Some Came Running

Hello, sailors

There's a perception out there that critics in general, and film critics in particular, are a herd of snooty, pinkie-in-the-air, latte and/or martini swilling elitists who enjoy nothing better than getting together and laughing at ordinary hard-working Americans. Well, I'm here to tell you: we drink beer just like everybody else. Only it's European beer, get me?

You might be wondering what I'm getting at. Truth to tell, I'm wondering what I'm getting at myself.

Okay, there's a story from Cannes that I've been wanting to tell, but didn't want to tell without evidence in hand. Now that it's in hand—or, rather, on desktop—I will spill.

Cannes Award Winners: A User's Guide

Break it down:

PALME D'OR: Entre Les Murs (The Class), directed by Laurent Cantet

As Dave Kehr points out, the first French film to take Cannes top prize in 21 years, and surely a less controversial pick than the last one, Pialat's Under the Sun of Satan. With such films as Time Out, Human Resources, and Heading South, all of which got some American distribution and were largely well-received by critics, Cantet has shown a knack for tackling socially relevant subject matter without coming off too didactic. This picture is an unusual fiction/reality hybrid: based on a book by Francois Begaudeau about his experiences as a teacher in a French equivalent of an inner city, it stars Begaudeau as himself and a cast of non-professionals as his charges. A comment by juror Marjane Satrapi sheds some light on the rationale for the prize: "There is almost nothing I believe in anymore. But if there is something I believe in, it is culture and education." Kent Jones, in the comments section of Dave's site, reveals himself to have been less impressed by the picture: "if you’ve seen it, it’s impossible to avoid a comparison with the fourth season of The Wire, which is not flattering to the Cantet...[it's not] a bad film, but it seemed like small potatoes compared with Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale or a Lucrecia Martel’s startling The Headless Woman."

As I noted in a post below, I missed Entre les Murs; I look forward to seeing it, but I'm with Kent on the Desplechin and look forward to a chance to see the Martel again, as my initial viewing of it took place under less-than-optimum circumstances...

Well, never put ME in charge of a Sports Book...

...because, in a switcheroo familiar to many Cannes veterans (didn't this happen with Rosetta, too?), the Palme D'or went to the last film in the Competition, Laurent Cantet's fact-based The Class, the last film shown in the comp but one that I could have seen had I not been blogging to the point of time-distraction into its noon Friday screening. Damn. I heard it was actually good, too.

Zip for Waltz With Bashir, although in fairness (condolences is maybe the better word) to myself, I wasn't the only one betting. I'm about to leave the house now (I know, that's a Jonah Goldberg excuse, but it's actually true and I could be actually killed if I don't move my butt), but my indieWIRE buddies have got all the awards covered.

I said it in the print version of Premiere, and I'll say it again: Never, ever try to predict what a Cannes jury will do. More later, including gratification over the recognition of Gomorra and head-scratching over the recognition of Il Divo. Is Italian cinema back?

Palme D'Or sports book...

Jeff Wells is reporting on some "scuttlebutt" that Steven Soderbergh's controversial (yet terrific!) Che "may—I say 'may'—be in a favoring position to win the Palme D'Or."

Way to hedge your bets there, my friend. Jeff goes on to surmise that Jury president Sean Penn's "lefty political views" are motivating his push for the movie. Maybe so. Although I must point out that >Che itself is not in any particular way a lefty film. I imagine Penn would have preferred a more overt piece of agitprop to the measured, almost Rossellini-esque vision Soderbergh's put forth. In any case, for a Cannes jury led by Sean Penn to give a Palme d'Or to a movie named Che is just too obvious. Me, I'm sticking with the prediction I made to pals on the first night of the festival—that Ari Folman's animated inquiry into Israeli guilt, Waltz With Bashir, would take the Palme. Not only does it fulfill Penn's obnoxious requirement of being conscious of the world we're living in today, but it examines a phenomenon that most Israel-boosters in the U.S. would baldly deny even conceivably exists. Also, the mere act of a French film festival honoring an Israeli film would be big symbolic/semiotic news to those who pay attention to such things. How could Penn resist? Unless he's so anti-Israel he can't even countenance Folman's vision, which is entirely possible, I guess. But still. That's my prediction, and I'm sticking to it.

"But Glenn," you say,"you're blogging as if Sean Penn is the only member of the Cannes jury. He's just the president of it. Don't you think he's going to be obliged to listen to his fellow jurors?"

In a word, no. You think Natalie Portman's actually going to stand up to Sean Penn? You think Alfonso Cauron and Sergio Castellitto don't have better things to do with their lives than bicker with a steamrolling Yankee asshole? (Castellitto, many of you will be happy to learn, was just cast in a new film by...wait for it...Jacques Rivette, to co-star Jane Birkin.) You think Apitchatpong Weerasethakul is anything but just happy to be there? No. The only jury member I can see giving Penn any significant resistance is feisty Persepolis creator Marjane Satrapi, who delivered the lone rejoinder to the president's asinine relevance rules at the opening press conference. And she's likely to be pretty partial to Waltz, for reasons easily inferable.

We'll see in a few hours. For myself, I'm about to get on a plane, bound for home, sweet home. Anybody interested in a friendly wager...?

The Mysteries of Cannes, #2, updated

By day, Le Petit Majestic is about as unprepossessing as a corner bistro can get:

By night, it's a spilling-into-the-street madhouse! The below shot was snapped on a slow night!

"But Glenn," you ask, "what of les films?" Well, right now I'm wrestling with Charlie Kaufman's almost-epic Synedoche, New York for a second Critic's Notebook for indieWIRE. Did I like it? "Like" is kind of not applicable. Questions persist as to whether density equals profundity. Just what is the state of the film's protagonist? Is solipsism all there is? I'm grappling, grappling.

Easier times were had with Philippe Garrel's Frontier of Dawn, a nice soak for those who love the indolent angoisse and tristesse of the Garrel mood, something the director is able to conjure, a friend noted, just by turning on the camera. Or so it seems. The more some folks ostentatiously laughed at the introduction of a supernatural angle into the plot (achieved via effects that date back to Cocteau if not Melies), the more I loved the film.

Atom Egoyan's Adoration, coming on the heels of the largely disastrous Where the Truth Lies, returns the writer/director to the unstuck-in-time, jigsaw-puzzle-assembling structures of his earlier pictures; here, the topics are life fictions, disemmination of information on the internet (this is in a sense the longest MacBook commercial ever), cultural difference, bigotry, and terrorism. At the heart of the picture, though, is a simpering sanctimony that could well bring out the neo-con you never knew you had in you. The "oh no, the nice old man is really a racist" theme is fairly tiresome, while a bit with figures from a creche is just, well, weak. Perhaps others less damaged than myself will be righteously stirred.

I may or may not get into the new Cantet in any minute, and after that, more wrestling with Kaufman, and after that, Wenders' The Palermo Shooting. Wenders, Hopper, Jovavich...and Lou Reed and Patti Smith as themselves. Because when you think "Palermo," you think Lou Reed and Patti Smith. Although, in fairness I have to note that I've heard that Palermo is a fairly happening gig for rockers of this undergound/post-underground ilk. So there's a rationale for their presence. We shall see...

UPDATE: At indieWIRE you can see what my grapplings with Synedoche, New York, yielded. Click here.

The Mysteries of Cannes, #1

I bet you're curious as to why there's a portrait of Gary Coleman painted on the side of this building in Cannes. And I'm sure that you'll be even more curious when I inform you that the building in question is the municipality's train station. I mean, I'm curious...

The fine folks at IndieWIRE have asked me to file a couple of Critic's Notebooks from the Festival; please do go there and check out my first, an examination of the competition's overall tone and a consideration of Steven Soderbergh's Che, which I liked quite a bit. But don't worry, there'll be more stuff here before long.

Cannes, Competition: "La Mujer Sin Cabeza," "Gomorra""

La Mujer Sin Cabeza

Confession time: as a result of hitting a Cannes wall that I really didn't see coming, I zoned out and occasionally even dozed through substantial bits of Argentinean director Lucrecia Martel's new film, the title of which translates as The Woman Without A Head. Some of the detractors of the film (which does not feature any decapitations) might try to comfort me with the notion that the 87-minute-film is, in fact, boring. And while Mujer is a far quieter film than Martel's sardonic 2001 feature debut La Cienega, not to mention it's followup, 2004's The Holy Girl. Mujer doesn't lack for stuff—but the register of the film's nuances is so narrow that unless you're paying proper attention, the image will disappear before your eyes. A fancy way of saying that I need to see this story of the discreet guilt-trip of one particular bourgeoisie again.

Cannes, Competition: "Changeling," "Two Lovers"

Changeling

Clint Eastwood opens his 1920s-'30s set film Changeling with a period logo of its studio—here, Universal, with its silvery, Deco-esque depiction of a small plane circling the globe. The slight but noteworthy irony here is that this picture is nothing like a Universal production of that era—it is instead, very much like a Warner Brothers production of that era and beyond. (Eastwood just recently stopped hanging his producing hat at Warner's, alas.)

For Changeling rings the muckracking bells of the likes of I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang, and the devoted-mother high notes of Stella Dallas. Its old-fashionedness, or I should say respect for verities, goes hand-in-hand with a particularly Eastwood-esque directness. The result is not as perfect a film as Eastwood has made, but it's damn strong, both as a story and an exploration of the parent-child bond...and, as it happens, as a polemic. Because despite the fact that it deals with the corruption and venality of a past era, Changeling is at times a very angry picture; Eastwood's angriest, I think, since Unforgiven.

Cannes, Competition: "Le Silence de Lorna," "Serbis"

Le Silence de Lorna

Back in the early '80s, the clamorous consistency of the Mancunian rock band The Fall was at such a high level that some fans got a little jaded. "Ho-hum, another great Fall album," we would shrug while at the same time marveling at such achievements as Perverted by Language or This Nation's Saving Grace, or what have you.

The art of Belgian filmmaking brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne doesn't have a whole helluva a lot to do with that of The Fall's (although if somebody wants to issue a challenge, I'm sure I could come up with some convincing affinities), except for the fact that at the moment they're making film after film of such unassailable excellence that it's getting a little predictable. Their new one, Le Silence De Lorna, is their followup to the 2006 Palme d'Or winner L'Enfant, and while I doubt that the Cannes prize is gonna go to this film (which IS, you know, "conscious of the world that we're living in" and all, but in a way that's likely too quiet to please self-righteous jury president Sean Penn), I think it's every bit as nuanced, surprising, and deeply moving as that film.

Cannes, Out of Competition: "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull," "Vicky Christina Barcelona," "The Chaser"

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Best appreciated as a pulp prequel to Close Encounters of the Third Kind...no, I can't. I mean the thing kind of is that, but the fourth Indy installment isn't really an attempt to retroactively create a Spielberg omniverse. But David Koepp's script, from a story by George Lucas and Jeff Nathanson and Herge and Edgar Rice Burroughs and Erik von Daniken and Carl Stephenson and...well, you get the idea...does tie together a good number of Spielbergian themes into an eventually pretty nifty package. Yeah—this is, by my sights, the most fun and least irritating installment of the series since the first one.

Although it starts out pretty unpromisingly.