self-hating and stoic. I longed for some shades of subtlety, but this is a story that relies on blood-red coding in dreams and flashbacks, and a soundtrack that emphasizes grating irritants. Ramsay, who acquitted herself very well with films including “Ratcatcher” and “Movern Callar,” seems an ill match for an American setting, letting raucous bluegrass numbers and stereotyped characterizations of Eva’s small town neighbors and co-workers stand in for insight.

Apocalypse von Trier; Miike in 3-D

Barbara Scharres

Another much-anticipated film by one of the big names in this year’s Cannes competition premiered this morning — “Melancholia” by Lars von Trier. It’s no secret that this apocalyptic science fiction drama ends with the destruction of the earth, since that is revealed in the first few minutes of the film. The character played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, neatly summarizes von Trier’s dark pessimism with the line, “The earth is evil; we don’t need to mourn for it.” What is rather amazing is that a film about the destruction of all life (and von Trier posits that we are alone in the universe) could be so turgid.

That said, I think I rather prefer von Trier’s wacko view of the cosmos in “Melancholia” to Terrence Malick’s in “The Tree of Life.” With the ingredients von Trier had to work with, it’s surprising that he didn’t make a better film. Following the various forms of desecration and transgression that are the hallmarks of “Antichrist,” it’s as if he felt the need to top himself with an even more outrageous concept, but forgot to figure out what the outrageous part would be.

“Melancholia” examines the relationship of two sisters, Justine (Kirsten Dunst) and Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) in the final days before the planet named Melancholia is due to collide with the earth. The story falls into two parts. The first is named for Justine, who is blonde, conventionally pretty, and mentally unstable. The second is named for Claire, who is Justine’s opposite in every way, not only in her lean, dark-haired appearance, but in her down-to-earth competence in managing the stuff of life.

Viruses biological and psychological

Barbara Scharres

The sounds of Cannes usually begin for me before daylight, when I’m awakened around 5:00 am by the noise of the big motorized awning of the bistro that’s directly under my window being rolled down for the day. That’s quickly followed by the watery roaring of the street-cleaning machine as it drives up and down the little plaza where the bistro sets up its outdoor tables and chairs. Then, comes the metallic scrape of dozens of chairs being dragged into place. Finally, some natural sounds: birds, including the big screeching gulls that fly inland from the waterfront a few blocks away. The alarm goes off and it’s time to start another festival day by arriving at the Palais at 8:00 am to get a seat for the 8:30 am press screening.

“Lawless” by John Hillcoat, the first of four American films in the year’s competition, premiered this morning. Set in Franklin, Virginia, in 1931, this is a Prohibition-era tale of a real family, the Bonderants, who became local legends as notorious moonshiners. Legend is the operative word here, as this is a highly romanticized story of three macho brothers and their apparent talent for besting the law, the competition, or death, as the case may be. This is film in which the good guys can be beaten to a pulp and be OK the next day, or take a shotgun blast to the gut from fore to aft but still get up and walk.

The cast is easy on the eyes: Tom Hardy as the eldest brother Forrest, who, as reputation has it, cannot be killed; Jason Clarke as Howard, the fearless middle brother who’s batshit crazy when he’s been consuming the product; and Shia Lebeouf as the youngest brother Jack, an aspiring lady’s man who still has a lot to learn about the family business. Love interests include Jessica Chastain as a former fan-dancer from Chicago who shows up at the Bonderant enclave seeking the quiet life (!), and Mia Wasikowska as the sheltered daughter of a fundamentalist preacher.

Love under stormy skies

Barbara Scharres

Sunday dawned with a dark and threatening sky and a chill in the air, continuing the dreary weather trend of the past two days. It’s a day of heavy-hitters here at Cannes, with two greatly anticipated films by major directors premiering in competition: “Amour” (“Love”) by Austrian Michael Haneke in the morning; and “Like Someone in Love” by Iranian Abbas Kiarostami in the evening. Is the weather an omen or just weather? We’ll see.

Neither of today’s competition films was made in the director’s home country. Haneke made “Amour” in France with French stars, but then he has more frequently worked in France in recent years. Kiarostami made his previous feature “Certified Copy” in Italy with an international cast, but “Like Someone in Love” was made in Japan with a French producer, a first for the globe-trotting director.

Michael Haneke has made his reputation on a uniquely transgressive form of cinema. Films, including “The White Ribbon,” “The Piano Teacher,” and “Funny Games,” cross boundaries and break taboos, all the while drawing the audience into complicity with moral compromises and sometimes vile acts. “Amour” represents a new and more gentle and affecting take on that artistic strategy.

In “Amour,” veteran French stars Jean-Louis Trintignant (“A Man and a Woman,” “My Night with Maud”) and Emmanuelle Riva (“Hiroshima Mon Amour”) play Georges and Anne, a married couple in their 80s. They are retired music teachers who live in a lovely high-ceilinged apartment, and their comfortable lives are steeped in music and the arts. Their adult daughter Eva (Isabelle Huppert), also a musician, has a busy life of touring with her British husband.

5/14: Swanky 3-D goggles for the chic cineaste

Barbara Scharres

The programming director of the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago is blogging from Cannes for us.

Thursday, May 14–You can’t beat the weather here in Cannes. After the cold rain and dark skies in Frankfurt, where I changed planes yesterday, the perfect, summery temperatures and extravagant displays of flowers makes this town seem even more like a Mediterranean paradise than usual.

The festival kicked off to the world Wednesday night with the first red-carpet walk by the jury, and the Pixar folks with their 3-D animated feature “Up”, but for most of us in film-industry jobs, the

festival is already well underway with press screenings, market screenings, and press conferences.

“The buffet of the universe.”

Barbara Scharres

Every day at the Cannes festival opens up the possibility of surprises, upsets, or major revelations. As Peter O’Toole in “Lawrence of Arabia” said, “Nothing is written.” Film history is made here all the time, and I think some history was made today with the international debut of the American independent film “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” by Benh Zeitlin, screening in the “A Certain Regard” section of the festival.. A first feature, it competes for the Camera d’Or. The world premiere was at Sundance back in January (where it won the Grand Jury Prize), but the high profile Cannes exposure will surely bring the film and its young star the worldwide attention it deserves.

“Beasts of the Southern Wild” is set in a wild coastal swamp on the Gulf coast, in a watery area referred to as “the Bathtub,” where the towers and smokestacks of chemical plants and refineries spread across the distant horizon. It’s a post-Katrina allegory that adopts many of the real-life images and circumstances of that disaster to create a purely mythic fable full of visceral visions, primal emotions, and haunting reminders of the inescapable cycle of birth, life, death, and decay.

At the center of the film is Hushpuppy, a feisty, unafraid six-year-old who lives with her sickly and often unstable dad in an isolated wilderness squatters’ community where they live off the land by trapping and fishing. Their home, such as it is, is the wreck of a small ramshackle trailer; their boat is the bed of an old pickup truck floating over 55-gallon drums. That mankind lives within nature’s unforgiving food chain is a daily reality for these two. As Hushpuppy’s teacher Miss Bathsheba reminds her handful of students, “Everything that lives is meat. I’m meat; y’all’s asses is meat; all part of the buffet of the universe.”

“Midnight in Paris” but Cannes has just begun

Barbara Scharres

Arriving in Cannes by bus from the Nice airport provides a thumbnail tour of the town, from the more seedy homes on the outskirts to the swanky hotels on the waterfront. The palms lining the Croisette, the festival’s de facto main drag, may be the ubiquitous symbol of city, but a few blocks away the plane trees, cypresses, and the prolific climbing roses of Provence are a more common sight. Walk a short distance from the Festival Palais and there are conspicuously un-chic restaurants where local cops congregate for dinner in the back room and retired couples hang out for a smoke and an evening beer, more often than not, with a fluffy mutt under the table.

In a way, my first reminders yesterday of everyday life in everyday France were a bracing counterpoint to this morning’s press screening of Woody Allen’s romantic fantasy “Midnight in Paris.” The festival’s opening night film is a colorful valentine to Paris, indulging and gorgeously illustrating the director’s every memory and cherished illusion of the city. I’ve never been a big Woody Allen fan, but “Midnight in Paris” is loads of fun.

The film opens with a morning-to-night sequence of views of the city’s most iconic sights: Montmartre and the Moulin Rouge, the Seine, the Arc de Triomphe and the Champs-Elysees, the narrow streets of the Left Bank, and the Eiffel Tower. That opening alone is a tourist board’s dream. At the press conference later, a journalist asked Allen, who mentioned that he thought of the title long before he had a story, whether these postcard-worthy views were his own impressions of Paris, or were meant to represent the point of view of his characters. Perhaps the French questioner was hoping for the latter, but Allen replied, “I learned about Paris the way all Americans do–from the movies. I wanted to show the city emotionally, not realistically, but through my eyes.

“There’s a fungus between my toes that speaks to me.”

Barbara Scharres

by Barbara Scharres

Cannes has become hot and uncomfortably muggy in a way that has me thinking longingly of the blankets and socks of earlier in the week. As the festival closes in on the final days, I’m hoping for some big excitement on the screen.

When the stiff, futuristic Brandon Cronenberg film “Antiviral” played a few days ago, it gave me cause to look forward even more to today’s premiere of “Cosmopolis” by his father David Cronenberg, anticipating that the contrast between generations would also point up the difference between a wannabe and a seasoned master. Boy, was I wrong. I’m sorry to say that they’re both among the worst films I’ve seen here this year. I’ve never been this disappointed in a David Cronenberg film.

“Cosmopolis” opens with a shot of a row of white stretch limos parked on a city street. The interior of one of them will become a primary location in this film, functioning as the office away from the office for mega-millionaire money manager Eric Packer (Robert Pattinson), an arrogant and powerful 28-year-old. Seemingly inspired by the Occupy movement in the U. S., the story is set in New York in the near future (although what we see of the urban landscape never looks like anything but Toronto; even the CN Tower is seen in the background). The president of the United States is due at any moment, a situation tying up the streets with blockades and large-scale protests.

Of popes and poissons and Kim Ki-duk

Barbara Scharres

It’s Friday the 13th in Cannes, and that has got to mean something good. An overcast sky threatening rain means that there couldn’t be a more perfect day to stay inside and watch movies.

The morning began with the 8:30 am press screening of Nanni Moretti’s “We Have a Pope.” Hmm…a comedy/drama about the Vatican by a self-professed Italian atheist? Moretti is known primarily for his wry, intellectual, and largely autobiographical approach to comedy in films including “My Diary” and “April, ” but also for serious drama in films including his 2001 Palme d’Or winner “The Son’s Room.” Subjects he has often lampooned include leftist politics, psychoanalysis, water-polo, and the cinema itself.

In “We Have a Pope,” the funeral of a dead pope has just taken place and the College of Cardinals is convening to elect the new pontiff from among their number. Moretti goes to great lengths to represent this ritual gathering with great accuracy, but injecting an escalating number of comic moments as the film traverses from the ceremonial pomp of its opening scenes to take on a lighter tone.

As if the voting for a pope were an elementary school spelling test, the prelates cross out names on their ballots, look to heaven for guidance, and even cheat, some slyly spying on what a neighbor seated to the left or right is writing. After a few rounds of voting, the winner is revealed to be a candidate who was not even in the running, a stunned Cardinal Melville (surely Moretti’s tip of the hat to iconic French director Jean-Pierre Melville), played by veteran French star Michel Piccoli.