Cannes 2009

[Mister Tee]

Thanks to Sonic and the others who've been keeping this up to date.

It doesn't appear to be a Cannes where anyone saw God. There was the obligatory "it's godawful/it's genius" split over AntiChrist (about which I'm already bored senseless), some films that seemed generally well-received (Bright Star, Vincere, maybe Fish Tank)...but mostly reactions seem either highly mixed (for Haneke and Tarantino) or "decent enough" (for Loach, Almoodovar, et al.)

All of which points to a much up-in-the-air Palme race. Not to say the competition is ever predictable -- but at least many years you know which film is thought to deserve it, even if the jury goes bonkers in another direction. This year, I don't see much in the way of a betting favorite...and Precious Doll may be right: that may lead to life-achievement recognition for someone like Resnais.

As far as the secondary, "does any of this affect the Oscars?" question -- I'd say it shapes up as the least impactful Cannes on AMPAS in many years. The films that might have been in Oscar's wheelhouse -- Taking Woodstock, Inglourious Basterds -- are being largely shrugged off. Bright Star is the only film that seems like it might get a boost. (I'm not counting Up -- which gave more to Cannes than Cannes could ever give to it -- or Precious, which is and forever will be a Sundance discovery) Am I missing something?

[Sonic Youth]

A few reviews for Giannoli's competition entry. I think Variety's regular reviewers are starting to go home early:

Film Review: In the Beginning
By Kirk Honeycutt
Hollywood Reporter

CANNES -- Xavier Giannoli's "In the Beginning" tells the sly comic story, based on an actual incident, of a con man who came to a depressed French industrial town, passed himself off as a project manager and lived off enough credit and good will to get a highway built before he was found out.

This story then has elements of both "The Music Man," in which a phony bandleader wants to con a town into buying non-existent musical instruments before finding himself caught up with the town's folks, and "Being There," in which people urgently want to believe in someone despite evidence to the contrary.

This Cannes Competition entry runs 151 minutes. The film certainly whisks by in no time, but its lengthy running time could be a problem when the makers try to secure overseas distribution. Francois Cluzet brilliantly plays "Phillipe Miller," as he calls himself.

Phillipe is not your usual movie con artist. He is somewhat shy and awkward, more a listener than a talker. So what happens is that a town desperate for jobs for its idle workforce all but talks him into his scheme.

All Phillipe wants to do is take a few kickbacks and hurry out of town. But the look in people's eyes and the respect he gets, a guy just out of prison, from everyone including its attractive widow mayor (Emmanuelle Devos) force him to stay.

A large project in the town previously stalled over ecological concerns regarding a protected beetle discovered on the site. A new highway would alleviate this problem so Philippe rents the equipment, hires a crew and everyone is happy.

Previous work in construction has given him enough expertise that he actually knows what he's doing. But when bills go unpaid and rumors start to fly, he keeps juggling money from those kickbacks and loans a local banker foolishly makes -- it's no more than the price of an expensive car, the banker muses -- so that work can continue. Meanwhile, Philippe becomes a part of the community and its people and starts to see what might have been had he not wasted time with criminal pursuits. Then, of course, he is still involved in a criminal enterprise although at the rate he's spending money, he'll see no profit.

The mayor, Stephane, becomes his lover. A maid in his hotel, Monika (musician-poet Soko), a charming and strangely innocent single mom, becomes his right-hand assistant. Her boyfriend Nicolas (Vincent Rottiers) gets work from him too, but since he is also a thief he soon enough recognizes the con man in Phillipe.

Two ticking clocks hang over the project. One is the agreed-upon date for salary payments; the other is an ex-partner in crime, Abel (a menacing Gerard Depardieu), who comes looking for the guy who robbed him.

Giannoli, who writes and directs, uses his running time to examine the conflicting emotions and motives not only in this con man who falls for his own con but in all the town's people. These are all richly detailed, in-depth characterizations.

Even in Nicolas, the local bad boy, you see that desperate times are pushing his anti-social behavior and with Monika that her optimism is always tinged with a suspicion of others earned from past experience.

The project foreman (Brice Fournier) pitches in with such enthusiasm that he almost wills the project to be real. And, of course, the mayor, for whom the con is very personal, sees in Phillipe a good man no one has ever before tried to reach.

Thanks to Cluzet and Devos, the story's central relationship and the deception that lies at the heart of it is always credible. There is much emotional danger at every step, as each character gets deeper and deeper into a situation whose muddiness is trapping them faster than the asphalt hardening on the highway.

For what is a small, intimate story, the film is rather large as an entire highway construction project with its considerable trucks and machinery, often working in pouring rain, is the main set. Perhaps Xavier Giannoli is a bit of a con man himself to pull off what looks like a remarkably difficult shoot.

------------------------------

In The Beginning (A L’Origine)
21 May, 2009 | By Mike Goodridge
Screendaily

Dir/scr: Xavier Giannoli. France. 2009. 155 minutes.


France’s Xavier Giannoli tells the true story of a small-time conman whose latest fraudulent scheme brings hope to a depressed community in In The Beginning, a sort of social realist Capra-esque fable set in the rain and grit of northern France. Giannoli’s expansive fourth feature is far less intimate than his last, lovely Quand J’Etais Chanteur, although his talent with actors and his keen observation are still in evidence. The film is crippled, however, by an extreme running time of 155 minutes which dilutes rather than strengthens the message of the story and will have even the most patient cinephiles shifting in their seats.

France is the target market here, especially with the potent star trio of Francois Cluzet, Emanuelle Devos and Gerard Depardieu in lead roles. International buyers might be cautious about taking a chance on the bleak setting and running time, not to mention the specific French flavour of the road construction sequences at the film’s core.

Perhaps Giannoli’s chief challenge in the story is that the audience is asked to relate to a jailbird whose actions for much of the film are both criminal and stupid. That his con scheme takes on a life of its own and brings a sense of value and worth to the town he’s in is a side-effect which brings him back to life and generates some empathy for the character, but it’s only a matter of time before his scheme catches up with him – an inevitability which hangs over every scene.

As played with a quiet desperation by Cluzet, Paul is an ex-con who gets out of jail and immediately rips off his friend and fellow small-time crook Abel (Depardieu). On the road in the far north of France, he starts to carry out petty scams which involve buying and reselling construction equipment using fake documentation. Before long, he ends up in a smalltown hotel pretending to work for a construction giant called CGI.

What he doesn’t realise is that the town has been languishing in unemployment and misery since CGI pulled out of a major road building project two years earlier due to an infestation of beetles.

After a banal chat with the hotel maid Monika (Soko), word spreads round the town quickly that a CGI executive is visiting and planning to reactivate the road project. Within days, Paul, who now calls himself Philippe Miller, is taking meetings with the mayor (Devos) and accepting kickbacks from suppliers who want his business.

Unable to halt the momentum of the project and buoyed by the unstoppable enthusiasm of the townsfolk, Paul, aka Philippe, leads a team which starts to rebuild the road, using a phony company name and a 90-day window before he has to pay any of the suppliers.

Giannoli goes into every detail of the scam and every step of the process whereby the town is galvanized, then stupefied as the people who trusted Philippe as their saviour begin to realise the extent of his deceit. Yet the film suggests that he isn’t quite such a villain, since he manages to restore hope and community to the town.

But in a post Bernie Madoff-world where unemployment is a global epidemic, many viewers might not receive Philippe’s grand deception as warmly as Giannoli would like.

------------------------------------------------


In the Beginning
A l'origine
(France)

By BOYD VAN HOEIJ
Variety

A small-time crook on the road to nowhere reinvents himself -- somewhat by accident -- as the head of a nonexistent freeway construction company in Xavier Giannoli's "In the Beginning." True story of a stretch of asphalt rolled out by formerly jobless road workers in northern France, under the command of an impostor, blends social critique, character drama and crime into one smooth, good-looking package. With "Tell No One" star Francois Cluzet as well as Gerard Depardieu and Emmanuelle Devos in the cast, pic should be able to make inroads into high-end Euro arthouses despite its 2½ -hour running time.

Pic is Giannoli's second to play in the Cannes competition after his Depardieu starrer "The Singer" (2006). And like that film, "In the Beginning" does not eschew dramatic conventions, but rather uses them to craft something subtler than a mere genre work.

By chance, recently released con man Paul (Cluzet) stumbles on a small community in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region, whose inhabitants have been struggling to make ends meet ever since a huge construction site for a nearby motorway was abandoned some years earlier.

Posing as an employee of construction giant CGI for a minor scam, Paul finds himself inundated with questions about what the locals assume can only be the reopening of the site. When he realizes the town's out-of-business subcontractors are offering 15% in cash to secure their participation, he decides to reopen the site by setting up a "subsidiary" of CGI with a staff of one: himself.

Everyone in the town, including the attractive, widowed mayor, Stephane (Devos), is too overjoyed at the prospect of economic prosperity to question some of Paul's stranger working methods.

Though the film is as much about telling the story of a depressed northern French town -- the flipside of "Welcome to the Sticks" -- as it is about Paul and his road, Giannoli's economical plotting allows him to explore these subjects by concentrating on just two quietly turbulent love stories. Stephane and Paul's affair, which blooms despite the latter's hesitation, represents those higher up in the social order, while working-class couple Monica (mono-monikered artist Soko), who becomes Paul's secretary, and Nicolas (Vincent Rottiers), a petty criminal-turned-road worker, represent the duped masses.

Teasing out the parallels between the smaller threads and the bigger picture, Giannoli explores different gray areas. Cluzet's portrayal of Paul as a fumbling opportunist who finds himself involved in something larger than himself, rather than as a smooth-talking evildoer, makes it easier to root for him. One wants him to get out of there before he's discovered, even if this means leaving the one person he might really love. Depardieu, in a small but pivotal part, and Devos lend able support as more polarized characters, but it's young Rottiers who impresses in the film's other ambiguous role.

Though the long running time will undoubtedly limit commercial prospects, it would be hard to pinpoint any one scene that could easily go, as Giannoli's treatment benefits from the larger, cumulative effects of editor Celia Lafitedupont's work.

Ace d.p. Glynn Speeckaert alternates between a functional approach to the smaller human stories and more fanciful widescreen images of the construction site.

A triumphant "dance" of engineering vehicles around Paul is especially memorable, visually expressing the town's hope for a brighter future. Cliff Martinez's score gets the job done but is not particularly memorable; other tech credits are strong.

For the record, the whereabouts of the real-life Paul are currently unknown. The stretch of motorway he built was made in accordance with all the regulations but still had to be demolished and redone, as a person who used it could have been charged as an "accessory to fraud for profiting from the fruit of an offense."



Edited By Sonic Youth on 1242944713

[Precious Doll]

More Wild Grass reviews. I'm getting a premonition that this may be the big winner.

I don't think that Resnais has ever won the top prize at Cannes and this may be one of his last chances given his age. That he is one of the few living legends still working in cinema won't hurt his changes either.

He did win the Special Jury Prize in 1980 for My American Uncle though. I would say that at the very least he may win Best Director.



Edited By Precious Doll on 1242855600

[Sonic Youth]

More Wild Grass reviews. I'm getting a premonition that this may be the big winner.


Film Review: Les Herbes Folles (Wild Grass)
By Duane Byrge
Hollywood Reporter

CANNES -- Her wigged-out, burnt-orange hair and black leather pants suggests she's the lead in "Cats," but this feline-fatale brings very bad luck. Whipped up from a novel, "L'Incident," "Les Herbes Folles" (Wild Grass) is a polished ditty from revered French director Alain Resnais. He's revered and he's French, and that's the likely explanation for inclusion of this demi-divertissement in the Competition.

In this slight cinematic, Andre Dussolier stars as Georges, a 50-ish, affluent gent whose decreasing mental state relegates him to house-husband for his younger wife. Georges is obtuse, and often does not connect his thoughts. He seemingly has trouble with the everyday, such as when he finds a woman's wallet and attempts to return it to her. It's a troubling process for Georges and more of a trouble for the woman, Marguerite (Sabine Azema), when he enters her life through this side incident.

Respectable-looking Georges is more than a little unhinged. He frightens Marguerite, a successful dentist and independent woman who flies her own plane. In an interesting twist, we soon suspect that Marguerite may be a bit of a fatal attraction: She shows up at his house late at night, neglects her patients, scares her partner/best friend.

Narratively, "Wild Grass" is a fractured romance, that never jells on any level, except for the backdrop visuals. Visually scrumptious, as if culled from the pages of good-taste magazines, it has the appeal of a designer catalog, and also the depth.

To the cineastes here at the fest, the homages du cinema (,a revival-house movie theater, as well as a blast from the 20th Century Fox theme, etc.) are attractive elements.

Indeed, filmmaker Alain Resnais has graced the frame with a lush look and surfaced it with an inviting glossy sheen, but never properly connected the characters to a cohesive narrative plot. Just because the characters are erratic does not mean the narrative should be. Structured as a dark-psychological romance, it's merely a poseur, a walk-through of unpredictable behavior.

Yet, at its roots, "Wild Grass" is merely a compilation of eye-candy fluff. It distracts with its warm visuals, but never fully fleshes out. With its thin narrative and elliptical story jumps, "Wild Grass" crashes and burns in a pretentious and unsatisfying manner.


--------------------------------------------------


Wild Grass (Les Herbes Folles)
20 May, 2009 | By Dan Fainaru
Screendaily

Dir. Alain Resnais. France-Italy. 2009. 104 mins.


Alain Resnais’ Wild Grass showcases one of the great masters of modern cinema with a romantic fantasy which displays the comfortable but consummate confidence of an artist who knows exactly what he wants to do and how to do it. If, once upon a time, audiences were scared away by the complexity of his work, here Resnais is offering a deceptively simple and elegant picture, which will grow in depth and meaning with every additional viewing. It’s evidently not one for wide commercial release, but beyond the festival circuit, select international art houses should show interest.

Working from Christian Gailly’s novel L’incident and using two of his favourite actors, Sabine Azema and Andre Dussollier, Resnais uses an ever-present off-screen narrator (Baer), to follow the last fling of middle-aged Mr. Palet (Dussollier). He accidentally finds a wallet belonging to the similarly middle-aged and charming dentist Ms Muir (Azema).

M. Palet is married, has grown-up children, while Mme. Muir is single. M Palet lives in his imagination no less than he does in real life, although he never shows it, while Mme Muir likes to believe she’s a realist but can’t resist a gentle streak of madness that erupts from time to time.

When M. Palet finds the wallet, he can’t stop fantasising about the woman who lost it, especially because she has a licence to fly planes, something he always dreamed of doing. He brings the wallet to a local policeman (Amalric), but then tries to contact her personally. Initially, she feels threatened and makes a complaint, but later curiosity gets the better of her.

In a certain sense, this is a natural extension of Resnais’ earlier Private Fears In Public Places. The leading characters are on the line which separates maturity from old age. In a certain respect, life holds no more promise for them - whatever they haven’t achieved yet seems unlikely to be achieved now and the fear of loneliness is weighing heavy. There’s a temptation there to try something new, whether it be an affair with a strange woman or flying for the first time. That these urges are cloaked behind courteous manners does not mean they do not erupt once in a while,.

Andre Dussollier, in a far from simple role, has to hint alternately at a possibly sinister past, at unsavoury present intentions, while suggesting he may not quite be in control of his own actions and somehow make this all feel warm and sympathetic. He does this with an effortless ease, as does Sabine Azema, who looks, acts and dresses like an independent woman, but always implies a slight edge of vulnerable insecurity hidden behind the self-assurance.

Anne Consigny’s understanding spouse and Emmanuelle Devos as Ms. Muir’s business partner provide excellent support. As for quotes, winks and references for the connoisseurs, there’s plenty of stuff to keep them busy. (The opening is a nod to Truffaut’s L’homme Qui Aimait Les Femmes, Ms. Muir is of course the heroine of the classic Mankiewicz picture bearing her name, etc). With splendid camera work by Eric Gautier, Jacques Saulnier’s sets eloquently provide the right background. Perfectly paced, this realistic fairytale is orchestrated with something of a magic touch by a director who can’t seem to put a foot wrong, even as he approaches his 87th birthday next month.

[Precious Doll]

Variety's review on the latest from Alain Resnais

Wild Grass
Les Herbes folles (France-Italy)
By JORDAN MINTZER
A StudioCanal (in France) release of an F Comme Film, StudioCanal, France 2 Cinema (France)/Bim Distribuzione (Italy) production, in association with Cinemage 3, with participation of Canal Plus, TPS Star, Eurimages, CNC. (International sales: Orly Films, Paris.) Produced by Jean-Louis Livi. Executive producer, Julie Salvador.
Directed by Alain Resnais. Screenplay, Alex Reval, Laurent Herbiert, based on the novel "L'Incident" by Christian Gailly.

With: Sabine Azema, Andre Dussollier, Anne Consigny, Emmanuelle Devos, Mathieu Amalric, Michel Vuillermoz, Edouard Baer, Annie Cordy, Sara Forestier, Nicolas Duvauchelle, Vladimir Consigny.


At the ripe age of 87, and exactly half a century since dropping a cinematic atom bomb with "Hiroshima mon amour," Alain Resnais continues his career-long experiment in filmmaking with the playfully flamboyant melodrama "Wild Grass." More freewheeling than 2006's "Private Fears in Public Places," but with a similar networking structure that connects the destinies of several melancholy adults into one intriguing web, the pic is marked by superb performances and a dazzling technical display by the helmer and praiseworthy cinematographer Eric Gautier. "Grass" should spread abundantly among the auteur's enthusiasts, but probably won't grow far outside the arthouse lawn.
Like "Private Fears" and several other recent features by Resnais, the film is an adaptation of an existing work that the director (this time aided by relatively inexperienced scribes Alex Reval and Laurent Herbiert) transforms into his own, often elusive, but rarely misguided dramatic vision.

Based on French writer Christian Gailly's 1996 novel "L'incident" -- which recounts how a stolen wallet results in an unlikely and unrequited love affair -- the story starts with the event itself and then quickly spirals out of control, taking its characters through hilarious scenarios and digressions while always maintaining a dark undertone.

The two opening scenes, which trail protags Marguerite (Resnais regular Sabine Azema) and Georges (Andre Dussollier, impeccable) with lush tracking shots reminiscent of the helmer's work from the '50s and '60s, show Georges scooping up Marguerite's wallet in a suburban parking garage. Revealing their faces only at the end of each sequence, yet providing ample voiceover from both of them, the helmer portrays the characters doing one thing while imagining the amusing opposite -- a technique he repeats throughout the movie.

As it turns out, Georges is a happily married family man with a lovely wife, Suzanne, (Anne Consigny) and two charming kids (Sara Forestier, Vladimir Consigny), while Marguerite is a single dentist who flies airplanes as a hobby. Immediately drawn to a photo of Marguerite in the wallet -- and the fact that she's a pilot -- Georges nevertheless can't decide whether to make contact at first, but eventually chases her down in harassing fashion.

For the first hour, the narrative dances around the couple's numerous miscommunications, and Resnais keeps things interesting and surprising by delving into techniques that hail back to classic studio filmmaking. Employing several impressive pans, push-ins, and crane shots, the camera of d.p. Gautier ("A Christmas Tale," "Into the Wild," and Resnais' "Private Fears") is forever roving, but manages to hit the perfect closeup when one of the actors delivers a pivotal line.

The images are matched by Hollywood composer Mark Snow ("The X Files: I Want to Believe"), whose playfully retro soundtrack runs the gamut of themes from jazzy Lalo Schiffrin-esque rhythms to pounding thriller beats from the '80s. Another form of music comes from the voiceovers themselves, whose succinct, lyrical flow mimics author Bailly's simple but abstract writing style.

When Georges' come-ons begin to feel dangerous, Marguerite contacts a pair of Keystone-style cops (Mathieu Amalric, Michel Vuillermoz), who show up at Georges' for a hysterically offbeat interrogation scene. But nothing, not even Suzanne's half-concerned questions, can stop this bizarre yet passionate romance from happening, and Resnais carries things toward a sadly inevitable conclusion that's pulled off with supreme skill, as well as some of his trademark dissonance.

Always a strong and demanding director, the helmer gets marvelous performances from all the cast members, with Dussollier's representing one of the better ones of his long career. As usual, Azema is completely on point in portraying someone who's all over the place -- a sentiment illustrated by her hairstyle, which looks like it was concocted with the help of a humidifier. Less forceful in its depiction of doomed extramarital affairs than his masterly "Mon oncle d'Amerique," yet sharper in wit and comic virtuosity, "Wild Grass" shows that although Resnais has grown more light-hearted in old age, he hasn't lost his desire to challenge the viewer on all levels.

More than one option
(Co) Canal Plus
Filmography, Year, Role
(Co) StudioCanal
Camera (color, Panavision widescreen), Eric Gautier; editor, Herve de Luze; music, Mark Snow; production designer, Jacques Saulnier; costume designer, Jackie Budin; sound (Dolby Digital/DTS), Jean-Marie Blondel, Gerard Hardy, Gerard Lamps; visual effects; Frederic Moreau; assistant director, Christophe Jeauffroy. Reviewed at Cannes Film Festival (competing), May 19, 2009. Running time: 113 MIN.

[Sonic Youth]

Catching up with D'Angelo:

Looking for Eric ('09 Loach): 51. Harmless crowdpleasing piffle. Might mean more to soccer fans, I suppose.

Vincere ('09 Bellocchio): 69. Perhaps the best imaginable film about a historical footnote. First hour is itself awesomely Fascistic.

And possibly most newsworthy:

Wild Grass ('09 Resnais): ??? In its unobtrusive way, this may be among the 10 or 20 strangest films I've ever seen. I am clueless.

(In response to someone:) WILD GRASS is much more overtly bizarre, to the point where by the end it's arguably gone full-bore Dada. The last line especially.



Edited By Sonic Youth on 1242780113

[Sonic Youth]

Marco Bellochio's "Vincere":

Vincere
(Italy-France)
By JAY WEISSBERG
Variety

Momentous events require suitably powerful storytelling, which vet helmer Marco Bellocchio delivers in "Vincere," the little-known story of Benito Mussolini's ill-fated first wife and son. Conceived as grand opera set inside delineated space, it's a thrilling, at times brilliant piece of staging that never forgets the emotional pull of either the tragic personal tale or the ramifications of history. Structurally and tonally, the pic opens like "Gotterdammerung" and moves to the more ruminative "Siegfried," which means auds might feel the last quarter loses steam, but the arthouse crowd will still flock, at home and abroad.

That's partly due to an unquestionably great story, which only recently come to light. Opening shifts between Milan, 1914, and Trent, 1907, the years when Mussolini (Filippo Timi) was a Socialist union organizer loudly asserting God's nonexistence. Following a fleeting meeting in Trent, the beautiful Ida Dalser (Giovanna Mezzogiorno) rekindles her fascination with the bold rabble-rouser on the eve of World War I, when Mussolini switches sides and goes from pacifist to hawk.

Ida's attraction to the demagogue is palpable -- where she's hungry for his larger-than-life personality, he's positively voracious for power. During their forceful sex scenes, Mussolini keeps his eyes fixed forward, as if he's pounding the future itself to break through his fears of mediocrity.

When Ida sells all her possessions to fund her lover's new newspaper, the rise of Fascism is set into play. Bellocchio stages one of his most stunning scenes as Mussolini incites a riot in a cinema between pro- and antiwar partisans, accompanied visually by newsreels from the battlefield and by the piano accompanist's bellicose scoring.

By 1915, Ida had a son, Benito Albino Mussolini, and a still-missing marriage certificate, but soon she learns her husband has married Rachele Guidi (Michela Cescon). From then on, Mussolini distances himself from Ida, and ensures she and her son are kept away. At first subjected to near house arrest at her sister's home, Ida is then thrown into an insane asylum, where she furiously writes to Mussolini, the Pope and others demanding her marriage be recognized.

Bellocchio convincingly imagines Ida as a woman obsessed nearly to the point of lunacy, but she's also completely aware of what she's doing. Her madness becomes both foolhardy and tragic; without minimizing Mussolini's pomposity or headlong grasp for power at all costs, Bellocchio refuses to demonize the root of Ida's obsession.

In political terms, the script is keen to present Il Duce as a man strikingly devoid of a moral compass. Bellocchio makes Mussolini's alliance with the Vatican particularly clear, and shows how his move from vocal atheist to papal supporter ensured both his jettisoning of Ida and his grip on the reins of government. Pic's title, the imperative form of "Victory," comes from Il Duce's rousing speeches, geared to mobilize the public to war.

The direction he'll be taking the country is presciently illustrated by a column of blind classmates, conceived as a choral interlude, which references the famed parable of the blind leading the blind as well as John Singer Sargent's haunting war masterpiece "Gassed." Rarely has actuality footage been used so superbly, not merely for period flavor but as integral to the storyline: Once Mussolini renounces Ida, he's only seen as she sees him, through newsreels.

While the history is fascinating, it's the film's style that takes the breath away. Bellocchio sets up his scenes like acts from an opera, alternately theatrical, spectacular, intimate and resounding. Blasts of oratorio, insistent texts overlaid on images, even thunder and lightning become tools containing all the "unnatural" excesses of opera: The full import is conveyed as rightfully larger-than-life.

Both Mezzogiorno and Timi are perfectly cast. He's got Il Duce's grandstanding down pat, yet Timi's Mussolini is also frighteningly human. Mezzogiorno, moving and pathetic, pairs him beautifully: Her Ida is cultivated (as opposed to Rachele's coarse peasant accent) and intelligent, a woman battered by her brush with unfettered power.

Carlo Crivelli's music is a tour-de-force -- it's been a long time since this kind of orchestration has been so well used. Sweeping and bold, it harks back to some of the grand compositions of Hollywood's golden age, yet there isn't a whiff of the old-fashioned in its power to thrill.


---------------------------------------------------------

Vincere
19 May, 2009 | By Lee Marshall
Screendaily

Dir: Marco Bellocchio. Italy-France. 2008. 128 mins.


Veteran Italian director Marco Bellocchio delivers his most commercial feature to date in this artsy melodrama about Ida Dalser, the mother of the only illegitimate child notorious womaniser Benito Mussolini ever acknowledged. It’s a curious but rousingly cinematic work that for all its flashy stylistic quirks is at heart as old-fashioned as its surging orchestral score. As a study of the personal tensions behind Italian history’s grand events, Vincere lacks the sensitivity of the director’s Aldo Moro kidnapping drama Buongiorno Notte; but as a stirring portrait of a woman wronged, it delivers the emotional goods.

Few of Bellocchio’s films have received more than the most cursory arthouse runs outside of Italy, although this could end up being a partial exception. In Italy, where 01 Distribution releases Vincere on May 20, the film’s Cannes competition slot and the all-out performances of local favourites Giovanna Mezzogiorno and Filippo Timi as Dalser and Mussolini should guarantee a solid run.

Ida Dalser merits only eight lines in Denis Mack Smith’s definitive English biography of Mussolini, but in Italy she has been the subject of at least two books and a TV documentary. She and Mussolini began their liaison in 1914 when she was a well-to-do beauty salon owner and he was an impoverished firebrand socialist agitator. In November 1915 she gave birth to a boy, also named Benito, who Mussolini initially recognised as his son. A year later, however, he married his other main squeeze, Rachele Guidi (who was the daughter of his father’s mistress), and as he rose to power he set about rewriting his left-wing past – and repudiating Ida and her son.

Bellocchio is good at creating atmosphere, and the first part of the film, set in an oppressive Milan, is a deft and breathless crescendo of scenes and inserts (including footage from newsreels and retro typographical flourishes) that establish the budding dictator’s fiery nature, his radical politics, and (in some steamy but not explicit couplings) the sexual passion that unites him to his mistress. The director lays his cards on the table by showing Mussolini’s marriage to Dalser – a rumour that has never been proven, though like most of its proponents, Bellocchio would claim that this is because Il Duce and his henchmen made sure that all the evidence was destroyed.

Back in her home town as Mussolini strutted his way to top office in 1923 and living with her brother and sister-in-law, Ida is kept under virtual house arrest by the local Fascists, and after writing an increasingly desperate series of letters to political and religious authorities, is committed to an asylum. Watched over by a stern sisterhood of nuns, she loses custody over her son and sees her increasingly shrill letters ignored, or never delivered. Things go little better for young Benito.

Carlo Crivelli’s swelling orchestral score – kept high in the mix throughout – gives the film a symphonic quality that is reinforced by an impressionistic montage of contemporary silent films, newsreel footage, desaturated tableaux featuring asylum inmates and overlaid oncreen Fascist slogans. Bellocchio’s directorial inventiveness – undimmed even after 35 years in the business – helps to paper over some of the more glaring chronological cracks in the story, especially in the later part (where the director has the neat idea of casting Timi, who played the young Mussolini, as the dictator’s grown-up son).

In the end, though, it’s Mezzogiorno’s sympathetic and unrestrained performance as a woman who was one of history’s victims that gives an auteur’s firework display its emotional heft.


---------------------------------------------------


Film Review: Vincere
By Natasha Senjanovic
Hollywood Reporter

CANNES -- Marco Bellocchio is no stranger to dividing critics and audiences with his films, and the highly anticipated "Vincere" is unlikely to be an exception. Bellocchio's name and Celluloid Dreams' selling power ensure that it will play in numerous countries, but this true story begs the question, "Why should we care about a woman in love with and driven mad by one of recent history's most brutal dictators?"

The film begins in 1907, with young Benito Mussolini (Filippo Timi, an established theater actor in Italy and a rising film star), a Socialist and union activist, provocatively "proving" that God does not exist to a spellbound group that includes the smitten Ida Dalser (Giovanna Mezzogiorno, "Love in the Time of Cholera").

In 1914, they become lovers and her passion for the charismatic journalist is total -- she will sell everything she owns to help him start his own newspaper. Initially a pacifist, we see that Mussolini already has changed his political tune and is now supporting WWI as the only means to cleanse society.

The sex scenes between Mezzogiorno and Timi are steamy without being gratuitous and Bellocchio eloquently establishes a powerful carnal connection between the two that persists even after Mussolini marries. Ida continues to be his lover and in 1915 bears his son (also named Benito), whom Mussolini did acknowledge. However, when she starts demanding that he acknowledge their marriage, which to this day has never been proven, he exiles Ida and the boy to her sister's house, under the watchful eye of bodyguards.

Years later, she is still waiting for him, all the while writing to everyone from the police to the royal family for her rightful recognition and due from the man she loves blindly. Eventually, in 1926, her thwarted assassination attempt of one of his political ministers lands her in a mental institution, and young Benito in the care of nuns. The rest of the film follows her descent into even greater madness, for Ida never changed her story, insisting that her life and her truth be heard and remembered.

Throughout the film, Bellocchio intersperses black-and-white archival footage, fascist-era graphics and close-ups of women whose identities are explained much later in the film, to good artistic effect. He creates an intimate mood while alluding to the general feel of the highly chronicled era without going too far over the top or reconstructing elaborate sets.

The director also pulls career-high performances from Mezzogiorno and Timi that are, respectively, tragic and mesmerizing. They deserve kudos for making such controversial personalities engaging and real, and they lift the film notches above standard biopic fare. "Vincere" belongs to Mezzogiorno, as Timi disappears once Mussolini renounces Ida, only to reappear later as the dictator's grown son, who goes by a different name and can do uncanny impersonations of the country's leader.

But of all the women who have been abandoned and all the people unjustly institutionalized, how sorry should we feel for Mussolini's lover? It's not as if Ida Dalser was in love with a man whose worst deed was driving her to insanity, or that her personal tragedy offset her love of a hoodlum-turned-dictator.

The damage done by Mussolini as he ruthlessly rose to power and became a bloodthirsty ruler in his quest for domination is so much greater than the two destroyed lives of "Vincere" that the film simultaneously cancels the very empathy it evokes.

[Sonic Youth]

Since the festival is halfway over, there are lots of summarizing articles all over the place by Manhola Dargis in the NY Times, Salon.com, etc. I don't think any of them says anything different from any of the others.

If you can't get enough of Cannes coverage, there are a few blogs doing their job, such as here, and here, and here. And all three of them have the same damn picture of Defoe and Gainsbourg rutting on those tree roots with the arms coming out of it.

And I forgot to check Entertainment Weekly this whole time, where Lisa Schwarzbaum is covering the festival. Poor Owen! Times being what they are, the mag could only afford to send one of them, and Lisa grabbed the long straw. Oh, well.



Edited By Sonic Youth on 1242742176

[Eric]

One of the best films I've seen here is Lee Daniels' "Precious," the story of a physically and mentally abused poor black girl from the ghetto, who summons the inner strength to fight back for her future. It contains two great performances, by Gabourey "Gabby" Sidibe, in the title role, and Mo'Nique as her pathetic mother. Sidibe is the life force personified. Mo'Nique has a closing monologue that reduced some of us to tears. I would write more, but Barbara Scharres, programmer for the Siskel Film Center, has just featured it in the blog she's writing for this site.

Go, Ebert! Make the Academy take notice!

[Sonic Youth]

What the French papers say about the Cannes film festival
With half of the films in competition already screened, French critics are reaching for superlatives to describe two films shot across the Channel

Ronald Bergan guardian.co.uk, Monday 18 May 2009 13.57 BST


As France is the most cinephilic country on earth, it is only right that the world's biggest film jamboree should be held in France. However, as English-speaking film critics stick together at the Cannes film festival, huddling in groups between screenings, and only reading each other's stuff, few of them are aware of the views of their hosts, which often differ widely from theirs.

But, this year, at least after the first week, there seems to be more of a rapprochement and consensus. First of all, everyone seemed to agree that Up was an apposite choice as an opener. Olivier Seguret in Libération thought that the initial 20 minutes, when the man ages before our eyes from eight to 78, was "certainly the most melancholic and tearjerking sequence that an animated blockbuster film has ever permitted … The use of 3D is reserved, discreet, undemonstrative, perhaps because Pixar is hoping that the film won't lose much when, inevitably, it is projected in 2D."

Thomas Sotinel in Le Monde felt that "the red spectacles were the most prized accessory among the festivalgoers, even though they didn't go well with the tuxedos and evening gowns". On the film itself, Le Monde commented: "Up doesn't attain the comic majesty of WALL-E or the graphic perfection of Ratatouille, but this children's tale ventures into places that are usually forbidden to the under 12s, dealing with subjects not often dealt with in Hollywood animation."

Lou Ye's Summer Fever impressed most French critics. L'Express wrote that "the quasi-documentary style (because of the clandestine filming) brought a supplementary urgency to the film. It also throws light on today's China". Le Monde commented that "Lou Ye uses the mobile camera with dexterity, interpreting the vibrations and pulsating rhythms of the protagonists, who are moved by jealousy, frustration and lust". But the former Communist daily, L'Humanité, thought that the director fails to give it "the air of liberation of Jules et Jim, and weakens the film by making the characters rather monotonous, despite their sensitivity".

Ang Lee's Taking Woodstock got Thomas Sotinel in Le Monde making comparisons with the documentary on the same subject. "Never hesitating to divide the screen in two or three parts, Lee plays with the images familiar from Woodstock by Michael Wadleigh – sliding in the mud, swimming nude in the river. In this case, fiction is beaten by reality." For Paris Match, Taking Woodstock is "contaminated by the message of Peace and Love in the 70s" and "is thus a gentle object … It will be astonishing if it gets any prizes, but at least it creates a smile or two … The organizers of the festival have obviously played the nostalgia card".

As I write, with 10 competition films still to premiere, it seems that two vastly different films shot in England – Jane Campion's Bright Star and Andrea Arnold's Fish Tank – are the frontrunners in the race for the Palme d'Or. However, the films exposed an ignorance among French commentators of both John Keats and Essex, though I wouldn't be surprised to find a similar unawareness of, say, Lamartine and Aubervilliers among British hacks.

Le Figaro welcomed Bright Star as the great return of Jane Campion, being "one of the most luminous films she has given us … Even if she reserves more tenderness towards the young man, it is still feminist".

Le Monde explained that "when the young woman takes off her hat, a discreet symbol of an indecent striptease, it is more troubling than all the orchestrated noises of sucking in many films in the festival … everything in Campion's direction suggests an oppressive atmosphere that tries to separate the lovers".

Libération thought that Campion "avoids the danger of becoming restricted by academicism by slipping in her own cheekiness. A small key hidden between Fanny's breasts, a quick shot of two naked feet, and the sigh that escapes from Fanny, as Keats whispers, 'I want to kiss your hands, your forehead, your lips ...', and she interrupts with, 'Everywhere.'"

Allociné was less ecstatic. "The return of Jane Campion to the Croisette is an event in itself. Pity, therefore, that it is in such a minor mode. We prefer her in a less constrained vein (An Angel at My Table, Holy Smoke), even though the actors (Ben Whishaw and Abbie Cornish) are particularly inspired."

It was to be expected that the name of Ken Loach would be invoked at every opportunity in regard to Fish Tank. But to Danielle Attali in the Journal du Dimanche, "At first sight, Arnold seems to be marching in the steps of Ken Loach or the Dardenne brothers. Reading the synopsis allows one to anticipate a Rosetta in Essex, the descent into hell of a young girl. But appearances are often deceptive. If Fish Tank (Aquarium in French) is political in the sense of its geographic choice – anonymous council houses, industrial wasteland – the director approaches her subject neither sombrely nor does she moralise … The final scene is magnificent, offering a possible reconciliation between mother and daughter. The rapport between the characters is difficult but, nevertheless, tender."

According to Jacques Mandelbaum in Le Monde, "There are scenes that go beyond the much visited socio-aesthetic territory, making it a meeting between Ken Loach and the Dardenne Brothers … the 17-year-old Katie Jarvis, playing a wild cat with an agility, immediately puts her in the running for the best actress prize."

For Libération: "Andrea Arnold anchors her film in an anonymous English city, without miserabilism, but sensitively attuned to the atmosphere … Arnold has confirmed her great talent, placing her in the tradition of British social cinema, launched by Carol [sic] Reisz and Ken Loach … This doesn't prevent her from having her own style. She makes us face the characters in crisis, but doesn't ignore hope, a source of vitality that permits them to survive."

Alain Spira in Paris Match thought that "the performance of Katie Jarvis deserves the acting prize for her convincing and energetic incarnation of an ill-at-ease adolescent … The interpretation is one of the strongest parts of the film, with dialogue which hits the air like a whip, notably in the mouth of the young sister, an irresistible little devil."



Edited By Sonic Youth on 1242658098

[Sonic Youth]

The trades - and The Guardian, and indieWire - on Ken Loach's "Looking for Eric":



Film Review: Looking for Eric
By Ray Bennett
Hollywood Reporter

CANNES -- The term "crowd-pleaser" is not often attached to the work of Ken Loach, the British Palme d'Or-winning director of films of social realism, but his latest Festival de Cannes Competition entry, "Looking for Eric," is exactly that.

At the press screening, there was laughter throughout, frequent clapping and sustained applause at the end. Loach regular Paul Laverty's script is filled with great gags and the director does his typically polished job of bringing out the best in his actors.

They include former soccer player Eric Cantona, the Frenchman who was unheralded at home but called King Eric at Manchester United, the world's biggest football club.

With Man U having just won the English Premier League title once again and heading to the Champions League final in Rome on May 27, the film's football connection could not be more advantageous. If only the club's millions of supporters around the world go to see it, and they will all want to, the movie will be a hit.

But "Looking for Eric" should connect with moviegoers who enjoy clever comic writing with a touch of fantasy plus fans of any sport that has legendary heroes. It looks set to be Loach's biggest mainstream hit.

The footballer materializes in the home of a sad-sack postal worker also named Eric, played with great energy and flair by Steve Evets, whose latest panic attack leads to him repeatedly driving the wrong way round a roundabout until the inevitable crash.

He escapes unhurt and no one else is harmed but Eric is chastened by his latest attempt to flee the unhappy realities of his life. His second wife split seven years earlier and his two stepsons, Ryan (Gerard Kearns) and Jess (Stefan Gumbs), ride roughshod over him at home.

His mates at work, led by portly Meatballs (John Henshaw), do their best to cheer him up, and there's a hilarious sequence in which they go one at a time to try to make him laugh, but it doesn't help.

Retreating to his own room, which is full of Man U memorabilia and pictures, including a life-sized poster of Cantona, to whom he confides his worries, Eric is startled to discover the genuine article has shown up to listen.

More than that, the iconic star, who was known for quoting obscure sayings, has brought a bunch of his favorite aphorisms and proverbs to help Eric clean up his life and find some happiness. This involves setting his kids straight and trying to make amends with his first love, Lily (Stephanie Bishop), whom he abandoned with their baby decades earlier.

There's a moment in the picture when a shift from high comedy to grim reality, caused by Ryan's involvement with a local hoodlum, is a bit abrupt and some may find the themes incompatible, but it wouldn't be a Loach film without some of that. With Lafferty's help, he manages to achieve a balance. In the end, with Cantona's wisdom and the help of his pals from the post office, Eric finds the courage and wit to win the day in a hugely entertaining final sequence.

Very funny and a bit sentimental, it's naturalistic comedy of the highest order, with Evets and Henshaw standouts among a terrific cast. Cantona too shows great comic timing and is both imposing and self-effacing, playing off his reputation for being a proud and temperamental man.

Not only Man U supporters will enjoy the splendid clips showing some of his classic passes and goals, and his dialogue is a constant delight. "Sometimes we forget you're just a man," Eric tells him. Comes the reply: "I am not a man. I am Cantona!"

---------------------------------

Looking for Eric
(U.K.-France-Italy-Belgium-Spain)
By DEREK ELLEY
Variety

No prior knowledge of either English soccer or one of its greatest stars of the '90s, French-born Eric Cantona, is necessary to go "Looking for Eric." But helmer Ken Loach and writer Paul Laverty's ninth feature together is a curious hybrid: Three movies -- boilerplate, socially aware Loach; personal fantasy; romantic comedy -- wrap around a central core of a hopeless soccer fanatic who's given a second chance to sort out his life. As in many of Laverty's scripts, problems of overall tone and character development aren't solved by Loach's easygoing direction, though when it works, "Eric" has many incidental pleasures.

How many fans of the now-retired Cantona (who co-exec produced and initiated the project) will turn out to see a Loach pic, especially in Blighty, remains a moot point, especially when word gets out that the Manchester United icon is only in a few scenes. But with smart marketing, this could reach fractionally beyond the usual Loach demographic. Stateside chances are more questionable given Cantona's lack of U.S. profile.

Eric Bishop (Steve Evets) is a fortysomething Manchester postal worker who returns home from the hospital (after a car crash) to find the place, and his life, in chaos, as usual. His two layabout stepsons, Ryan (Gerard Kearns) and Jess (Stefan Gumbs), show him no respect. And his wife, Lily (Stephanie Bishop), who left him seven years ago, won't talk to him, despite the efforts of their grown daughter, Sam (Lucy-Jo Hudson).

His work colleagues (also avid Manchester United fans), led by portly Meatballs (John Henshaw, good), try to cheer him up. But then one night, while getting high in his bedroom, Eric is "visited" by another Eric, his all-time idol Cantona.

Given that this is a Loach movie, Cantona's appearance is handled in an entirely natural way, sans vfx, though it's economically made clear that the onetime soccer star is a figment of Eric's dopey imagination. As the two get to know each other, the ooh-la-la Frenchman starts giving advice to Eric on how to get back with Lily, his first, teenage love (shown in flashbacks) for whom Eric has never lost his devotion.

Dialogue during the two men's heart-to-hearts cleverly plays on Cantona's rep for straight-talking -- "She has big balls!" he exclaims about Lily -- and he and Evets show the relaxed chemistry of opposites bound by a shared obsession in their scenes together.

There's a similar warmth -- heightened by Loach regular Barry Ackroyd's sunnier lensing -- in the sequences of Eric cautiously restarting his relationship with Lily. Loach has always drawn good perfs from his female leads -- one thinks of Eva Birthistle in "Ae Fond Kiss ... " or Kierston Wareing in "It's a Free World ... " In Bishop, he's found another thesp who brings some much-needed estrogen to a basically male-dominated movie, as a still-attractive woman who would also like to give things a second chance but remains realistically suspicious.

In many respects, the wryly humorous Eric-Lily sections are the best parts of the movie and could easily have formed a complete pic given the wealth of background between the two. (Hudson as their grown daughter is also very simpatico.) But in an obvious contrivance to supply a third act, the script veers off into a disorienting subplot involving Ryan, a gun and some lowlifes.

This eventually leads to a crowd-pleasing finale involving Eric, Meatballs and the whole gang of Manchester United supporters that stresses a favorite Loach theme of the collective being stronger than the individual. Again, the bit is enjoyable but further jars the pic's search for an overarching tone.

Though nowhere near as hard to decipher as that in the Loach-Laverty Scottish-set films, the dialogue here, with its Mancunian inflections, could cause some problems for Stateside viewers. Script also is unnecessarily littered with strong cussing.


-------------------------------------

Looking For Eric
18 May, 2009 | By Fionnuala Halligan
Screendaily

Dir. Ken Loach. UK/Fr/Belg/It/Sp. 2009. 116mins.


A light-hearted Ken Loach – or as light-hearted as Ken Loach gets - and his longtime writing partner Paul Laverty add humour to the social mix in Looking For Eric, Loach’s tonally-varied but most widely accessible film which could end up being his highest-grosser. Audaciously dropping the French former footballer into a dramatic scenario involving a depressed Manchester postman, his off-the-rails gun-toting stepson, longed-for ex-wife and bantering salt-of-the-earth colleagues, Loach crams a few films into this unique title and manages to pull them into one crowd-pleaser by the end.

UK response could be very solid for this feel-good film (June 12), despite a lengthy running time and the jolting introduction of a heavy dramatic stand-off mid-way through what initially seemed to be a more whimsical piece. French returns will also be strong on release on May 27 – apart from his iconic status, Cantona’s bon mots are often delivered in French – although action outside Europe is less certain.

Eric runs the gamut from whimsy, social commentary, high drama and violence before moving into a crowd-pleasing, literally rabble-rousing finale. And then there’s Eric Cantona, standing in a postie’s Manchester bedroom delivering words of wisdom. It’s an odd mix, but it should all spell wider returns than his 2007 Palme D’Or-winning The Wind That Shakes the Barley (worldwide $22.8m; UK$7.5m, Fr$6.2m) and a whole new generation of viewers for Loach.

We meet depressed, middle-aged Eric Bishop (Steve Evets, another Loach discovery) as he’s driving the wrong way around a roundabout, an escapade which lands him in hospital. His friends at the Royal Mail are concerned and try to cheer him up by telling jokes in some of the movie’s most amusing sequences. Chief amongst them is a wisecracking Johan Henshaw as Meatballs, another great performance which often seems ad-libbed.

Slowly it transpires that Eric, abandoned and ineffectual step-father to two mouthy teenage sons, has recently come in contact again with his ex-wife Lily (Stephanie Bishop), mother of Eric’s only natural child Sam (Lucy-Jo Hudson) and it has thrown his life out of kilter.

A Manchester United fan (there’s some heavy-handed speechifying about the corporatisation of football), Eric is given to addressing a poster of Eric Cantona hanging in the neat bedroom of his otherwise squalid house. One day, Cantona himself is standing there (Evets apparently had no idea this was about to transpire). Cantona’s function in the film is to try to bring Eric back to his life, through some enigmatic advice and sharing of spliffs.

But just as Eric starts to get the courage together to speak to Lily – they are sharing childcare duties for their grandchild - his older foul-mouthed stepson Ryan (Gerard Kearns), in with a bad crowd, ups the ante in an unexpectedly-violent way.

At this point, Loach could take the film in any direction, but he surprisingly opts for the Working Title route to pull it all together with a heart-warming finale in which the postmen come to the fore and solidarity conquers all.

Performances are as crisp and seemingly-genuine as in any Loach film – Evets and Henshaw are the main finds, while Cantona does look ill at ease at times and the aphorisms can wear a little thin. Working again with DoP Barry Ackroyd and production designer Fergus Clegg, Loach grounds Looking For Eric in complete realism – there’s no attempt at trickery involving any of Cantona’s scenes, even though the character is evidently imaginary.

-------------------------------


Peter Bradshaw at the Cannes film festival


Seeing top-whack footballers at the Cannes film festival is becoming a bit of a tradition. Last year it was Diego Maradona, showing up for Emir Kusturica's macho movie tribute, Maradona By Kusturica. The year before it was Zinédine Zidane, the subject of Douglas Gordon and Philippe Pareno's Zidane: A 21st-Century Portrait. (Zidane didn't turn up in person, but contributed a winning video intro for the premiere.) Now it is the turn of Eric Cantona, the gnomic philosopher-king of 90s Man U, and now hero of Ken Loach's boisterous new picture; scripted by Paul Laverty, it is a lovably good-natured if erratic comedy about a depressed middle-aged postman and football fan called Eric, played by Steve Evets.

Eric is stressed. He has to look after his stepsons from his failed second marriage, who are drifting into burglary and serious crime. When he takes his grandchild round to see his first wife Lily (Stephanie Bishop) and realises that he is still in love with her, Eric takes refuge in his boys' supply of dope and a breakdown-cum-epiphany ensues. Steve is visited by his low-hairlined, barrel-chested hero, the only man who can help him out of his spiritual mess. Eric Cantona himself appears in his bedroom, offering some ferociously serious life coaching and some heavy-duty pensées, of the sort only he can deliver.


It's a bit like Woody Allen's Play It Again, Sam. This is Kick It Like Eric. (Or maybe Kick Him Like Eric.) The difference is that Woody had to make do with an actor who only looked like Humphrey Bogart. Ken Loach has got the real thing (played, as it says in the credits, by "lui-même"): Cantona is excellent comic value, although his accent is still a bit impenetrable, and it isn't easy to tell if he is speaking in French or English.

We get a deeply enjoyable montage of Cantona goals, but when a saucer-eyed Eric asks the great man what was his best moment, Cantona replies that it was not a goal, but a pass: an inspired assist. From this, Cantona's pupil begins to learn the selfless values of friendship and community, and finds the road back to happiness.

But the film takes a weird, and not entirely convincing lurch into darker territory: Eric's boys are involved in some very bad business, and threaten to drag their dad down with them. During this very grim stretch, Cantona is largely absent, only returning when Eric and his mates have between them cooked up a very unlikely plan for collective payback against the nasty local criminal who is making their lives a misery. It's frankly a pretty naive view of how to take revenge on a psychopathic gangster, though it reminded me, not unpleasantly, of something by the old Children's Film Foundation.

For Ken Loach fans, Looking for Eric will call to mind the uproarious football commentary scene from Kes or, perhaps in its great group comedy moments, his tremendous television film The Navigators. There are very nice performances from Evets and from John Henshaw as his mate Meatballs. The boy Loach has tucked away a nice goal with this film.

• Peter Bradshaw is the Guardian's film critic.


-------------------------------------------

Art-house Crowd Pleaser: Loach Lightens Up with “Looking for Eric”
by Anthony Kaufman (Updated 49 minutes ago)
indieWire

In 2006, British director Ken Loach won Cannes’ top prize with a bracing chronicle of the Irish Republican Army’s struggles against the British in the 1920s. Three years later, he’s come up with a film that couldn’t be more different in tone and subject matter - a lighthearted dramatic comedy about a distraught middle-aged postal worker, Eric Bishop, who gets his groove back by channeling his favorite soccer hero, Eric Cantona, the legendary French star of UK team Manchester United.

Comparisons to Woody Allen’s “Play it Again, Sam” are inevitable, as Cantona magically appears in the postman’s bedroom one day, offering advice along with his trademark aphorisms. Cantona isn’t Bogart, of course, but knowledge of the famous footballer isn’t necessary to enjoy the conceit or the version of himself he plays on screen: A suave macho man who serves a similar spirit-boosting purpose.

Still, Loach and screenwriting partner Paul Laverty continue to work in their familiar social realistic-kitchen sink mode. Bishop lives in a cramped, cluttered multi-level flat, with his step-sons, bad-seed Ryan and the younger black Jess, both of whom appear out of control. His second-wife left him seven years before and he’s never dealt with the fact that he abandoned the first love of his life, Lily, shortly after the birth of their daughter Sam.

But Loach and Laverty choose to depict Bishop’s depression in mostly comic terms: A couple of hilarious early sequences show Bishop’s friends at the post office trying to cheer him up. In an excellent bit, the working class lads - with names like Spleen and Meatballs - turn to corny self-help exercises in order to raise Bishop’s self-esteem. One in which they envision someone they respect - in Bishop’s case, Cantona - is what brings the soccer player into Bishop’s reality.

The film’s heart belongs to the tentative reconciliation between Bishop and Lily, former rock n’ roll dancing partners in their younger years. To the script’s discredit, this emotional resolution happens too easily. On the other hand, an unexpected plot twist involving a handgun and a hundred guys wearing Eric Cantona masks suggests that Loach and Laverty may be just as much interested in the joys of comedy and vindication than the struggles of overcoming past misdeeds.

It’s a refreshing shift from the sometimes overt class-conscious sermonizing found in previous Loach outings; the only scenes that come close to such politics are a debate about a corporate-sponsored soccer team that’s sold out to the highest bidder - still handled humorously - and the fact that poor Bishop is too poor to get tickets to his beloved soccer matches, the one place, he says, where you could “forget all the shit in your life for just a few hours.” It’s a defter handling of social issues than we’ve seen from Loach in a long time.

Indeed, “Looking for Eric” belongs less to the tradition of hard-hitting British dramas that frequent Cannes and increasingly more along the lines of the sort of slight crowd-pleasing fare that does well in U.S. art-houses. And although Cantona may be less known in America than overseas, there’s no denying the comic fun of seeing a burly sportsman put on some rock n’ roll and cut a rug with another man.



Edited By Sonic Youth on 1242657629

[Sonic Youth]

More:

Antichrist
18 May, 2009 | By Jonathan Romney
Screendaily

Dir/scr Lars von Trier. Denmark. 2009. 104 mins.


Veteran provocateur Lars von Trier must have been feeling taken for granted, because he goes all out for our attention in baroque horror essay Antichrist. The film could be described as a shocker in more ways than one, and was greeted with both laughter and booing at its Cannes competition press. This bizarre, increasingly hysterical melodrama for two is ostensibly von Trier’s first crack at genre horror, but his nods to convention really serve an attempt to pursue the gender-war theme further than even the director’s avowed influence Strindberg.

Some von Trier fans will welcome his return to the elaborate visual invention he abandoned with the founding of Dogme. But in the wider world, Antichrist will prove too loopy and coarse for art-house audiences, while genre horror buffs – however cleverly the film is sold to them - will spurn the film, much as they did Michael Haneke’s US Funny Games remake.

Divided into four chapters, plus black-and-white prologue and epilogue, the film follows the emotional travails (Grief, Pain and Despair, as the film repeatedly specifies) of an unnamed couple (Gainsbourg and Dafoe). They attempt to cure their sorrows by going on an ill-advised wilderness retreat, matters coming to a head in the mother of all marital spats. Sexual politics is manifestly the film’s true subject, all the Gothic trimmings coming across as intense but misleading window dressing.

Von Trier begins with a nod to Don’t Look Now, detailing the death of the couple’s young son while they are busy having passionate and graphically detailed sex. This moment – too manipulative to be emotionally wrenching – is depicted in luscious black and white and impressionistic ultra-slow motion, verging perilously on music-video kitsch.

Von Trier and regular DoP Anthony Dod Mantle switch to colour on a restricted palette – blues for the first section, woody greens and browns later – as the film settles into an intimate mode, depicting the couple’s emotional wranglings, often in claustrophobic close-up. The wife has reacted to grief by going into an extended trauma. Her husband, a know-it-all psychotherapist who never expresses his own sorrow, counter-intuitively decides to tackle her cure personally. Reacting equivocally to her fits of violent sexual passion, he prefers to talk her down with dubious-sounding psychobabble, then decides that she should confront her fear by accompanying him to the place where she is most afraid, a creepy house among dark woods, ironically named Eden.

There, the couple find nature conspiring to put the chills up them, with even acorns seeming to have a malign presence, and a deer, a crow and a fox all getting to provide bizarre (and in the fox’s case, preposterous) scares.

The film’s ultimate destination is signalled by the revelation that the wife Gainsbourg had been working on a thesis about witches and the mistreatment of women, although she now seems to have concluded that women are innately evil. It comes as no surprise when marital tensions at last come to a boil in a way that even Ingmar Bergman might have thought a bit steep. In fact, von Trier’s models in the culminating sequences seem to be Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty and Stephen King’s Misery: who would have thought that the mischievous yet high-minded Dane would have provided the latest high-profile torture porn?

Von Trier has stated that Antichrist was a form of therapy for him, following a long period of depression. You can imagine that its making was cathartic for him, and no doubt for the actors, who go at their performances full tilt - raw and often discomforting nudity included. The eventual extremity of the acting is very much part of the overall conception, suggesting that – despite flamboyantly cinematic finish – Antichrist is ultimately as rooted in stage drama as the director’s studio-shot Dogville and Manderlay.

Von Trier deserves credit for audacity, not least in making a genuine two-hander: apart from the couple’s sporadically glimpsed child, Gainsbourg and Defoe are the only players, other humans appearing with faces digitally blurred. Dod Mantle’s elegant DV photography, using RED and Phantom cameras, makes for visual distinction, both in the stylised sequences and in the straighter chamber-drama sequences. But you can’t help wondering why a director this sophisticated would want to put his audience through the mill quite so crudely. After a brief, weird-out epilogue, we come out feeling that we have learned very little – other than that it’s a good idea to hide the toolbox when having a domestic tiff.

----------------------------------


Film Review: Antichrist
By Peter Brunette
Hollywood Reporter

CANNES -- With his latest offering, "Antichrist," Danish bad-boy director Lars von Trier is in no danger of jeopardizing his reign as the most controversial major director working today. Visually gorgeous to a fault and teeming with grandiose if often fascinating ideas that overwhelm the modest story that serves as their vehicle, this may be the least artistically successful film von Trier has ever made. As such, commercial prospects appear slim, though many of the auteur's most ardent fans will want to see the film anyway. And they should.

"Antichrist" is relentlessly and solely focused on a married couple, played by Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg. As we learn in a rather pretentious prologue shot in slow-motion and black and white, their toddler son has fallen to his death through an open window while they were making love. Bereft, they retreat to Eden, their ironically named cabin in the woods, to recuperate from their loss. At this point, von Trier switches to color and his signature chapter headings. The fact that the first three are "Pain," "Grief" and "Despair" does not bode well.

In discussing this self-styled "most important film of my career," von Trier has referred to the forbidding Swedish playwright August Strindberg. Clearly, or rather not so clearly, von Trier is working in a full-out symbolic vein here, as did Strindberg late in his career, but alas, the film medium inevitably carries with it, like an albatross, a heavy charge of realism. Hence, many of von Trier's more outrageous, ultra-serious symbolic moments (such as a talking fox, its guts half ripped out, muttering "chaos reigns" in an "Exorcist" voice) will -- and did, in the press screening -- undoubtedly provoke unintended laughter. Or horror, as when genitals are scissored off, masturbation produces blood rather than semen and holes are drilled into legs.

The film's most successful thematic confrontation is that between frail reason (embodied in the pathetic, infantilizing attempt by the husband, who's a psychotherapist, to treat his deeply disturbed wife with cognitive therapy) and the uncontrollable forces of emotion and mystery that emerge victorious.

Another powerful idea, that nature is cruel and vicious and completely antithetical to human welfare, seems to align von Trier with the German visionary director Werner Herzog. ("Nature is Satan's church," the wife utters apocalyptically at one point.) This focus on nature subsequently gets conflated with human nature and finally with female nature, where von Trier's careerlong misogyny comes into fullest bloom. In any case, all the ideas of the film are so extravagantly and feverishly expressed that one fears that von Trier, always working on the edge, has finally become unhinged.

The film works much better on a purely visual level, if only viewers were able to forget that these are real people being represented in these voluptuous images, abetted by an often superb sound design. From the opening titles, abstract expressionism reigns powerfully and conveys a great deal of intense, if finally unspecifiable, meaning. Unfortunately at some point a story has to be told, no matter how minimalist, and with actual human beings, no matter how symbolically freighted. This is where the film falls apart.



Edited By Sonic Youth on 1242655879

[flipp525]

The score is brilliantly crafted and Bjork is a dazzling screen presence. I loved it.

Bjork's performance in Dancer in the Dark and Gillian Anderson's in The House of Mirth should've replaced Binoche and Allen in that year's Best Actress line-up, but of course, by now, that's just a known fact.

[Sonic Youth]

"Two years ago I suffered from depression. Everything, no matter what, seems unimportant, trivial. I couldn't work. Six months later, just as an exercise, I wrote a script. It was a kind of therapy, but also a search, a test to see if would ever make another film.

"In any case I offer no excuses for Antichrist. Other than my absolute belief in the film -- the most important film of my entier career!"

Oh, for fuck's sake.

Von, you enigma!



Edited By Sonic Youth on 1242615269

[OscarGuy]

I will defend Dancer in the Dark until my dying day. It was a brilliant film, evoking the complete antithesis of escapist musical films of the '60s, evoking an elastic reality that at once feels too real and sometimes too outlandish. The score is brilliantly crafted and Bjork is a dazzling screen presence. I loved it.

And you know what this movie reminds me of (at least from the description?) A strange combination between Un Chien Andelou, Weekend and Eyes Wide Shut.