My Cannes 2014 report...3 thousands years later...

 

 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

…. At the Cannes Film Festival, I operate in a different time zone.

I don’t just mean the one-six-ten hours time difference between Bucharest, Portobello, Patagonia and Cannes.

Somehow, I operate far further into the future than just an hour or eight.

All the upcoming films which were on my radar (and a lot of fabulous ones that were not) are all of a sudden at my disposal.

Everything in the space of a week and a half.

 

First morning:….It’s my alarm, and the time is 7.30am.

Why am I up so early after a fairly late night yesterday?

Well yes, that question does ring through my mind fleetingly, and then I remember. I have to jog the Champagne out…

Badly awaken cinephiles are slowly marching towards the 8h30 am screening of Bonello. In the Louis-Lumière I can hear flies passing, my friends, especially when Moujik, Saint Laurent’s dog, is eating acid.

The designer and his lover, Jacques de Bascher, breathe on fire (passion), lascively lying on the sofa. We are somewhere between 1967 and 1976.

Older, later, Saint Laurent has Helmut Berger’s features, ex-viscontian beau. He has breakfast while Moujik IV stays on his lap. He is left only with his hairdresser. He is alone.

Bonello films the emerging of the name-branding, of luxury on a large scale, an equation that fascinates as well as the psyche of its model (scattered pieces of the last moments of the film, powerful editing and split-screens).

…

I head out to the Palais des Festivals …Into the Palais (ola!, various levels of security), up an escalator, and around the corner.

It’s easy as pie to remember where to go

When you’ve done the trip once already..

It turns out that once I’m in the room to pick up my MR TURNER ticket, the computers on the wall let me reserve a ticket for TIMBUKTU too!

I make a repeat trip to the friendly chap behind the desk.

He scans my festival badge again,

And all of a sudden I have two tickets for screenings in the Grand Theater Lumière.

Never give up on the good times… as a Spice Girl or two once sang

 

I saw a woman…Filled with jewelry that shines and a wild hair bun…
...her name is Angélique, she’s been a cabaret dancer for 30 years in Alsace and Lorraine. She used to dance over her legs and ass. One day, she has to stop.

She puts her clothes back on, and does all bars, drifts out in the night until daylight… She has 4 kids with 4 different men… One of them, gorgeous man and actor leaves Paris for saving her. She goes into rehab. He writes a movie: his mother will be its heroine.

Everything is false and everything is true in “Party Girl”. There is the real family, and the fiction of a documentary. All the rest is written, acted, segmented in a funny sort of deviancy à la Cassavetes and with a filthy twist as in the films of Fassbinder…

…Later on in a party I meet Deneuve.

Her feet hurt.

She has enough of Cannes: “a joy and a pain”, she says.

Deneuve sulks.

Guillaume Canet asks for one of my Gitanes. Adèle Haenel threw away her high heels shoes.

In her green dress with savage designs on, Deneuve would prefer to be elsewhere. “Everything is a caricature at Cannes”, she gives me, before totally disappearing beyond the cloud of her ultra long cigarette…

 

…It’s out one door, and back into the next queue, to head up the red carpet again and into the cinema for the 10.30pm screening of TIMBUKTU.

This film certainly doesn’t disappoint.

Skillfully depicting a return to the simplistic thinking that comes about when a group of "rebels" decide to go on a jihad and impose Shari Law on a  community in Timbuktu.

The film is very well received, with applause for the filmmakers, still ringing out as we leave the auditorium.

I wonder what the Jury of Campion, Coppola, Dafoe and Co will make of it though.

…Haven’t slept for 36 hours…queuing for the screening of Mommy, the film of Xavier Dolan.





He premiered his fourth feature “Tom at the Farm” at the Venice Film Festival last summer. 
He is 25 and all his teeth on.
Good for him.

Orson Welles was 25 when he made Citizen Kane, Jean-Luc Godard was 29 when he made Breathless and Steven Spielberg was also 29 when he made Jaws.

Sometimes when you look at contemporary directors from mainstream cinema to the art-house, it feels like we’ve lost the art of letting genuine talents make films while they’re still young…

This film screams out loud, it pushes, mumbles and scrambles, it’s beautiful.

There is this disturbed teenager, a bit of a fascist, blondish and crazy, who goes back living at his mums’.

He steals, she reprimands him, he strangles her, and she hits his head.
They love each other.
Then a neighbor loser comes living with them and a sublime triangular love story emerges.
The film overwhelms me with crazy laughter and timid tenderness, and has the huge merit of rehabilitating…Céline Dion…

….« Haaaappppy birrrthday to you MAGNUM! » On the beach of that famous ice creamer, Kylie Minogue sings in sotto voce the magic phrase that will enable her by the end of that evening to fill up her pockets with a few dozens of thousands of Euros….

Disgusted by the system,
my Argentinean friends and I,
we decide to jump cut to the fiesta of the movie of Virgil Vernier.

The Chinese aluminum restaurant is jam packed with young cinephiles discussing the films of the day while sipping on delicious fresh Champagne…

I lean on to the soft windows of an aquarium...
A lavishly looking man tells me all about his chagrins d’amour.
I tell him about mines... 

The windows slowly break.

300 pounds of water and the cat fishes that go with it explode in golden huge jets…

Everyone jumps to the ceiling of joy…

The evening can finally start…

…Day X…

I feel as if I have stepped through the looking glass…

It’s warm out on the balcony at 3.15am over Nikaia the white…as I write this diary entry.

I can see the moon above, peering down on all of us film industry folks…

…and no doubt (anthropomorphically speaking) it is sending me some messages, in some way. For which lover of cinema wouldn’t find this whole set-up just a bit surreal, magical, and bombastic?

I’ve had quite a day today…

…it has been a sandwich sort of a day, with great bread, and an only so-so filling.
Will that metaphor hold up?

First film I saw today and the most unusual film in Cannes this year was a Critics’ Week triumph.
 One that also sounds like a parody of what you would expect to see here.

It’s an Ukrainian film with no dialogue or voiceover or subtitles, with all speech conducted entirely in sign language.
And it’s brilliant.

Set in a boarding school for deaf signers,
director Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy shapes a narrative about the deaths, racketeering and prostitution that go on amongst hierarchical students …

… And yet… the shooting style is completely the opposite end:
long takes observed from a clinical distance lend a sort of CCTV drama
and give violence a casual toughness
that is difficult to watch.

Michael Haneke comes here to mind, particularly White Ribbon and Funny Games,
but the Tribe is ultimately very much its own thing.

The question you ask before you see the film is of course how on earth are you meant to understand the action
if you don’t speak sign language?

 I was astounded at how comprehensible everything is, through look,
gesture,
atmosphere,
emotion and performance.

As someone who is generally a fan of smart, talky films and wise dialogue,
it was a revelation!

I had, sincerely, expected to be bored and yet was gripped, constantly engaged in what was happening and actively enjoying the process of deciphering the interactions between the teens….
One area which I’ve not completely made my mind up about was the film’s depiction of its female characters.

But their motivations remained much more opaque than the male characters.

I never understood why these teens would allow themselves to be pimped by their school mates to truck drivers in dirty and dangerous conditions;
it really doesn’t look like the sex involved is at all satisfying, nor the money generous.

One girl in particular suffers through some horrendous treatment and yet behaves as if nothing has happened.

It’s not as if she’s repressing a horror, but as if it was nothing to her.
the context of the film’s nihilism, perhaps that’s an artistic choice, rather than carelessness …

 

 

Philippe Lacote’s RUN was my second film of the day in Salle Debussy.

I got there two hours early.

Ploughed through another 20 pages of my Truman Capote novel.

Was one of the first people into the screen, and got a front row seat.

Isaac de Bankolé (recently seen in the excellent CALVARY) is one of my favorite actors, so to see him stroll up on to the stage was a real thrill. The film is set on the Ivory Coast and follows the protagonist, Run, through a shifting chronology.

It manages to say all the right things about corruption and hardship in the Ivory Coast, whilst also feeling far more accessible and light-hearted than TIMBUKTU (a film for which I also have a strong affection).

The cinematography is gorgeous!

And what some felt to be a bizarre rhythm to the film due to the shifting chronology of events,
I found to be a rather refreshing way
for telling a story.

I left the screening feeling very positive
and ready for a couple of other movies
in quick succession.

It was, however, not meant to be…

To be fair to the South of France, it does provide some stunningly good weather,
and I was in very good company with my film festival buddies for all afternoon and all quees, getting slowly burnt by the sun.

…you don’t feel very well this morning…

Hair has grown all over your body…

you have huge nails…

in fact, your parents never told you, as they preferred to speak to you about your bad scholar results…

but you are a wolf…

YOU ARE A FUCKING WOLF DARLING.

In the film « When Animals Dream » by Jonas Alexander Arnby (Semaine de la critique), the young Marie is harassed because of her animal tropism.

The villagers would like to put her down with dozens of pills just as they did with her mum, glued to a rolling chair.

A rather heavy metaphor about intolerance, but an astounding mixes of social fantasy and realism.
And a backward sort of feminization: here the beast is blonde and has soft skin. When her lover kisses her, she is born again…

 

….I then went back to the apartment in Nice and got changed into my black pea-green half evening dressed, as I had invitations to screenings in the Grand Theater Lumière this evening.

First up was Argentinean director Damián Szifron’s RELATOS SALVAJES. 

Damián Szifron and his cast and crew from RELATOS SALVAJES walk up the red carpet and into the screen, sitting behind me.

The contingent includes energetic director Pedro Almodóvar (a producer on the film), and Ricardo Darín, the brilliant Argentinean actor from THE SECRET IN THEIR EYES a few years ago.

The film begins and the audience is super-charged after a day drinking and queuing on the sun-drenched pavements and courtyards of Cannes. Through a series of five, loosely interlinked stories, at some point, everything (and I mean everything) falls apart in a manner that reminded me of some of the best of Roald Dahl’s short stories.

As each segment of the film concludes, the audience bursts into applause, wondering how the next tale can possibly top the previous one, but the energy and pacing of the film is relentless. I loved it!

It was then back into the queue with Serbia, Swedish, American and Greek fellows, for Kristian Levring’s THE SALVATION – starting at half past midnight.

It’s a balmy Saturday evening on the French Riviera, and everyone’s here to have a good time.

The Danish director of this Western, starring Mads Mikkelsen, has infused the genre with a good smattering of Nordic Noir, and I enjoyed it immensely. 

Just as much as I enjoy any film or human production from the North…

 

….Is it really day seven?

Has this really been going on for a week?

It feels like three weeks at least.

That karaoke party I went to … last night? It was at least a fortnight ago, I know it in my bones!

I can feel my body aging at an accelerated pace as I ping-pong between movies and meetings in the hot sun, forgetting to eat for 12 hours at a time …

….until I land at a dinner where the portions of rich, fatty, delicious French food make me feel woozy and disoriented, which I try to resolve by flooding my body with rosé and staying awake for as long as possible.

It doesn’t seem like a logical way to cope, I know.

But it’s been working for me for the eight or nine months that this festival has lasted.

 It has been at least eight months, hasn’t it?

…and then down to the Petit Majestic to drink Desperados (they are tequila flavoured beers and they are gross) and hang out.

I got into a really interesting conversation about relationships and friendships within the film biz, with a film fest acquaintance from Berlin...
... and then realized how late it was and bolted.

…I hope I run into him again because it would be very worth continuing that chat!....

 

By Giulia GHica Dobre