Cannes film festival reviews

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Post by FilmFan720 »

Does anyone else think the trailer for Tree of Life looks horrible...it almost plays to me like a parody of Malick's work. I am anticipating this will be a real divisive film, but it doesn't look overly promising to me right now.
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Not much of a New World fan, I'm hoping against hope for the fourth best Malick movie, and sadly ready to accept the fifth.
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The Tree of Life is scheduled to have its public premiere screening tomorrow. However, sometimes - not always - there are press screenings the night before... meaning, tonight. And if there are reviews tonight, I won't be around to post them, so please don't rely on me. IMO, it deserves its own thread rather than be posted here in the Cannes omni-review thread.

After so many years of waiting, I'm almost expecting a huge letdown.
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Entertainment Weekly: Can Harvey Weinstein take a silent movie to the Oscars

Three reviews:

The Artist
15 May, 2011 | By Mark Adams, chief film critic
Screendaily

Dir/scr: Michel Hazanavicius. France. 2011. 100mins



Possibly one of the most joyously enjoyable films to screen in the Cannes competition - especially for lovers of classic Hollywood cinema - The Artist is a real pleasure… shot in beautiful black-and-white, silent (apart from a few brief moments of sound) and propelled elegantly forward by delightful performances from Jean Dujardin and Berenice Bejo it is the most unlikely of feel-good movies.

The Weinstein Company picked up for film for the US at the start of the festival and it could well prove a popular draw for other distributors with a love for old-time Hollywood fare. Though French produced - and the two leads also French - the remainder of the key cast are recognisable US actors and the film’s intertitles are all in English. It will be a challenge to market, but strong critical response should aid releases.

Writer/director Michel Hazanavicius has scored notable successes with his two OSS:117 spy spoof films - both of which starred Jean Dujardin, and with Berenice Bejo also starring in the first film - and has embraced the technical challenges of The Artist, constructing an appropriately old-fashioned story packed with plenty of nods to Hollywood classics and bringing out the best of his talented cast. It is true the film is a pastiche…but it is lovingly made and extremely watchable all the same.

And in Jean Dujardin he has the perfect leading-man. He is a gifted physical performer and the grace, style and easy charm that worked so well as the blundering spy in the OSS:117 films is harnessed perfectly as successful silent movie star George Valentin whose career is blighted by the arrival of the talkies.

Valentin is at the height of is powers in 1927 when he meets the vivacious and warm-hearted Peppy Miller (Bejo), who is trying to break into the movies through work as an extra. In a plot similar to A Star Is Born and Singin’ In The Rain, as Peppy Miller’s star is in the ascendance as the studios looks for new fresh new talent with nice voices, so George’s career dips. The Wall Street crash arrives only to seal his fall from popularity as he invests all of his money in an overblown silent African adventure film Tears Of Love.

The film does feel a little sluggish towards the end of the first third as the music is a little repetitive and the intertitles are infrequent, but Hazanavicius manages to give the film a real sense of charm and warmth, and film fans will be competing to spot visual and musical references. The films of silent Murnau, Chaplin and Borzage are obvious visual influences, while Welles’ breakfast scene in Citizen Kane is delightfully referenced as George and his sullen wife (Miller) unhappily trudge through their marriage.

The relationship between George and Peppy is nicely handled. Dujardin has a ball playing a variation of Douglas Fairbanks while Peppy’s grace and innocently passionate personality (perfectly played by Bejo) is the perfect balance to George’s sophistication and charm. Both are also terrific dancers, as they get to display in a climactic scene.

Sound does briefly - and engagingly - dip into the film. In an amusing dream (or nightmare for him) scene, George imagines the sudden appearance of sound in the studio as suddenly he can hear voices and winces as even a feather falls to the floor. In the very final scene there is the briefest moment of dialogue.

The American supporting cast are also impressive. John Goodman has real presence as the flustered studio executive, while James Cromwell is suitably stoical as George’s loyal driver. Missi Pyle has a nicely judged cameo as a blonde silent star unable to make the transition to talkies - in a role rather similar to Jean Hagen’s as Lina Lomont in Singin’ In The Rain.

The film, though, comes close to being stolen by the wonderful canine antics of George’s loyal Jack Russell companion Jack (real name Uggy). Production design, costumes and music cues are all sheer perfection.


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

The Artist: Cannes Review
by Todd McCarthy
Hollywood Reporter


CANNES -- It’s a good bet that most contemporary directors would have a hard time pulling off a silent movie, so it’s all the more impressive what Michel Hazanavicius has wrought with The Artist, a real black-and-white silent in the 1.33 aspect ratio that takes place in Hollywood when silents were overtaken by talkies. A playful, lightly melancholy tale with A Star Is Born echoes about a young actress whose career takes off in sound pictures just as that of a veteran male star declines, this unusual Los Angeles-made French production is, by definition, a specialty item, perfect for festivals and buff enclaves worldwide but a tough proposition commercially outside France, where the director and stars are household names by virtue of the OSS capers.

A mustachioed and preening Jean Dujardin engagingly incarnates George Valentin, a vain, athletic star in the Douglas Fairbanks mode who specializes in swashbuckling romantic adventures. In 1927, at the lavish premiere of his latest extravaganza (an event shot at the Orpheum Theater in downtown L.A.), the married star takes a fancy to a pretty girl in the crowd, Peppy Miller (Berenice Bejo), who gets her picture in the papers and very soon a small role in the next Valentin production, even though their relationship never progresses beyond mutual attraction.

Although everything in both the films-within-a-film and the “real” movie looks a bit too crisp and clean, lacking the soft focus close-ups so prevalent at the time, Hazanavicius and his key collaborators—cinematographer Guillaume Schiffman and American production designer Laurence Bennett and costume designer Mark Bridges—succeed in the important matter of approximating the general spirit and flavor of some late silent pictures, notably their energy, brio and direct emotional appeal.

Similarly, Ludovic Bource’s continuous score may be more elaborate and ambitious than the orchestral music that normally accompanied major silent features in big city engagements, but its vigor and imagination provide The Artist with a crucial boost that amplifies its numerous mood swings.

Preparing to switch entirely to talkies in 1929, Kinograph Studios boss Al Zimmer (John Goodman) offers Valentin a private look at the new format, but the star rejects it out of hand and recklessly proceeds with his own self-financed silent adventure, which is doomed to failure. By the time the stock market crash hits that October, Valentin is washed up, just as Peppy Miller’s infectious youthful appeal is taking the country by storm.

Valentin’s downfall is complete: His long-suffering wife (Penelope Ann Miller) leaves him, he’s forced to auction his personal effects, he dismisses his ever-faithful chauffeur (a subtle and fine James Cromwell) and, in a frenzy reminiscent of the room-destroying outburst in Citizen Kane, he trashes his prints of his films, finally lighting a match to them. His life is saved only by the efforts of his exceptionally talented last remaining friend, his clever little performing dog of the type so common in the silent era.

What Valentin doesn’t know, however, is that Peppy has always remained loyal in her heart, so when it counts, and in the spirit of the title of her new film, Guardian Angel, she is there for him. During this climactic stretch, when Valentin hits his deepest despair, Hazanavicius and Bource daringly choose to explicitly employ Bernard Herrmann’s love theme from Vertigo, which is dramatically effective in its own right but is so well known that it yanks you out of one film and places you in the mindset of another. Surely some sort of reworked equivalent would have been a better idea.

Still most immediately conjuring up the image of a Sean Connery lite, which worked so well for him in the OSS duo, Dujardin also by turns triggers physical impressions of Fredric March, who starred in the first A Star Is Born, and John Gilbert, one of most famous silent luminaries to stumble in talkies. One minor mystery that could have been clarified by one additional inter-title is whether Valentin simply disdains sound films or might be hampered by a foreign accent.

The slim and chic Bejo is entirely winning as the public’s darling who never forgets who provided her big break, while Goodman is perfect as the cigar-chomping studio chief who obviously loves his job.

Filmed on studio stages as well as on old Hollywood streets, The Artist evinces unlimited love for the look and ethos of the 1920s, as well for the style of the movies. The filmmakers clearly did their homework and took great pleasure in doing so, an enjoyment that is passed along in ample doses to any viewer game for their nifty little conceit.

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

The Artist
(France)
By Peter Debruge
Variety


A love letter to silent cinema sealed with a smirk, "The Artist" reteams director Michel Hazanavicius with dapper "OSS 117" star Jean Dujardin for another high-concept homage, delivering a heartfelt, old-school romance without the aid of spoken dialogue or sound. Projected in black-and-white in the classic 4:3 aspect ratio, this crowd-pleasing comedy tips its top hat to those late-'20s Hollywood conventions rendered obsolete by the rise of the talkie as a pompous star fails to adapt to the new era. However inspired, pic will take careful handling to shatter the arthouse ceiling, as today's auds demonstrate little nostalgia for cinema's roots.

In a way, the medium is in similar transition today, as such sincere, emotional stories are forced to compete with digital spectacle and 3D extravaganzas. Fortunately, it's a challenge well suited to the Weinstein Co., which announced its acquisition of U.S. and some international rights to this unique French-financed, American-made entry on opening day of the Cannes Film Festival. TWC's retro-style logo had already been attached to the front of the film by the time it screened four days later.

"The Artist" opens in 1929 on a film-within-a-film starring matinee idol George Valentin (Dujardin), a square-jawed, double-breasted Douglas Fairbanks type (though his masked screen persona cuts a silhouette that suggests France's Fantomas character). Having mastered the Sean Connery shtick for the spoofier "OSS 117," Dujardin turns his impeccable imitation skills on a host of early film stars, combining Rudolph Valentino's smoldering appeal and slicked-back hair with Errol Flynn's panache and pencil moustache, while preserving an essential sincerity in the process.

Though the packed movie palace erupts into a boisterous ovation as soon as the house lights come up, we hear nary a clap, since Hazanavicius has committed to telling his story MOS (save for two unforgettably hilarious exceptions). Instead, the helmer relies on infrequent English-language intertitles and a grand, period-appropriate score from "OSS" collaborator Ludovic Bource, which carries the emotion and energy of the film without resorting to anything so modern as a theme. Outside his premiere, Valentin finds himself sharing the red carpet with a star-struck aspiring actress, Peppy Miller (played by Hazanavicius' real-life wife, Brazilian stunner Berenice Bejo).

Though Peppy seizes the opportunity to score a small dancing role in the studio's next picture, Valentin's producer (John Goodman) is furious that the pompous star's antics have upstaged his film. It doesn't help that Valentin is completely distracted by Peppy on set, blowing take after take as the cameras witness him falling in love. Back in Valentin's dressing room, Peppy proves equally smitten, cozying up to his overcoat in a bit that perfectly fits how one of her characters might behave onscreen.

More respectful of his marriage to forever-dissatisfied Doris (Penelope Ann Miller) than most actors of the era were toward their spouses, Valentin resists making a pass at Peppy when the time seems right. Such courtesy has consequences, however, forcing their romance into a state of unrequited suspension as their careers veer in opposite directions: Peppy embraces the talking-pictures era, a nice sequence recapping her rise through the credits of several films, while Valentin scoffs, "I'm the one people come to see. They never needed to hear me."

Truth be told, there's good reason Valentin resists this new fad in filmmaking, though we don't learn his secret until the very last scene. Along the way, Hazanavicius has inventive fun with the character's silence, particularly in one dream sequence where Valentin hears foley effects for the first time, yet still finds it impossible to speak. At home, divorce-ready Doris gives new meaning to the words, "We need to talk, George."

Valentin's only companions during his harsh fall from the spotlight are his chauffeur Clifton (James Cromwell) and faithful Jack Russell terrier -- one of those star dogs well trained enough to rescue his master from scrapes both onscreen and off. But Peppy holds a place for Valentin in her heart, evident not only with each successive encounter, but also in her discreet actions to support the self-destructive star without his knowing.

Although Valentin represents a corny breed of heartthrob for which today's auds have no use, Hazanavicius looks to the more artistically ambitious films of the era (and several subsequent decades) to inspire his own directorial style. Cribbing from Fritz Lang's "Spies," he stages a conversation between Valentin and Peppy on the stairs of Los Angeles' Bradbury Building, while undercranked extras speed by around them. Later, Valentin's climactic meltdown lifts an overhead shot straight from "Citizen Kane."

Such references are offered less for the benefit of film geeks than for the mere fact that they offer the most elegant solutions for framing the scenes in question. Rather than using the harsh, stagebound look of the period, d.p. Guillaume Schiffman embraces the softer, more glamorous lensing of '40s-era Hollywood productions, shooting on color stock and then converting it to black-and-white in post. The look flatters the cast, especially Dujardin, whose incandescent charm comes through just fine with his arsenal of arched eyebrows, wry smiles and the other nonverbal tricks.




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Thanks, Sabin and Harry.

Michael
(Austria)
By Alissa Simon
Variety


Illustrating the banality of evil in an impressively controlled and sometimes darkly humorous fashion, "Michael" takes a coolly nonjudgmental, non-psychological approach to a disturbing topic, spending five months in the life of a 30-ish pedophile who keeps a 10-year-old boy locked in his basement. Although it begins in medias res, Austrian writer-director Markus Schleinzer's feature debut slowly reels viewers in with Michael Fuith's strong lead performance, a creepy accumulation of ordinary detail and suspenseful twists. Although the pic is certainly not for all tastes, arthouse distribs of challenging material will want to give it a go.

Bland-looking Michael (Fuith, superb) is a buttoned-down insurance exec who keeps a spotless suburban home and at one point receives a promotion at work. He drinks with male pals and appears attractive to women. Yet he's also forcing sexual relations on his captive, Wolfgang (David Rauchenberger, convincingly vulnerable), compounding the abuse by telling the child his parents don't want him.

In showing the interactions between man and boy, Schleinzer (working with co-director Katrin Resetarits) provocatively questions what constitutes a monster, with scenes that echo typical family dynamics, making abnormality look surprisingly normal. The pre-title sequence, in which Michael arrives at home with groceries, prepares dinner for Wolfgang and then shares washing-up duties, may give some viewers the impression that they're watching a father-son story (press notes in Cannes provided only a coy synopsis).

Businesslike at work, attentive to his sister when necessary, seeming like just one of the guys on a ski trip, but in fact a predator on the prowl at a miniature-car racetrack packed to the rafters with young boys, Michael definitely has a monstrous side. Thankfully, the abuse scenes with Wolfgang are implied rather than shown.

Schleinzer, whose previous film experience was as a casting director for Austrian helmers including Michael Haneke, Ulrich Seidl and Jessica Hausner, appears to share their subversive style. Often his images have a double meaning that takes a few moments to sink in; a scene in which Michael and Wolfgang tidy his quarters and assemble a bunk bed seems almost companionable, but when followed by the sequence at the racetrack, Michael's intentions become subtly but chillingly clear.

It's difficult to describe the plot twists without spoiling them; suffice to say they rise organically from the tightly structured narrative. Within the pro tech package, crisp production design and editing make the most of locked doors, shuttered windows and repeated washing up. The final use of ambient music provokes some uneasy laughs.
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The Dardenne brothers strike again. Palme Trois?

Variety first; Hollywood Reporter below.


The Kid With a Bike

The Dardenne brothers' latest reminds you the most compelling stories are unfolding right outside your window.

By Peter Debruge

Belgium's Dardenne brothers make movies that remind you the most compelling stories are unfolding right outside your window, rather than in outer space, the distant past or wherever cinema usually takes us. But rather than diminishing the medium, they elevate it, as in "The Kid With a Bike," another fest-ready, arthouse-bound neorealist snapshot that subtly echoes virtual soul brother Vittorio de Sica's "Shoeshine" and "Bicycle Thieves." The Dardennes' sixth Cannes-born feature, "Kid" shadows a stormy 11-year-old grappling with the realization that his father doesn't want him, shoring up the helmers' profoundly humanistic, observational approach after the slightly more mainstream "Lorna's Silence."
As played by newcomer Thomas Doret, Cyril is an intense young man. This much is evident from the first scene, in which the agitated lad attempts to break out of the boys' home where he lives after failing to reach his father by phone. Cyril simply can't comprehend being abandoned: He's an angry kid, refusing to trust anyone but his own dad, even after seeing for himself that the deadbeat sold Cyril's bike and moved without a word.

"Kid's" first few reels track Cyril's determined search for his father. "Don't be upset if it's not the way you dreamed it should be," warns Samantha (Cecile de France), a kind-hearted hairdresser who generously agrees to watch Cyril on the weekends, hardly realizing what a handful the boy can be.

But her intuitions prove correct: Cyril's dad, a weary-looking lout played by Dardennes regular Jeremie Renier (who made his debut in the brothers' "La Promesse," which might just as easily have been called "The Kid With a Motorbike"), wants nothing to do with his son. Now, all that leftover aggression needs an outlet -- an idea that fuels the remainder of the film, as the poor, wound-up kid acts out in various ways.

Watching Samantha patiently try to get through to her foster charge is like witnessing a cowboy break in an obstinate mustang. Though the narrative strands shift several times over the course of Cyril's journey, the basic arc tracks how the boy, half wild with desperation, is ultimately tamed by Samantha's fundamentally good nature.

A stock version of the same story might find de France's and Renier's characters gradually falling in love over the course of the film. In the Dardennes' hands, however, she Samantha represents the sort of exemplary soul we too seldom see in films -- least of all Cannes, where "Kid" is competing alongside several entries committed to exposing pedophilia and child abuse. Samantha is one of those beatific yet realistically challenged women, like Simone Signoret's "Madame Rosa," who embodies the best of us, putting aside her own interests in a sincere effort to give Cyril a chance at a proper childhood.

And yet, cinema thrives on conflict, and while the Dardennes' miniaturist style brooks no contrivances, it's not enough to base a film on a boy who refuses to be loved. So the helmers introduce a local thug named Wes (Egon Di Mateo) who sees potential in Cyril's pent-up anger, enlisting the kid to participate in a robbery that brings tragedy into the picture.

Among movie moralists, the Dardenne brothers certainly rank near the top of any list of directors preoccupied with matters of personal responsibility and conscience. As such, there's something a bit disappointing about how straightforward "Kid" is regarding the choices Cyril should be making, especially when compared with the more difficult decisions underlying "The Son" and "L'enfant." "Kid" is undeniably mellower stuff, a softening further enhanced by Alain Marcoen's lensing, brighter and less brutally handheld than in their past collaborations.

Members of an elite list of helmers who have won dual Palmes d'Or at Cannes, the siblings are known for launching acting careers, not casting established names (another regular, Olivier Gourmet, makes a brief appearance as a bartender here). It's a pleasant surprise, then, to see them cast movie star de France, hot off Clint Eastwood's "Hereafter." The Belgian-born actress gets a rare chance to reprise her native accent for this film, set in Seraing, the blue-collar industrial town that has hosted most of the Dardennes' earlier efforts.

De France is a natural fit, blending into the vaguely white-trashy environs with her acid-washed denim and wild-print synthetics. Still, she's more than proven herself in the past. The breakout here is 13-year-old Doret, the Dardennes' latest stunningly naturalistic, non-professional acting discovery. Whether blazing through Seraing's streets on his bike or carrying a difficult scene, he's never less than riveting to watch -- his face the telltale steam-vent that augurs an emotional geyser roiling beneath.



The Kid With a Bike: Cannes Review
8:28 PM 5/14/2011 by David Rooney


With customary restraint, the Dardenne brothers have added yet another exquisite entry to their masterful body of work.

Cast

Cécile de France, Thomas Doret, Jérémie Renier, Fabrizio Rongione, Egon Di Mateo, Olivier Gourmet

Director-screenwriters

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne

This heartrending film chronicles a boy who clings to a woman after his father abandons him.

As movie titles go, The Kid With a Bike could hardly be more direct and explicative in its unadorned simplicity. Which is a perfect encapsulation of any film by the resolutely unshowy maestros of humanistic portraiture, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. Back at the festival that has already crowned them with two Palmes d’Or (for Rosetta in 1999 and The Child in 2005), the Belgian siblings are again at the peak of their powers in this impeccably observed drama.

Few, if any, contemporary filmmakers can match the Dardennes for unstinting compassion, rigorous avoidance of sentimentality and unimpeachable emotional integrity. Their films can grab you by the throat and thrust you into a state of abject despair. But they are no less persuasive when they surprise you – and they always do – with their unshakable faith in the human capacity for hope and redemption, a quality that has earned them comparisons to Robert Bresson.

On a craft level, the writer-director team’s films have become more refined over the years, swapping some of the visual rawness of early features like The Promise for a startling crispness here. Cinematographer Alain Marcoen’s colors practically sing while remaining utterly naturalistic. But the more polished style has done nothing to compromise the purity of the Dardennes’ work. There’s not a superfluous gesture or a redundant line of dialogue in The Kid With a Bike. Nor is there an image held for a second too long, including some gorgeous extended tracking shots. Everything here is 100% in the service of character and storytelling.

The opening has the visceral charge of a great chase scene as 11-year-old Cyril (Thomas Doret) makes a mad dash to evade his counselors and flee the children’s home where he has been placed temporarily. In his first screen role, the remarkable Doret bristles with anger and flailing determination; this wiry, ginger-haired kid conveys a desperation that is shattering. Cyril makes it as far as his father’s old address but finds the apartment empty and his bicycle gone. When staff from the children’s home track him down in the building, he clings to Samantha (Cécile de France), a hairdresser waiting in a doctor’s office, for protection.

Touched by the child’s need, Samantha finds his bike and delivers it to the children’s home, where Cyril overcomes his inability to accept affection long enough to ask if she would agree to foster him on weekends. Being back in his father’s neighborhood stirs up painful feelings, and when Samantha tracks down the missing parent (Dardenne regular Jérémie Renier) and takes Cyril to see him, the rejection is crushing.

What follows is not a conventional chronicle of a troubled child scarred by abandonment issues, learning to experience the unfamiliar sensations of love and trust, though to some degree, that happens. Instead, it’s a robustly plotted and highly suspenseful battle to save uncontrollable Cyril from self-destruction. He threatens to spiral down an irreversible path of corruption when his feistiness gets the attention of Wes (Egon Di Mateo), a local drug dealer and thief looking for fresh lieutenants.

The sense of danger is intense, and the cool detachment with which the filmmakers show how easily savvy criminals can charm and seduce troubled kids into their employ is chilling. There are many heartrending sequences, but perhaps the most plangent of them is when Cyril offers the proceeds of his first robbery as a final attempt to get back into his father’s life. Without ever articulating it in words, the film over and over again illustrates with wrenching effectiveness every child’s primal hunger for parental love and acceptance.

Marking a rare use of music in a Dardenne film, a handful of key moments are sparingly punctuated by brief bursts of mournful Beethoven. Edited with fluid urgency by Marie-Hélène Dozo, the film navigates with extreme grace its transitions from sorrow to tenderness to distressing violence, before finally taking a gentle step toward healing. That most overused term in the therapy handbook notwithstanding, there isn’t a single unearned emotion in this tremendously moving drama.

Kindness is evident in even the most hurt or exasperated moments of de France’s lovely performance as Samantha. But then, kindness couched in unblinking social realism is an intrinsic part of how these supremely gifted filmmakers view the world.




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Post by Sabin »

Yeah. This is my first stop of the day. Already Cannes seems like it's a step up from last year's weak batch.

Joseph Cedar seems like a decent bet for Best Screenplay for Footnote, which seems absolutely intriguing. Michael Fuith for Best Actor seems like it could be very likely. And I'd be very surprised if Tilda Swinton didn't win Best Actress. She's been a beloved part of Cannes history for ages now and this could be the perfect place for a win.




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Post by HarryGoldfarb »

Thanks a lot Sonic Youth, for all the work in here... This has been addictive through the last days... :)
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Screendaily and Hollywood Reporter on 'Michael'.

Michael
14 May, 2011 | By Allan Hunter
Screendaily

Dir/scr: Markus Schleinzer. Austria. 2011. 96mins

The very idea of a serious film about the everyday existence of a paedophile will be enough to deter some viewers. Add to that the fact that Michael neither judges nor redeems the central figure and you have a film that seems the very definition of a hard sell.

Look beyond the subject matter to the film itself and you will discover a rigorously responsible, endlessly disquieting piece of work, acutely sensitive to issues of exploitation. The approach is one of almost clinical detachment that is more akin to an academic study or psychiatric report than a tabloid witchhunt. The intriguing subject matter and assured handling should combine to shine attention on writer/director Markus Schleinzer and attract adventurous distributors to what seems likely to remain a controversial title.

Schleinzer has worked as a casting director on more than 60 films and claims that his work casting and coaching the children for Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon gave him the confidence to make his first feature. Haneke is an obvious influence on a film that strips away emotion and sentimentality to focus on an almost forensic presentation of the evidence. The tone is cool, the often-static camera acts as a calm observer of events and we only see what is necessary to gain a sense of what is happening.

Michael (Michael Fuith) is a 35 year-old man whose life has all the surface appearance of normality. Everything about him seems unremarkable. He is a dumpy, balding, insignificant man whose beige complexion seems at one with his wardrobe. He is the kind of man that neighbours will say tended to keep himself to himself.

In the earliest scenes of the film we see him arriving home from work carrying shopping. He sets the table, cooks tea and prepares to share a meal. The only real difference is that he will be sharing it with David (David Rauchenberger) the 10 year-old boy who is kept prisoner in his cellar.

We assume the situation has existed for some time, as the man and boy appear to have settled into a domestic routine. Michael even appears to act as a loving parent as he cuts the boy’s hair, allows him to watch a little television in the evening and occasionally takes him out for a visit to an animal park. Time and again, Schleinzer stresses the normality of this abnormality. He makes us realise the Michael could be your son, brother, father or the colleague from work.

If that were all the film had to offer then it might become a little tedious. The conclusion that perhaps paedophiles are just people too would be too trite for such a film.
Schleinzer manages to convince us that the film has much more to offer by gradually extending the focus. There are touches of humour and even moments of awful tension when Michael goes on the prowl to find a companion for the boy in the cellar.

There are even elements of a thriller developing as the audience is encouraged to speculate on how this could all end, if the boy might be able to escape and, inevitably, relating the situation to real life cases that have grabbed the headlines in recent.

Mercifully, Schleinzer spares us the gory details of the sexual relationship between man and boy. He merely allows us a sense of what is happening especially in an unsettling moment when a lustful Michael lounges on a bed staring in anticipation at his quarry.

The performances are both commendable in their restraint and plausibility. David Rauchenberger is especially impressive at suggesting the vulnerability and steeliness of David. His downward glances and the way he flinches at every touch from his captor makes us attuned to his suffering in a way that makes anything more graphic superfluous. The restraint of his performance is in tune with a film that takes the sting from a white-hot topic and transforms it into a troubling, thought-provoking and quietly disturbing drama.

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

Michael: Cannes Review
by Kirk Honeycutt
Hollywood Reporter


CANNES -- Michael from first-time Austrian director Markus Schleinzer is a seriously misguided film. It bravely tackles a subject most filmmakers would shun, then loses courage and fails to make any sense, either psychological or morally, of repugnant behavior. Drawing a mixture of applause and boos at its Competition screening in Cannes, Michael will probably remain a festival curio inspiring more debate than it ever will ticket sales.

Pedophilia and sexual predators are much in the news but the subject is rarely dramatized anywhere since the general public thinks of these perpetrators as a lower life form than contract killers. Schleinzer, who wrote and directed this film after many years working as a casting director, wants to get at the problem by putting a human face to the crime. He knows full well this will occasion the jerk-knee reaction by many that he is humanizing a “monster.” Yet this is not the real problem with his movie.

He bestows on his kidnapper/child predator Michael (morosely played by Michael Fuith) such human traits as smoking outside his house but not in, being remote but collegial at work, fastidiousness over having a clean house and so on. But then timidity overcomes the film.

It never wants to look too closely at the evil Michael perpetrates or imagine what compels him to so desert moral principles. In other words, this human portrait lacks any inner life or uncontrollable impulses. Is he in anguish over his crimes or perfectly happy about them? You never know.

Michael is tightly wound and gloomy with a streak of cruelty and anti-social behavior lurking right beneath the surface. Schleinzer refuses to make him even close to likable in his “normal” life outside the home where he has imprisoned a young boy. You clearly distinguish a warped personality even if his colleagues and family don’t.

It’s not as if movies have never explored such a topic. Michael Cuesta’s 2001 L.I.E. was bold enough to make a child predator sympathetic although admittedly in that case and with Nabokov ‘s famous novel, Lolita, these were much older youngsters. Schleinzer does up the ante of disgust by making Michael’s captive a 10-year-old boy (David Rauchenberger). But having challenged himself thusly, he comes up empty.

If anything this is a portrait of a monster as a quiet and perverse young man. Nothing sparks a viewer’s interest in this 35-year-old man other than the enormity of his crime.

The treatment of the child is another problem. He’s a victim every moment. Nothing here makes you understand how an adult can cajole a child into trust or make the abnormal feel normal. News reports of such crimes often mention that children believe in what their captors tell them and even come to have positive feelings toward them. Schleinzer will have none of that: He presents his young character as angry, sullen or sorrowful at every turn.

Then too, you worry about the child actor. Isn’t exposing him to such a character even in play-acting for a movie a kind of exploitation? Hard to say but it’s an uncomfortable thought.

Schleinzer has a deserved fate awaiting his horrible protagonist as if to make up for even daring to display such a tormented soul on screen. This in a final indication that he is back-peddling from his own subject, denying Michael’s real humanity — which has nothing to do with smoking outside or buying a Christmas gift for his captive — and making certain to visit on him a terrible, painful revenge.




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Footnote
By Jay Weissberg
Variety


It's said that academia is a famously back-stabbing place owing to its small-potatoes stakes. "Footnote" sets out to reveal the navel-gazing elements behind the pursuit of arcane knowledge while laying bare the storms it creates when ego and father-son rivalry play their parts. Scripter-helmer Joseph Cedar shifts sympathies back and forth as frequently as he changes tone from jokey to bitter, skewering ivory tower blindness with some wit and, just occasionally, emotion. A tendency to overbake may distance some, as could the immersion in obscure corners of Judaica scholarship, though Sony Classics' early Cannes pickup shows noteworthy confidence.

Target auds will undoubtedly be Jewish viewers and college towns, a not insignificant demographic, yet "Footnote" is unlikely to find the same kind of heavy fest play as Cedar's Silver Bear winner "Beaufort." Academic researchers rarely make for dynamic screen material (unless there's sexual hanky-panky involved), so Cedar goes to great lengths -- indeed, too great -- to turn editing and music into the driving force behind the pic's liveliness.

Professor Eliezer Shkolnik (Shlomo Bar Aba) worked for decades in semi-obscurity comparing corrupted manuscripts of the Jewish texts collectively known as the Talmud, with the near-impossible goal of preparing a version as close to the original ancient writings as possible. While Eliezer devotes himself to the minutiae, burying himself in the library or his study and barely publishing, his son Uriel (Lior Ashkenazi) produces book after book on broad Talmudic culture. Father looks with disdain on his son's intellectual pursuits as much as on Uriel's constant need for the limelight.

In many ways Uriel is a more human companion to Michael Sheen's pedant in Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris": he loves to lecture, he soaks up the adoration of students and colleagues alike, and he needs to be right, at all times. While Eliezer toils away with little recognition apart from a lone footnote in a multi-tome work, Uriel has honors heaped upon him, which he accepts with a faux-humility calculated to set his father's teeth on edge.

The script nails academic gobbledygook along with the viciousness of professorial rivalries, nicely realized not only via the father-son conflict but between Eliezer and peer Yehuda Grossman (Micah Lewesohn, pitch-perfect), the latter a self-righteous, two-faced SOB who saw his career flourish by deliberately sidelining Eliezer. The pic's best scene occurs in a tiny office into which Uriel is called after Eliezer gets news that he's receiving Israel's most prestigious award, the Israel prize. The awards committee is chaired by Grossman, and Cedar's aim is unerring as he targets the insularity of the academic world along with the secret pacts and betrayals regularly concocted to keep rivals down. Tellingly, the scene is also one of the very few not propelled by music.

The sequence comes after a key though not unexpected plot twist, whose reveal occurs around the 40-minute mark. Uriel's subsequent behavior shifts his character from merely a pompous egoist to more of what wife Dikla (Alma Zak) calls him -- a nice guy who avoids confrontation. Viewers feel a surge of satisfaction when he finally does go on the attack, for the right reasons, which makes the character a far more rounded figure than originally presented.

With all his flaws, at least Uriel moves forward, unlike his father, whose recondite pursuit of an elusive ur-text is ultimately presented as blind intellectual masturbation no more useful than Mr. Casaubon's unachieved "great work" in "Middlemarch." Cedar's impatience with Eliezer's pursuits are crystallized in a well-written speech he puts in the mouth of the old scholar, in which the cataloguing of potsherds as opposed to the study of the vessel itself is proven to be all means and no end.

Despite the presence of Dikla, along with Eliezer's wife Yehudit (Alisa Rosen), "Footnote" is a decidedly male-centric film. Structurally, the pic is divided into named chapters that make for cute markers but give it the not-entirely satisfying feel of a jaunty satire. Bouncy editing is intimately tied to Amit Poznansky's score, the latter sounding like Stravinsky at his most playful and competing far too much with characters and themes. As in Cedar's past films, corridors and doors play a key role, with Yaron Scharf's tight lensing subtly responding to the notion of dividers and passageways.

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Footnote
14 May, 2011 | By Dan Fainaru
Screendaily

Dir: Josef Cedar. Israel. 2011. 105mins



Pungent, ironic and glib, Josef Cedar’s follow up to his award-winning Beaufort is a smart, well written and deftly executed confrontation between a father and son who may be more alike than they would choose to believe. Both are academics, both dedicated to the obscure and marginal field of Talmud research, each representing a different generation and approach but both terribly keen on recognition for their work.

Though possibly too ascetic for multiplex crowds and rather difficult to follow for audiences that are not that familiar with academic bickering and philological refinements, Footnote (Hearat Shulayim) should do well for Sony Classics, which has acquired the film in Cannes, particularly with selective audiences in US, and turn into natural art house fare and ideal festival fodder.

Eliezer Shkolnik (popular comic Shlomo Bar Aba, remarkable in an atypical role) is a grim, dedicated purist who has been preparing all his life an introduction to a much annotated version of the Jerusalem Talmud. For years he has been the ignored candidate in his field for the country’s highest honorary award, the Israel Prize, causing him an enormous amount of resentment, which he openly expresses in spitefully putting down the winners and their achievements.

His son, Uriel (Lior Ashkenazi in an unexpected but highly successful departure from his macho roles), followed in his father’s path, but is apparently far more communicative and easy-going in his contacts with the rest of the world. All the more reason for the father to consider his son is a lightweight in his profession, incapable of true and serious research.

In the opening scene, the edgy Eliezer attends a ceremony honoring Uriel and the tense relationship established at this point between the two of them will only get worse as they get mixed up in a complicated imbroglio around the impending annual distribution of the Israel Prize, with the father’s academic nemesis, Prof. Grossman (Micah Lewesohn) involved up to his neck in the proceedings.

Some of the conflicts in the film will be more evident to Israelis, only too familiar with the traditional arguments, gossips and squabbling around the Israel Prizes, with unsatisfied candidates bypassed by the selection committees, exposing their complaints and aggravation in the media. Also, the prolonged exposition and the conflict that will complicate their already uneasy relations may appear at first to be rather fussy and even nagging, as the whole family background has to be introduced and the nature of the protagonists’ occupation has to be clarified.

But thanks to Cedar’s humorous, at times even sardonic, way of dealing with this material, tackling stuffy themes with a light touch and alertly moving forward with the imaginatively skillful assistance of editor Einat Glaser-Zarhin, the risk of losing his audience is smilingly avoided.

As the main crisis finally erupts, Bar Aba’s studied surly performance on the one hand and Ashkenazi’s increasing restlessness on the other hand, carry Cedar’s script efficiently forward to a climactic, almost hallucinatory preparation for the distribution of the supreme awards, before leading into an inconclusive ending that some will consider to be disappointing while other will praise, rightly so, for its restraint.

Helped by Yaron Scharf’s fluid cinematography and Alex Claude’s judicious sound design, and accompanied by a richly opulent - but almost invasive - soundtrack, Cedar, in what is most likely his top achievement to date, delivers a rather unique combination of original satire and serious drama, conveying, once the smiles wear off, a bitter aftertaste which will linger on for a long time.
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The three trade reviews for Moretti's Habemus Papem.

We Have a Pope: Film Review
by Deborah Young
Hollywood Repoter


ROME — It’s a pity that We Have a Pope, the English title of Nanni Moretti’s gently amusing tale about a newly elected Pontiff who refuses to take office, wasn’t left in the original Latin. Habemus Papam, the words by which a new Pope is announced to the world, conveys the skewed overlay of Catholic tradition and bizarre otherworldliness that give the film its unique comic tone, assisted by a rapturous performance by Michel Piccoliin the central role and Moretti in top acting form as his would-be psychoanalyst. The subject in itself should shepherd in a worldwide flock of film-goers. Let it immediately be said that there is nothing in the film to impede the enjoyment of Catholics, all the way up to the top.

Coming out in Italy just two weeks before the beatification of Pope John Paul II on May 1, We Have a Pope – which opens with newsreels of John Paul’s 2005 funeral — is set to cash in on the media frenzy for all things Papal. Its international bow in competition at Cannes, where the director’s The Son’s Roomwon a Palme d’Or in 2001, should be a 1-2 punch for the Italo-French co-production.

And yet, fans of Moretti, the political activist and beacon of uncomfortable truths, will wonder where he left the mordant, oft-times savage humor and fierce political satire of Mass Is Over and his Silvio Berlusconi send-up,The Caiman. Here the storyteller overpowers the moralist in every sense. Not a hint of clerical sex scandals clouds the surreal image of frolicking white-haired Cardinals; the most critical line in the film suggests the Church needs a leader who will bring great change, but even that plays as an offhand remark. Those looking for a probing study of religious faith, in the vein of Marco Bellocchio’s The Religion Hour/His Mother’s Smile, are knocking on the wrong church door.

What the film offers is a well-written, surprisingly mainstream comedy with an unbeatable setting, the Vatican’s inner chambers, brilliantly recreated by production designer Paola Bizzarri from an astute collage of Roman palaces and churches and shot through with bold cardinal red by cinematographer Alessandro Pesci. The illusion of being in the Sistine Chapel and the Vatican gardens alongside the Princes of the Church is satisfyingly complete.

Following the Pope’s funeral, a procession of red-robed Cardinals from all over the Earth convenes to elect a successor. The news media is lampooned in a goofy TV reporter, shooed out of the way by the suave Vatican spokesman, played with unflappable self-assurance by Polish actor Jerzy Stuhr.

The conclave is ceremoniously locked inside the Sistine Chapel and voting gets underway. Though Cardinal Gregori (Renato Scarpa) is the odds-on favorite, he is overturned in the second round by an underdog, French cardinal Melville (Piccoli.) Everyone is delighted and they escort the new Pontiff to the balcony, where he is to address the crowds in St. Peter’s Square, breathlessly awaiting the news. But just as he is about to be announced, Melville lets out a shriek and runs out of the room, under the horrified eyes of the assembly.

While Stuhr, who assumes a central role as event organizer and crisis trouble-shooter, tries to buy time with the Cardinals and the public outside, Melville falls to pieces in a crisis of inadequacy, unable to face the enormous role he is being called on to play. Suddenly, hilariously, a psychoanalyst (Moretti) is called in and is instructed to “cure” the patient in front of the entire conclave – just don’t mention sex, mother, fantasies, desires or dreams, please. When Stuhr tells the analyst (who confesses to being an atheist) that “the soul and the unconscious can’t co-exist,” it seems as though the sarcastic fun is about to start; but it doesn’t.

Instead the depressed Pontiff dodges his guards and wanders through the streets of Rome, listening to the common people on buses and in coffee shops and falling in with a theater troupe rehearsing Chekov’s The Seagull. His escape climaxes in a fancy theater, where the Pope is aptly compared to an actor.

Meanwhile, the analyst organizes a volleyball tournament for the other prisoners of the Vatican, a cute idea of good, clean fun that looks tame compared to the ferocious, politically-tinged water polo scenes in Moretti’s early Red Lob.

Still the screenplay, which Moretti penned with his Caimanco-scripters Francesco Piccoloand Federica Pontremoli, is full of inventive moments thatshow he is one of the most creative filmmakers working in Italy, astutely recasting current history into a popular form. But the finale is a let-down, leaving the feeling of an artist paralyzed by his own perfectionism and his desperate search for originality at all costs. The sacrifice in spontaneity really isn’t worth it.

What makes the film memorable, in the end, are the characters, particularly Piccoli’s wrenching portrait of the frail old Cardinal, who painfully rummages through a lifetime of human experience to reach a few words of wisdom. On a completely different register, Moretti lights up every scene he’s in as the brash, bossy shrink (a role he played in The Son’s Room) married to another obsessed analyst (Margherita Buy, virtually the only female character in this boys’ movie). Stuhr and Scarpa stand out in the sea of Vatican dwellers, though the ultra-nice Cardinals, many of whom are non-pro actors, hold their own.

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Habemus Papam
By Lee Marshall
Screendaily

Dir: Nanni Moretti. Italy-France. 2011. 104 mins


A delightfully underplayed turn from Michel Piccoli as a newly-elected Pope paralysed by feelings of inadequacy, a large dose of widescreen confidence and some moments of delicate human observation fail to make up for the unresolved feel of Nanni Moretti’s long-awaited Vatican film, which seems to share its protagonist’s fear of commitment.

Fascinating and frustrating in equal measure, and less funny than one might expect, Habemus Papam (We Have A Pope) hits a genuinely fresh and graceful note in its opening conclave scenes but soon becomes just another meandering and off-the-wall Nanni Moretti comedy mixing Freud, God, Darwin, Chekhov and volleyball – and then struggles to regain its human touch in time for what should be (and almost is) a powerful ending.

Still, for much of its length this is a more playful and more likable excursion than Moretti’s last, the tortuous Berlusconi-inspired political satire The Caiman. With its upscale production values and sumptuous recreation of what happens behind the scenes at the Papal conclave – including a Cinecittà-built Sistine Chapel interior – it may also prove to be the director’s most commercially successful film to date (it’s certainly his most expensive, with a budget of 8 million euros).

Long fascinated by religion – he played a young priest facing a crisis of faith in the underrated and underseen The Mass Is Ended (1985) – Moretti keeps the Catholic satire gentle and sympathetic, veined even with a certain spiritual yearning, and there may be some crossover trade from curious Christian filmgoers. But mostly the film, which opened on April 15 in Italy on a record (for the director) 450 copies, will reach out to a wider than usual version of Moretti’s core cineaste audience. It’s likely to play in a few more territories than The Caiman, and should appeal to those who liked the quirky charm of the director’s 1993 breakout title Caro Diario but haven’t taken a gamble on him since then.

Opening with scenes that splice in genuine footage of John Paul II’s funeral, Habemus Papam initially puts not a foot wrong in its establishment of tone, first prompting the audience to share in the low murmur of devout expectation that rises from the crowds gathered in St Peter’s Square, before segueing into a procession of cardinals reciting their saintly ‘ora pro nobis’ devotions as they file into the Sistine Chapel to elect a new pontiff, with touches of comedy arising only through the inane gabble of a superficial TV anchorman and a hint of growing absurdity in the names of the saints being chanted.

Inside the chapel, after a couple of ‘fumate nere’ (hung ballots, announced by black smoke from the Chapel’s chimney) the conclave reaches a seemingly miraculous consensus around a dark horse candidate, Cardinal Melville (Piccoli), a mild-mannered prelate whose nationality is never mentioned. Melville initially accepts the papacy, but as he is about to be presented to the crowds in the square he bottles out, revealing in his refusal to cooperate with the anxious cardinals and modern, media-oriented Vatican spokesman (Stuhr) a childlike, inarticulate stubbornness.

The Italian trailer sells the film as a Vatican variation on Analyse This, with Moretti’s arrogant (and atheist) therapist character, Professor Brezzi, being given the task of sorting out the self-doubting Pope. But in fact there’s just one amusing (but dramatically flat) scene between the two, and soon the uncertain Melville, aka His Holiness, and the cocky Brezzi have gone their separate ways – the pope-in-denial having managed to escape from his minders into the urban jungle of Rome after a session with Brezzi’s therapist ex-wife (Buy), while il professore cools his heels inside the Vatican, where conclave rules still apply – no leaving the premises, no mobile phones, no contact with the outside world.

It’s here that Habemus Papam loses its way. The letdown begins, paradoxically, with Moretti’s entrance – like Woody Allen the director always plays versions of himself, and though his trademark control freakery and short temper generate genuinely funny episodes (as in a cardinals’ card game where he makes up a fourth), his tendency to monologue while others are trying to dialogue and his ironic collusion with the audience turns what might have been a genuinely sensitive moral comedy into Nanni’s latest performance.

Sure, it’s fun to see elderly cardinals playing volleyball in the international tournament Brezzi organises in a Vatican courtyard to pass the time, but with its echoes of Palombella Rossa (Red Lob), Moretti’s 1989 film that mixed Marxism with water-polo, this interlude seems little more than a directorial mannerism.

So does the Chekhov theme that runs through the errant Pope’s pilgrim’s progress through Rome, when he falls in with a theatrical troupe that is rehearsing The Seagull: yes, like that play, this film is making points about human frailty and our misguided attempts to control our fate, but the arcane and not particularly funny symbolism of these overlong theatrical episodes do little for the audience and feel like an intellectual smokescreen, as if Moretti were afraid of telling a simple story simply.

Themes (like the Moby Dick suggestions in Melville’s name) and references (including a couple of other nods at Moretti’s back catalogue) hang like apples on the Tree of Knowledge in Habemus Papam, but the director seems to care little whether we bite into them or not.

Pin-sharp widescreen photography, the lush choreography and costumes of the scarlet-clad cardinals, Franco Piersanti’s densely scored classical orchestral soundtrack, and above all the sense of real pathos in the central story of a man crushed by the God-given responsibility that has been thrust upon him all build a sense of anticipation.

We’re gunning for this to be the comic equivalent to the director’s family tragedy The Son’s Room – a universally relevant story with its eye fully on its dramatic object, here the reluctant Pope, played (and scripted) with some finesse as a near-silent everyman role. But Moretti seems so terrified of the easy solution, the comedy of manners and of the soul that would make a three-act story out of a poor paralysed Pope, a frantic Vatican spokesman and an arrogant analyst, that he takes deliberate aim and shoots his film in the foot. And yet, despite the ensuing limp, the film’s anti-feelgood conclusion does have a certain moral authority.


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We Have a Pope
By Jay Weissberg
Variety


Following a string of mordant themes, Nanni Moretti turns to gentle comedic stylings with the artistically and doctrinally conservative "We Have a Pope." The original-language title, referring to the words spoken to announce a new pontiff, reps the sole irony in this uneven tale of a cardinal (played with consummate brilliance as usual by Michel Piccoli) who fears the papal tiara. There are only so many yuks Moretti can milk from the sight of old men in clerical robes, and the film's toothlessness makes it unlikely for arthouse crowds to anoint a work that shouldn't offend Opus Dei.

Euro play will gain traction from "Pope's" Cannes competish berth, and Italo biz was strong on its opening weekend, but the helmer's resumption of his Woody Allen-like mantle appears designed for a conventional older crowd. The biggest sin here isn't the cutesy, unoriginal take on the upper echelons of clerical life, but rather an inability to balance mildly amusing scenes, which seem tailored for a jokey trailer, with the anguish of a man unprepared for the responsibility of ascending St. Peter's throne. The results veer between occasional smiles and outright pretension, with only Piccoli's mastery transcending the material.

The College of Cardinals is sequestered in the Sistine Chapel (expertly reproduced at Cinecitta) to elect a pope. Following a few inconclusive votes, they appoint Cardinal Melville (Piccoli), who is overwhelmed with humility. As the world anxiously awaits, the prelates gather to announce "Habemus Papam" from the balcony of St. Peter's, but when the words are proclaimed, Melville screams and rushes away. Stupefied, the cardinals withdraw without declaring the name of the new pope.

Technically, Melville is the pontiff, but until he agrees to be publicly proclaimed, his identity can't be revealed. The curia is thrown into a tizzy, especially the Vatican spokesman (an excellent Jerzy Stuhr). The cardinals remain sequestered, and a shrink (Moretti) is summoned to find out if the pope is mentally stable. The psychiatric session, conducted before the assembled cardinals and severely circumscribed, reps the funniest scene, yet the script doesn't know where to take it, and Moretti's character becomes as aimless as the film itself.

Through a not-terribly-believable narrative somersault, the spokesman takes the pope incognito to the shrink's estranged wife (Margherita Buy), also an analyst. Following a farcical encounter, Melville deliberately loses his handlers and wanders the streets of Rome , finding inspiration from bus passengers, a parish priest (Salvatore Miscio), and a troupe of actors performing Chekhov's "The Seagull," all of whom help him formulate thoughts on the weight thrust upon him.

Timing works for and against "We Have a Pope": John Paul II's upcoming beatification means traditionalists are ready for a light-hearted pro-Church film they can embrace, but recent scandals have left such sourness that many will expect the man who made "The Caiman" to inject a note of pointed commentary. They will be sadly disappointed: What they get instead are scenes of cardinals playing volleyball. The clerical fashion show in "Fellini's Roma" conveyed a biting absurdity that Moretti's film can't begin to touch.

Nor does the film have the profundity of the recent "Of Gods and Men," which explored faith in ways both respectful and deeply moving. Here, the uncertain pope's inner turmoil makes for engrossing moments, yet they're sabotaged by the helmer's apparent need to find humor in the thought of a cardinal wanting a good cappuccino. By the hour mark, the film already feels overextended, and then it leaps into pretentious territory with an overly staged scene in a theater, followed by a finale dwarfed by the intensity of Arvo Part's "Miserere."

Thankfully, Piccoli makes it worthwhile, and thesps and acting coaches could do no better than study the way he conveys humility, intelligence, fear and innocent pleasure with the merest of eye movements. Casting is flawless throughout, from Stuhr and his marvelous rubbery face, as controlled as that of a silent film comedian, to the multinational extras making up the believable curia.

Alessandro Pesci's lensing is attractive, calling attention to itself only when quietly conveying an emotion, such as slow zooms of the pope alone in the Sistine Chapel, though slow-mo during the volleyball scene is pointless. The f/x team does an excellent job inserting real Vatican background shots, and the set designers and location scouts are to be commended for impressive research.
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Poliss
13 May, 2011 | By Jonathan Romney
Screendaily

Dir: Maïwenn. France. 2011. 127mins



A tough docudrama-style cop story nearly makes it to the finishing post but drops the ball too soon in Poliss (Polisse). This patchily impressive film is all the more frustrating because when it’s good it positively crackles, while the less successful passages are self-indulgent and sometimes borderline superfluous.

An ensemble piece by actor-director Maïwenn - who scored a domestic hit with her Actresses (2009) - boasts a superb cast and offers a sometimes steely and informative look at the activities of the Paris police’s Juvenile Protection Unit. Based, as opening title states, on actual JPU cases, the film bears the marks of serious research.

But Maïwenn is often too taken with her characters’ off-duty lives - and, ruinously, with the rather marginal character she herself plays - to truly fulfill the film’s initial promise of casting light on the everyday business of child protection. Even so, at its best the film has a vitality and approachability that should make it a passably saleable prospect.

It should flourish in France, where it is released in October, not least thanks to an illustrious cast. Abroad, its profile should be aided by superficial affinities to recent, very different successes A Prophet (which generally boosted the cachet of the realist French policier) and Laurent Cantet’s The Class, with which it shares its loose structure and quasi-documentary behind-the-scenes feel.

The film starts with an ironic title sequence set to a bouncy song suggesting that children live “in paradise”. The truth, we discover, is rather different, as the JPU officers work through a succession of cases involving, variously, abusive parents and grandparents; Romany children in pickpocket rings; and homeless immigrants begging the JPU to take their children away and give them shelter.

The film is punctuated by a series of seemingly semi-improvised scenes in which officers either grill adults suspected of abuse, or try more subtly - but sometimes awkwardly - to winkle the truth out of nervous children. Punchily shot in naturalistic style by Pierre Aïm, this film has a largely non-linear, fragmentary structure that introduces us by and by to a sprawling cast.

Among the cops are Nadine (Viard) whose colleague Iris (Foïs) is helping her through divorce storms; the volatile Fred (rapper turned actor Joeystarr), whose own marriage problems see him temporarily staying with his long-suffering but affable unit head (Pierrot); and work partners Mathieu (Duvauchelle) and Chrys (Rocher), who have a simmering but unstated fondness for each other.

Also thrown awkwardly into the mix is Melissa (played by the director herself), a photographer assigned to the unit for an official project, and whose outsider-looking-in status appears to represent the director’s own research into her subject. The initially comic, gawky Melissa becomes an increasingly sore-thumb presence, and preoccupies the director to a degree that seriously distracts from the film’s ostensible theme - especially when she sparks romantically with Fred.

More interesting than the familiar procedural business of raids and strategy meetings is the underdeveloped hard core of the film, which deals with the team’s intervention in family dramas and dealings with suspected paedophiles and abusers. These are the most provocative and troubling scenes, with Viard and Foïs excelling in particular. There are also tantalisingly spare cameos by Sandrine Kiberlain and Louis-Do de Lenquessaing as parents in a family case, the latter memorably slimy as a defiant suspect.

Some of the interrogation scenes edge the film into risky and troubling territory, into which Maïwenn and co-writer Emmanuelle Bercot (who also
appears) never finally delve as challengingly as they might. There’s some eyebrow-raising comic material, too, notably the scenes in which teenagers under the team’s protection insist that they’re perfectly capable of running their own precocious lives, thank you very much.

But there are a few too many scenes of the team bonding off duty, which suggest Maïwenn getting carried away by the pleasure of working with such a tight-knit ensemble.

She is undeniably a very strong director of actors, especially in it comes to the delicate scenes involving the various children. She’s less adept, though, at judging what is dramatically essential and what is surplus to requirements, and an abrupt and incongruous ending disastrously blows the credit of what has up till then been, flaws notwithstanding, a pretty arresting effort
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Poliss (Polisse): Cannes Review
by Jordan Mintzer
Hollywood Reporter


A powerhouse of emotional jolts, free-wheeling comedy and socially-minded storytelling, Poliss (Polisse) reps an admirable step up for writer-director-actress Maiwenn, and one which should finally expand her audience beyond French borders. This extensive portrayal of officers working in a Parisian Child Protection Unit is packed with raw energy and visceral performances from an accomplished cast, and despite an unwieldy episodic structure, the film touches where it matters most.

Honing in on the fervent style that marked her self-confessional debut, Pardonnez-moi, and her mockumentary on Gallic stars, The Actress’ Ball, but applying it to a much broader playing field set within the world of pedophile crime investigations, the 35-year-old Maiwenn presents an engrossing network narrative that benefits from the impressive work of nearly a dozen talented French actors. Like a whole season of The Wire packed into a single two-hour-plus film, Poliss covers much ground, and even with its loose threads and frenzied structure, it convincingly jumps from laughter to tears and back again, never losing sight of the brutal realities at its core.

From its opening scene, in which a little girl tells one of the officers, Chrys (Karole Rocher), that her father sometimes “scratches her butt,” the film presents the difficulties in distinguishing truth from speculation in child sex abuse cases, especially when kids and parents offer conflicting testimonies, or take issue with police workers poking into their private lives. Maiwenn and co-writer-star Emmanuelle Bercot insert a number of such interrogations throughout the story, and they run the gamut from disturbing to hilarious to downright tragic, especially in one emotional wallop of a sequence where a little boy is separated from a mother who can’t provide him adequate shelter.

That moment occurs about midway through the movie, and that fact that it runs on for longer than expected is revealing of Maiwenn’s approach to such uneasy material. Instead of playing scenes safely via evocative cutaways or trying to up the cute factor whenever a kid appears on screen, she allows – like fellow French directors Abdellatif Kechiche or the late Maurice Pialat – for the intensity of the situation to take over in all its rawness. Another prime example is a late scene between two officers and sometime buddies, Nadine (Karin Viard) and Iris (Marina Fois), whose explosive office shouting match is something to behold.

Very much like David Simon’s Baltimore-set HBO series, Poliss concentrates on the strain the job puts on policemen and women who deal day in day out with hard knocks cases and bureaucratic pigeonholing, and how that affects their generally chaotic home lives. In fact, all of them, including Melissa (Maiwenn), the timid photographer who’s been commissioned by the Interior Ministry to document the unit’s activities, are undergoing either a divorce, a separation, or are defiantly and unhappily single. While these cops work very hard to mend other peoples’ nightmares, they are unable, through the sheer exhaustion of their métier, to take care of themselves, relying on each other for all kinds of support, friendship, or, in a few instances, love.

Their work hard, play hard attitude is best exemplified by Fred (Joeystarr), a wiry cop whose estrangement from his own daughter makes him take every case to heart, putting him increasingly at odds with a superior (Frederic Pierrot) who caves in too easily to the power above. French rapper Joeystarr, who has gone from shouting “fuck the police” to portraying one incredibly well here, is perfectly on point with the film’s constant temperature changes, and provides one of its comic highlights when Fred interrogates a teenage girl who performed fellatio to get back a stolen cell phone.

If that doesn’t sound like comic material, Maiwenn manages to make it so, and what in another filmmaker’s hands would have seemed merely provocative has an honesty and spontaneity to be reckoned with. Whether performances were improvised or not is unclear, but they’re reigned in enough to feel polished and real. Ditto for the tech, which feels free and unmannered as it captures the grittier neighborhoods of northeast Paris, though it never drops to the handheld quirks of many a young director.

If the film suffers from anything, its the writers’ choice to shove in so many plots, subplots, and episodes within its limited running time, and the finale especially takes a turn that doesn’t seem warranted by what preceded it.

Per press notes, the title comes from Maiwenn’s own son’s misspelling of the word, but was also a way to distinguish her film from Pialat’s 1985 drama, Police. In Poliss, he may have found a surprisingly worthy successor.

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Polisse
By Boyd van Hoeij
Variety


A Parisian Child Protection Unit gets the gritty group-portrait treatment in "Polisse," the third feature from mono-monikered actress-helmer Maiwenn. Crimes against minors, often vice-related, are the harrowing day-to-day reality of this motley group of cops, who face their work with a necessary dose of humor and the more-than-occasional breakdown. Though rough edges are very much part of pic's fabric and charm, the current two-hour-plus edit is too choppy, with many sequences feeling rushed or underdeveloped. Nonetheless, this police ensembler has enough highlights to arrest savvy arthouse patrons worldwide.

Maiwenn demonstrated a flair for mixing comedy, drama, autobiographical elements and a documentary-like approach in her sophomore helming effort, "All About Actresses." But her latest has more in common, thematically speaking, with her autobiographical directorial debut, "Forgive Me," a crude, at times painfully honest film about a pregnant daughter's relationship with her abusive father.

The helmer's third and by far most ambitious and complex pic, "Polisse" looks at a large group of colleagues who work for the Child Protection Unit in northern Paris. Early reels immediately throw auds into the thick of things, and characters only slowly emerge as Maiwenn follows different cases, heated discussions over lunch and after-work gossip sessions.

The details of the vice-related cases, many of them shocking even for seasoned vets like the ones portrayed here, are not as important as the effect they have on the cops, who try to continue living their own lives as best they can while doing a job that confronts them with bottom-of-the-barrel humanity on a daily basis.

The squad includes Nadine (Karin Viard), who's in the middle of a divorce and has to watch what she eats, while her work partner, Iris (Marina Fois), swears by a little exercise (and some trips to the restroom). Mathieu (Nicolas Duvauchelle) secretly carries a torch for his married partner, Chrys (Karole Rocher), who's just found out she's pregnant. The unit daddy is Balloo (Frederic Pierrot), who allows Fred (Joeystarr), the resident hothead with the heart of gold, to crash at his place.

Maiwenn is probably most famous Stateside for her supporting role in "The Fifth Element" from Luc Besson, with whom she had a child at 16. Here, she co-stars as a nerdy photog who has an assignment from the Interior Ministry to document the unit's work. Somewhat oddly, Maiwenn's character is one of the group's blander elements, as is the role played by actress/co-scripter Emmanuelle Bercot.

"Polisse" is most successful in several impressive individual moments, such as a big celebration in a club after a case has a happy ending; a hilarious scene in which the entire office is confronted with a teen who values her smartphone more than her dignity; and the impressive dramatic undercurrents that surface when Fred can't find a shelter for an immigrant mother and her young son.

Impressively, the editing balances these moments of high drama and police action with more routine office work, as the cops blow off steam and reveal snippets of their private lives. But while this equilibrium works well in terms of tone, individual story threads are shortchanged and some narrative inroads barely developed.

Some characters remain background filler except for one big scene, while a late-in-the-game field operation in a mall is treated in such a rushed manner that it seems to serve only as a setup for the rather anticlimactic hospital scene that follows. The ending rather awkwardly crosscuts between one of the rare scenes that stays close to the p.o.v. of a child victim, apparently chosen at random, and the rather drastic goings-on during a unit meeting.

As in her previous efforts, Maiwenn coaxes terrific, naturalistic perfs from her ensemble without eschewing the extreme emotional highs and lows that could have led to more caricatured turns. Joeystarr, a rapper famous locally for his run-ins with (irony of ironies) the police as much as his music, delivers on the promise of acting talent he first suggested in "All About Actresses." The way he's seen behaving around his own daughter, of whom he sees very little, speaks volumes about how working for the unit can be its own kind of slow poison.

Handheld video aesthetic again imbues a nonfiction feel that augments the urgency and rawness that propel the entire film. Downbeat but unsentimental score by Stephen Warbeck is used only sparingly.

English-language press materials refer to pic as "Poliss," though the print caught in Cannes left the original title, a French, childlike spelling of "Police," untranslated.




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Hollywood Reporter and Variety reviews. Spoilers hidden.

We Need to Talk About Kevin: Cannes Review
by Kirk Honeycutt
Hollywood Reporter


CANNES -- The irony in the title of Lynne Ramsay's film, We Need to Talk About Kevin, is that no one ever does. In many ways, in fact, the film is almost as non-verbal as the newly restored version of Georges Méliès' 1902 A Trip to the Moon, shown here at the Festival de Cannes earlier this week. The film is about one character yet takes place entirely in the mind and world of another. Seldom has a son and a mother been more unknown to each other than in this drama, which is as perplexing as it is intriguing.

Its Cannes exposure should send Ramsay's movie, her first in nearly 10 years since Morvern Callar, on a distinguished ride along the festival circuit with acquisitions coming in many territories, all of which will be tough sells theatrically. Moviegoers seek out a film such as We Need to Talk About Kevin for the experience of a top-flight director taking complete charge of a fractured, intricate narrative design and a top-flight actress at the peak of her game. With this film, Tilda Swinton establishes herself as the one to beat for best-actress honors at 2011 Cannes.

The Kevin in the title is a troubled, angry youth who, you realize fairly soon in a narrative that tracks back and forth in time, has committed a high-school murder rampage. He is played by three different youths at varying ages but the two playing him as a 6-year-old (Jasper Newell) and a teenager (Ezra Miller) definitely have the evil eye. Sinister and brooding, each stares at his mother with dark intent, the mind behind those eyes clicking away with devious plots.

But the movie really isn't about Kevin. It's about Swinton's Eva, the mother who maybe didn't want to have the child in the first place, but that's just a guess. She never says so.

Eva has moved from her New York suburban home following the tragedy into a humble house that is the frequent target of vandals, even as she is the frequent target of outrage from a community that scorns her for producing such a monster. Kevin is incarcerated in a nearby prison that she occasionally visits as she tries to get back on her feet with a menial job at a travel agency.

Since the movie largely takes place in her tormented mind, it free-associates with images, words and themes going as far back as her romance with Kevin's father, Franklin (John C. Reilly), somewhere in Europe. The movie, in fact, opens at a Spanish festival where a large crowd of young people douse themselves with tomatoes and juice, calling forth one of the basic theme images of the movie - a redder-than-red red that takes in the festival bacchanal, red paint vandals throw on her house, the supermarket soup cans she hides behind to avoid irate parents and the blood from Kevin's many victims.

Reading aloud to her son from Robin Hood -- the only time in the film mother and son enjoy each other's company -- the movie tracks Kevin's growing obsession with archery from rubber toys to increasingly powerful bows until the final weapon he uses to hunt classmates.

An enmity exists between son and mother, seemingly from birth, that Ramsay - who wrote the screenplay with her husband Rory Stewart Kinnear from Lionel Shriver's prize-winning novel -- never tries to solve. The film hints that no mother could cope such a son; indeed Kevin despises his mother, seems to have no friends and treats his dad and young sister Celia (Ashley Gerasimovich) with only feigned affection. This boy likes nothing and no one -- except for archery.

The father is clueless about his son's treachery and ignores any attempt at enlightenment by his wife. Of course, the movie's events are memories filtered by guilt, regret and anguish so they are by no means reliable. The camera sticks with Swinton, letting you know that this is her thinking back, searching for answers. None come.


Although on camera every minute, Swinton gives the impression that this woman would love to disappear. Even before the massacre, she looks like she wants out of her life. The actress conveys every thought racing through her character's mind.

What is she doing in this dreadful suburb with a husband she forgot how to love and a son she cannot reach? The last thing she knew she was at a tomato-throwing festival in Spain.

Ramsay shoots in Cinemascope so no matter how close she gets to her heroine, you sense the environment as well. Small objects and little details about what Kevin is up to take on a more ominous aspect in wide screen. This is, in a way, a real horror film about everyday things and a disconnected family.

All these narrative tricks and the intense scrutiny on a single character do put a viewer at a remove from these events, however. This is a coolly cerebral film with odd music choices - everything from the Beach Boys to vintage country - and a few odd images such as a microscopic view of breast cancer cells dividing, apropos of absolutely nothing.

It's a film to think about and debate over but not one to embrace.

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We Need to Talk About Kevin
By Leslie Felperin
Variety


After a nine-year sabbatical from feature filmmaking, Scottish helmer Lynne Ramsay is back with a vengeance with "We Need to Talk About Kevin," an exquisitely realized adaptation of Lionel Shriver's bestselling novel. In a rigorously subtle perf as a woman coping with the horrific damage wrought by her psychopathic son, Tilda Swinton anchors the dialogue-light film with an expressiveness that matches her star turn in "I Am Love." Craft contributions, especially from lenser Seamus McGarvey and editor Joe Bini, round out an immaculate package that will rep catnip for crix and get auds talking, but may be too bleak for the mainstream.

On paper, Shriver's distinctively voiced, Stateside-set first-person narrative might have seemed like a mismatch for Ramsay's visually stylized, European-arthouse sensibility. But as she proved with her 2002 sophomore effort, "Morvern Callar," Ramsay has no qualms about shearing great chunks of exposition from the texts she works with to get to the heart of the story. Here, as in her previous work, especially her 1999 feature debut, "Ratcatcher," trained photographer Ramsay lets pure film technique do the heavy lifting in order to convey the desolate emotional climate that makes the central tragedy happen. To echo a key line Kevin speaks at one point, the look and tone of the film isn't something that has to be understood in context; it is the context.

Pic unspools through a fluid system of flashbacks that require auds to pay close attention to the length of Swinton's hair to know what's happening when. Told chronologically, the story relates how travel-writer-turned-publisher Eva Khatchadourian (Swinton) and her photographer husband Franklin (John C. Reilly) awkwardly swap a boho hipster lifestyle in Gotham for upmarket suburbia to make a home for their son, Kevin (played as a toddler by Rocky Duer, as a 6- to 8-year-old by Jasper Newell, and finally, chillingly as a teen by Ezra Miller), and later his sister, Celia (Ashley Gerasimovich).

Although Eva and Franklin intentionally conceive Kevin out of love for each other, motherhood doesn't come easily to this adventurous, fiercely independent, some might say selfish woman, especially when faced with an angry, colicky baby. At one point, she tells her toddler son while he's angrily splattering the walls with baby food that, quite frankly, she'd rather be in Paris than sitting with him at that moment, an honest reaction many mothers feel but don't usually dare articulate. The scene and others like it neatly establish the story's unanswerable core conundrum: Is Kevin just a bad seed, or did Eva's strained, unhappy first attempt at parenting turn him into a monster?

As in the book, it's revealed fairly early on that at some point Kevin did something horrible and deadly at his high school that created a small avenging army of grieving parents, whom a now-alone Eva must constantly dodge and withstand abuse from in the film's present tense. The finer details are meted out in small, cruel shocks (gore is minimal, but the telling details are no less disturbing). And just like the book, the pic saves its cruelest revelation for last, in a reveal even the most genre-trained auds might not see coming.


Ramsay and splicer Bini (best known for his work with Werner Herzog) devise some innovative edits, like one ironic match-on-action that juxtaposes a pregnant Eva, walking down a hallway surrounded by little girls in tutus, with a walk of shame down a prison corridor years later. But the quick fluttering between time periods, especially in the pic's first half, may prove a bit too brittle and mannered for some viewers.

That said, when things settle down into longer, deeper breaths in the second half and the tragedy inexorably approaches, the technique pays off with tiny, close-up details, coming into their own as symbols or at least leitmotifs, some of which resonate with moments in Ramsay's earlier work (like a curtain seen at the beginning that recalls "Ratcatcher"). Sound design by Paul Davies is similarly playful and foreboding; the whoosh of sprinklers has never been more menacingly deployed than it is here.

Present in every scene so that there's no doubt that her character's consciousness is filtering what's seen, Swinton delivers a concrete-hard central perf that's up there with her best work. Sporting dark hair and brown contact lenses to suggest Eva's Armenian heritage, her naturally ghostly pallor effectively sets her apart from the more luridly colored townsfolk she settles uncomfortably among. Playing it straight for a change, Reilly has warmth but perhaps not as well developed as a character. That couldn't be said of Kevin, who's perfectly rendered by the three cannily cast thesps who play him, from stern-faced tot Duer to chilling Newell and finally the elfin-featured yet disarmingly deep-voiced Miller.

Soundtrack choices, particularly Lonnie Donegan tunes and golden oldie pop like the Beach Boys' "In My Room," work in unsettling counterpoint to the visuals, enhancing the sense of foreboding so vital throughout. The fact that the setting is worlds away from Ramsay's usual working-class Scottish milieu somehow works in the pic's favor, so that the slightly exaggerated Americana feel of the locations mirrors Eva's estrangement from her community. Widescreen lensing by McGarvey is aces, as usual.




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Post by rudeboy »

Sonic Youth wrote:Lynne Ramsay, whose last film was the much acclaimed Ratcatcher (1999)
Her last film prior to this was Morvern Callar, no?

This is my most anticipated movie of the year so far. I was a huge fan of the novel, and the very talented Ramsey's attachment was something I was ready to celebrate as soon as it was announced. Ditto Swinton - difficult to re-read the book without picturing her now, inspired casting. I really hope they pull this off, and that it becomes an awards player at the end of the year... this first review gives me hope.
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