Cannes film festival reviews

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ETA: Screendaily and Hollywood Reporter's review:

Hara-Kiri: Death Of A Samurai
19 May, 2011 | By Allan Hunter
Screendaily

Dir: Takashi Miike Japan. 2011. 126mins



The combination of cult director Takashi Miike, a classic saga of samurai honour and 3-D creates a level of expectation that Hara Kiri: Death Of A Samurai is unable to meet. Anyone anticipating an action-packed companion piece to last year’s 13 Assassins will need to adjust their thinking to accept something akin to a stately, slow-burning Shakespearean tragedy in which a blade is barely raised in anger before the final twenty minutes.

Patient audiences are rewarded with a beautifully crafted story of suffering, sacrifice and vengeance that gradually gains in emotional weight over the course of two long hours. Commercially, it will struggle to match the success of 13 Assassins.

The remake of Masaki Kobayashi’s 1963 classic begins in 1634 as Hanshiro (Ebizo Ichikawa) arrives at the House of li asking if he may use the courtyard as the setting for his ritual suicide. Before granting the request, the prefect of the house Kageyu (Koji Yakusho) tells him the story of a penniless young man Motome (Eita) who recently called to make the same demand. In a time of peace and massive unemployment,

Impoverished samurai have been extorting money by threatening suicide in the expectation that wealthy owners will pay them not to carry out the deed. In the case of Motome, Kageyu had been persuaded to call his bluff leading to the film’s most excruciating sequence in which he tries to take his own life with a dull bamboo blade that wouldn’t cut butter. What Kageyu doesn’t know is the connection between Motome and Hanshiro, a relationship that is traced in extensive flashbacks.

At first the flashbacks appear somewhat ponderous and a little dull as we learn of what lead Motome into such dire straits and the responsibility Hanshiro feels for his fate. The core of the film is a delicately handled family drama with a whiff of a Dickens novel or a Victorian melodrama. Eventually, we are won over by the story when we come to realise what was at stake for both of the men who called at the House of li.

A big problem with Hara-Kiri, is Miike’s decision to follow in the footsteps of Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders and put 3-D at the disposal of something other than animated blockbusters and genre fare. Sadly, it feels more of a distraction than an enhancement allowing a depth of focus in some scenes no more impressive than what cameraman Gregg Toland achieved in Citizen Kane.

The required glasses cloud the film with an olive fog that dulls the lustre and precision of the often exquisite colour photography by Nobuyasu Kita that is at its most resplendent in the vibrant tints of autumn leaves and a showdown in gentle snowfall.

Miike regular Koji Yakusho is a typically commanding presence as Kageyu whilst Ebizo Ichikawa brings a righteous anger to Hanshiro. Miike’s decision to frame both men in lingering close-ups adds to the intensity of the impact they make.

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Hara-kiri: The Death of a Samurai: Cannes 2011 Review
by Maggie Lee
Hollywood Reporter


CANNES – Anyone expecting a 3D film on Japanese ritual suicide by the director of such ultra-gory fare as Ichi the Killer to have guts and entrails squirting out from the screen has another thing coming. Hara-kiri: The Death of a Samurai, Takashi Miike’s remake of Masaki Kobayashi’s Hara-kiri is expensively mounted with comfortably unobtrusive 3D effects, ceremoniously slow, and oh so respectable. As a critique of the hypocrisy and inhumanity of bushido it lacks a bitter sting, nor does it search for a new angle to the subject.

Rather than Miike’s regular extreme Asia genre fans, who may not stay awake for the final spurt of action, this film should pursue an older age group with an acquired taste for well-made period drama, such as Yoji Yamada’s Twilight Samurai. In Japan, leading man Ebizo Ichikawa, the hottest and most scandal-prone Kabuki actor of his generation will provide necessary buzz for the film. Niche theatrical release can expect decent returns.

The viewing experience offered by the film’s 3D effects is one of deeper perspective and greater vividness. Objects come into sharp focus, such as frayed threads from kimonos, snowflakes and trees aflame with autumn leaves. It’s merit – effects are less strain on the eyes and don’t impede with story flow. However, they are too tame for those who like things to leap out of the frame.

The film closely follows the story arc of its textual source: Yasuhiko Takiguchi’s Ibun Roninki, set around 1630, a time of widespread unemployment for the low rung samurai class. A down-and-out ronin named Hanshiro (Ichikawa) calls on the illustrious clan of Ii begging them to grant him space to commit seppuku (ritual disembowelment) so he can die the honorable samurai way.

Kageyu, the lord of the house (Koji Yakusho) tries to dissuade him by recounting what happened just two days ago. A young man claiming to be Motome (Eita) from the disbanded Chijiwara clan has made the same request. A flashback reveals how they sadistically make an example of him to deter other “suicide bluffs” whose real intention is to exhort a meager handout.

With a story-within-a-story and flashback-after-flashback structure, there is rich potential for suspense and tension – something Kobayashi exploited to the hilt with long takes and hard cuts that play with the audience’s consciousness of time. Not only does he convey the mounting dread of waiting for death, he also plots the revelation of Hanshiro’s true intentions with precision.

Miike is less consistent with his narrative tempo, beginning with an unusually flat first act which only begins to stir after about 30 minutes with Motome’s seppuku scene. He then proceeds to disperse all the tension with a painfully long melodrama reaching back in time to Motome’s childhood, and explains why he and Hanshiro are finally driven to such desperate measures.

Although Motome’s gentle nature and his plight of having a sick wife (Hikari Mitsushima) and dying infant eventually achieve tragic resonance, Miike wavers about the emotional pitch he wants to achieve. More Mizoguchi than Miike, the middle act is somber in color tone and lighting, and full of static shots and arch compositions. Especially distancing are shots through a mosquito net that blur characters’ figures and expressions.

The naturalist acting of Eita, the over-the-edge passionate display of Mitsushima and Ichikawa’s studied theatricality don’t quite gel either. Ichikawa finally gets his moment when the film springs into action in the last 20 minutes. His kabuki background not only enables him to execute the sword fights with immaculate grace, his magnetic enunciation makes his speech denouncing Kageyu’s spurious code of honor resound with eloquence.

Japanese title Ichimei means “one life.” Technical package is high end and low key.




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Pater: Cannes 2011 Review
by Deborah Young
Hollywood Reporter


CANNES -- Witty, urbaine and quintessentially French, Pater is a game two famous adult men play with the camera in an offbeat film closer to documentary than to fiction. Director Alain Cavalier and his friend, actor Vincent Lindon, film themselves as they pretend to be businessmen-politicians campaigning for office. The politics are so tongue-in-cheek and the protags so articulate and funny that the film works – at least for the cognoscenti of France, a small niche that can expand to include film societies and upscale festivals. Everyone else is likely to feel excluded from their private party.

Pushing 80, Cavalier’s rare film work now centers on diary-style films (Lives, Le Filmeur) he shoots himself using a small DV cam and the help of his companion and co-editor Francoise Widhoff. The intimacy of this personal style makes for very closed films for the happy few. Pater is a little more accessible thanks to popular actor Lindon, called on by “President” Cavalier to be “prime minister” in the cabinet he wants to form after the elections. Though the jokes relate to French politics, they are easily translatable for European viewers.

From the opening close-up of juicy truffles on a plate to the numerous scenes shot in kitchens and at the dinner table, Cavalier introduces the viewer to a posh upper class world of good taste. Surrounded by books, paintings and rich furnishings, the President and future prime minister debate the inequality of the law, which allows CEOs to earn huge salaries. Their platform is to set maximum salaries alongside minimum wages, somewhere in the neighborhood of 15-to-1. Discussed very seriously over fine wines and exquisite food, the maximum wage notion seems to lampoon leftist political frippery, especially when the whole idea is abruptly abandoned as an election handicap.

Though both Cavalier and Lindon mention their fathers, the Pater of the title seems to refer to a political dynasty that just goes on and on, whoever wins the elections.

At the same time the film reveals a great deal about its protags -- a slice of life that particularly reflects Cavalier’s own refined lifestyle and wicked sense of humor. Lindon is a hoot in a long monolog about his landlord, while Cavalier riffs on soft silk ties and Ines de la Fressange. One either likes these characters or finds them unbearably self-indulgent, but in any case the film is beautifully shot and paced with only a few longeurs.
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Hara-kiri: Death of a Samurai
By Justin Chang
Variety


Hot off his terrific actioner "13 Assassins," Takashi Miike draws less blood from a different vein with "Hara-kiri: Death of a Samurai." A formally elegant, dramatically faithful retelling of Masaki Kobayashi's 1962 black-and-white classic "Harakiri," this slow-burning tragedy will disappoint auds expecting a nonstop slash-'em-up from Asian cinema's most prolific purveyor of extreme violence. But Miike's mournful variation on traditional samurai-movie themes of honor, sacrifice and retribution offers its own rewards, and his latest tip of the hat to Japanese pics of yesteryear should find an appreciative arthouse niche even as it bores his bloodthirsty base.

Offshore auds may struggle initially with the period details in Kikumi Yamagishi's screenplay, though knowledge of the oft-referenced Battle of Sekigahara isn't crucial to grasping the ways of the ancient samurai code whose honor is called into question here. In 17th-century Edo, a long period of peace has put most of the samurai population out of work, making Hanshiro (kabuki star Ebizo Ichikawa, outstanding) the latest impoverished ronin seeking to quell his shame through ritual suicide.

Hanshiro approaches the esteemed House of Ii, seeking use of the warriors' courtyard to commit his bloody act of seppuku. Their leader, Kageyu (Koji Yakusho), responds by recounting the story of the unfortunate young Motome (Eita), who made the same request a few months earlier. Like many desperate ronin, Motome expected he would be turned away with a charitable handout; instead, the warriors called his "suicide bluff," forcing the reluctant samurai to cut his stomach open with the dull bamboo sword he brought with him.

Considerably longer (and redder) than in the original, Motome's death scene is agony to watch, thanks to sound design that amplifies the gruesome impact of every squirt and squish as blade tears flesh. Yet it's also the film's sole moment of overt violence until the big finale, and it's followed by another, even lengthier flashback as Hanshiro, far from being dissuaded from his own death wish, proceeds to tell Kageyu and his assembled warriors a tale of his own.

To reveal more would dilute the impact of a drama that packs scant enough surprises to begin with. Suffice to say it's a story of desperate deeds in which joy is fleeting, poverty is perpetual and the way of the samurai offers few helping hands to those who, in the poignant words of Hanshiro, are merely living their lives, waiting for spring. The sense that not just the actors but the characters themselves are enacting a ritualistic tragedy precludes the sort of devastating emotional punch that's called for here.

Yet that hushed, heightened formality just as often works for the film's intricately nestled stories-within-stories, creating a stagelike space in which viewers willing to contemplate the film's political and moral underpinnings can do so. There's something chastening about being immersed in a feudal existence where family honor means everything and a few coins can make the difference between life and death.

If "Hara-kiri" is inevitably less satisfying than "13 Assassins" (also a remake), it's because it not only lacks that film's sustained virtuosity but also takes a more reverent approach to its source; it's possible to admire Miike's newfound classical restraint while also wishing he'd put a more singular stamp on the material. Even principal actors Ichikawa and Eita seem to have been cast for their resemblance to their 1962 counterparts; still, both turn in passionately charged perfs, particularly the handsome Ichikawa, whose preternatural gravity morphs into a fearsome display of butt-kicking prowess in the final moments.

Nearly 50 years after Kobayashi's film won the jury prize at Cannes, Miike's update has the honor of being the first 3D film presented in competition at the festival. As is often the case with stereoscopic fare, the murkiness of the image remains a not-insignificant problem, making it harder to appreciate Miike's often-exquisite visuals, such as the stunningly beautiful interstitial shots of autumn leaves.

At the same time, the manner in which the technology is used to subtly enhance the film's pictorial qualities signifies the helmer's uncharacteristic seriousness, often working in concert with the interior pillars, doorways and veiled curtains of Yuji Hayashida's production design to lend d.p. Nobuyasu Kita's widescreen compositions a greater depth of field. Ryuichi Sakamoto's score makes a crucial contribution to the film's somber tone.
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Hanezu
By Rob Nelson
Variety


Its title translating as "Shade of Red," Japanese writer-director Naomi Kawase's "Hanezu" works moderately well as an emotionally grisly account of a relationship's dissolution, but less so as an allegory of a nation grappling with its history and suffering terrible loss. The filmmaker, whose "The Mourning Forest" took the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2007, won't win many new fans here with a snail-paced, documentary-like pic that favors periodic shots of nature and reveals its narrative concerns only after an hour or so. Festivals far and wide, though, will help maintain Kawase's track record of international exposure and acclaim.

Amid gorgeous images of the Asuka region of Japan, the nation's birthplace, poetic voiceovers by a man and woman begin the film by recounting the ancient myth of two mountains competing for one another's love. Bringing this tale into present-day, human form is a young couple living together in picturesque Nara prefecture and expecting a child. Pregnant Kayoko (Hako Oshima) dyes scarves red using safflower, while her partner, Tetsuya (Tetsuya Akikawa), tinkers in the garden when not working as a book editor or daydreaming about opening a cafe.

But such details emerge only gradually, as Kawase spends the pic's first half-hour focusing nearly as much attention on shots of insects, mountains and the sun's reflection on water. Eventually, Tetsuya leaves on a business trip, returning to discover Kayoko has been keeping a secret that will greatly jeopardize their relationship. The film's early voiceovers are repeated an hour in, with the lovestruck mountains of yore being likened to men and women who are driven to engage in toweringly messy interactions.

At film's end, a title card makes reference to the tsunami that recently devastated northern Japan, but this addendum feels gratuitously out of place, as do lingering shots of an excavation that bracket the pic and flashbacks to a '40s-era soldier telling his wife and young child that he'll be going off to war. Japan's leading female director, Kawase hasn't managed in the thematically fuzzy "Hanezu" to intertwine nature, pregnancy, past and present as fluidly as in her many documentary labors of love (e.g., "Birth/Mother," "Genpin").

The string-based musical score by Hasiken helps lend a suitably mournful tone to the proceedings, while Kawase's 16mm lensing appears startlingly vivid and sharp-edged, not least in a late scene that adds another shade to the pic's title.
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Hanezu
18 May, 2011 | By Lee Marshall
Screendaily

Dir/scr: Naomi Kawase. Japan. 2011. 91mins



One of Japanese director Naomi Kawase’s more inscrutable offerings, Hanezu is a mysterious, slow-paced cinematic poem that weaves together many of the director’s favourite themes - the pressure of the past on the present; Japanese myth and legend, especially as it relates to the spirit of a place; man’s connection with nature, and nature’s produce; love’s intimate connection with suffering and loss.

But here, although the grace and quietude of Kawase’s style often charms and seduces, the story seems too slight, especially in dramatic terms, to support the cultural symbolism the director loads it with. In Shara, the effect of a young twin boy’s disappearance on the rest of his family touched deep emotional chords; so too, in The Mourning Forest, did the almost wordless understanding that developed between a young carer and the elderly man in her charge.

The love triangle that forms the basis Hanezu (based on an original story by Masako Bando) on the other hand, is too hastily sketched in, and too obliquely portrayed, for us to feel more than a passing interest in the characters, though Kawase’s delicate mise-en-scene never fails to fascinate.

Micro-budgeted and micro-distributed, Kawase’s films always tend towards the festival and cine-club niche, and Hanezu will be no exception.

Without the emotional heft of The Mourning Forest, and lacking a spectacular set piece like the dance sequence that ends Shara, there is little chance of this latest offering achieving more than the most cursory theatrical distribution. But Kawase has her following - as much abroad as inside Japan - so the film will somehow nuzzle its way towards its faithful micro-audience.

Set in Kawase’s home base of Nara prefecture, whose history and legends inform most of her work, the film begins with images of mud and stones on a conveyor belt. It’s only gradually that we realise that these come from an archaeological dig, and not until the film wraps that an end title informs us that the site in question is Asuka, an imperial capital of Japan in the sixth and seventh centuries, but today a rural backwater.

A dreamy voiceover recites lines from the ancient Japanese poem that underpins the story - from eighth-century collection the Manyoshu - which tells of the rivalry between Mount Kagu and Mount Miminashi for the love of Mount Unebi (we assume that these three peaks are among those shown shrouded in mist at various points).

Slowly we put a name and a few scraps of story to the three main characters. Long-haired Takumi (Komizu) makes wooden sculptures influenced by Japanese myth and religion. He’s having an affair with Kayoko (Oshima), who lives with Tetsuya (Akikawa). She makes coloured scarves using natural dyes; Tetsuya is a literary editor, but he seems happier tending plants in the garden, and talks of opening a café dedicated to the cuisine of the Nara region - one of several references in the film to locally-sourced, organic food.

Plot points that would be major in most other films are here dealt with so reticently that one could blink and miss them: when Kayoko tells Takumi she’s pregnant, presumably with his child, he mumbles something incoherent and she cycles away on her bike with a cursory “See you!”.

Nature, for Kawase, seems more expressive than people: streams and forests, mountains and the weight and presence of the past (given flesh in the form of the military father who comes back from the dead to visit his son, the chief archaeologist on the Asuka site) infuse and in the end overshadow the three lives shown here. Shot on handheld digital, with a wistfully melancholic string soundtrack, this is one of those films that washes quite pleasantly over one’s head. But in the end, it feels like an in-between project for the prolific Kawase.
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Two reviews:

Pater
18 May, 2011 | By Jonathan Romney
Screendaily

Dir: Alain Cavalier. France. 2011. 105mins



Pater is arguably the ultimate two-people-in-a room film - and so is only partly as departure for veteran experimentalist Alain Cavalier, who over the last few years has proved himself France’s master of the one-main-in-a-room film. In recent work - including 2009’s superb memoir Irène, about a former partner - Cavalier has used video and strictly restricted resources to create intimate, highly crafted, seemingly off-the-cuff personal essays that are the very definition of the 100% authored cinema dreamed of by the precursors of the Nouvelle Vague.

Cavalier varies his approach in Pater, in which he joins with popular actor Vincent Lindon in a sometimes comic double act that could be described variously as improvised acting exercise, political satire, quasi-documentary experiment and folie à deux. Occasionally droll and engaging, this often opaque venture ultimately disappears up its own meta-cinematic derrière, and is unlikely to appeal outside a hardcore coterie of Francophile lovers of experiment. Commercial prospects are negligible.

The film is shot on DV cameras, sometimes actually wielded on camera by either Lindon or Cavalier, or both simultaneously, at a number of locations, including the homes of both men (Lindon has a large walk-in closet that provides the only concession to spectacle). Pater begins with a lunch of canapés prepared in close-up, and Cavalier and Lindon discussing the video project they’re embarking on.

It will involve the wearing of suits and ties, which - Cavalier points out - will come out of the production budget rather than the men’s own pockets. The first in a series of role-playing exercises reveals the basic scenario: Cavalier will play the President of the Republic and Lindon his newly appointed as Prime Minister. They discuss their plans for several radical new laws, proposing for example that any elected official who steals as much as one euro from any citizen will incur maximum penalties. They then decide to pass a bill stipulating that, if there’s such a thing as a minimum wage, then there should be a maximum one too.

The film follows the two politicians’ relationship, through the rise of Lindon (or ‘Lindon’, if we’re to see him as a fictional character), through the suggestion that he might one day be President himself, through to his eventual sacking. In between, the two politicians, and/or the men who play them, swap improvised banter with a group of other actors and act out scenes from an imaginary political life: Lindon visits a bakery and listens to a barfly dispensing misogynistic repartee, and Cavalier gazes at himself in the mirror after having (genuinely, it appears) undergone cosmetic surgery to reduce his sagging dewlaps.

A seemingly free-associative structure, with Lindon’s political ‘career’ as the coherent thread, yields some lively moments: in particular, Lindon, playing up his rough-diamond charm, fulminates tetchily off the top of his head. The odd moment of outright surrealism - such as the discovery of a car spiked with pickaxes - pushes the project into the realm of video art rather than auteur cinema in the familiar sense.

Beyond the political themes, other preoccupations are (as the title suggests) the quasi-oedipal tension between the elder-statesman ‘father’ and the chosen ‘son’ or successor; and the question of how clothes maketh the man, with the cast’s demeanour and comportment partly determined by the sober formal garb they wear throughout.

Both principal participants are lively, often witty presences: Cavalier is self-mockingly, impishly punctilious, while Lindon shows that his energy can command our attention even when he’s visibly flailing for something to say (at more than one moment, he and other actors simply start corpsing). But ultimately, the film is too hit and miss - and often too slow and vague - to yield many trenchant insights. And, partly because it’s never clear at the outset exactly what kind of project Lindon and Cavalier think they’re pursuing, we can never quite gauge whether it’s successful within its own terms of reference.

Finally, little is revealed either about power politics or about the mirror game of acting and filming. This self-referential terrain has been pretty thoroughly covered in recent years by the likes of Godard, Kiarostami, Catherine Breillat (Sex is Comedy) and von Trier (in his The Five Obstructions), to name a few. Cavalier and Lindon add little of note in this dressing-up game for adults.

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Pater
By Rob Nelson
Variety


The epitome of an in-joke, best appreciated by director Alain Cavalier and his slender cast, "Pater" is a confounding slog for most anyone else. Curiously tapped for a Cannes competition slot, this sloppily improvised film about filmmaking doesn't bother to make clear whether and how it's a mock-docu account of the shooting of a French prime minister biopic, as Cavalier cavalierly squanders the chance to represent his meta-narrative in stylistically coherent terms. Dialogue about the great glory of appearing in a Cavalier film does nothing to minimize one's pervasive sense of "Pater" as the auteur's excruciating display of unearned arrogance.

Cavalier appears directing Vincent Lindon in the P.M. role and gratuitously mentioning that he hasn't donned a tux since his film "Therese" was at Cannes in 1986. That the pic's title translates as "Old Man" is odd in that the ostensible star is Lindon, who distinguishes himself by nervously playing a nervous actor playing a nervous politician. Lingering shots of wine bottles and moist truffles on a plate accentuate the feeling of a private party, one to which only the director's inner circle and least discriminating fans have been invited.




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Variety's review of the Kaurismaki. Scroll down for the more enthusiastic reviews from the other trades.

Le Havre
By Leslie Felperin
Variety


Mixing together some of helmer Aki Kaurismaki's favorite Gallic and Finnish thesps with a few newbies, "Le Havre" feels like a welcoming family reunion. A semi-contempo fairy tale about a shoeshine man who finds redemption helping an African stowaway in the titular Normandy harbor, pic takes place in the same retro-styled deadpan universe in which all Kaurismaki films dwell. That's not a bad thing, especially for his fan base, and despite dark edges concerning the poor treatment of immigrants, "Le Havre" is neater and sweeter than his previous pic, "Lights in the Dusk." Pic should ship out to the director's usual offshore ports.

Marcel Marx (august French thesp Andre Wilms, featured in Kaurismaki's "La Vie boheme," "Juha" and "Leningrad Cowboys Meet Moses") shines shoes at the train station in Le Havre, a career suffering ever-decreasing returns given the rise of sneakers over leather footwear. When he and fellow shoeshine man Chang (Vietnamese actor Quoc-dung Nguyen) see one of Marcel's clients gunned down, Marcel's only reaction is to shrug and be thankful he got paid first.

At home, Marcel takes for granted his wife, Arletty (Kati Outinen, whose Finnish accent is never remarked upon by anyone), a femme so devoted to her hubby she doesn't want the doctors to tell him she's dying, because it would upset him. Besides, miracles do happen, as she pointedly observes.

Meanwhile, down at the docks, a security guard hears a baby crying in a sealed container that originated in West Africa and was bound for Blighty, but which has been sitting on the quayside for weeks due to a computer mix-up. Rightly suspecting it will be full of smuggled souls, the authorities open it up, and are relieved to find its human cargo still alive. One preteen boy, Idrissa (Blondin Miguel), runs off; the rest are sent to various refugee camps in France where riots are taking place (seen in real news footage) to await deportation.

Idrissa crosses paths with Marcel, who takes the poor kid under his wing. Before long, the whole neighborhood is helping to keep the boy hidden from Inspector Monet (Jean-Pierre Darroussin, a newcomer to the Kaurismaki corps who falls perfectly in step with everyone else's droll, morose line delivery). To raise the needed coin to pay for Idrissa's illegal passage to London to find his mother, they persuade local aging rock legend Little Bob (a real local musician, credited here under his real name, Roberto Piazza) to give a "trendy charity concert," providing the de rigueur rockabilly musical interlude few Kaurismaki films can do without.

It's all rather jolly and slight, and certainly doesn't break any new ground for the Finnish auteur, even though it foregrounds more influences than usual from French filmmakers like Marcel Carne (obvious, given the protagonists' names), Jean-Pierre Melville, Robert Bresson and others. But on its own terms, "Le Havre" is a continual pleasure, seamlessly blending morose and merry notes with a deftness that's up there with Kaurismaki's best comic work.

Craft contributions from regular alumni Timo Salminen on camera and Timo Linnasalo at the editing table ensure the pic has the same glowing colors, stylized lighting and crisp pace auds have come to expect from their collaborations with Kaurismaki. It's like listening to a band that's been cheerfully churning it out for years, whose members all know each other's timings inside out, not unlike onscreen performers Little Bob and his grizzled, perfectly in-sync crew.
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Hanezu: Cannes 2011 Review
by Maggie Lee
Hollywood Reporter


CANNES -- The magnificent and dramatic presence of Nature dwarfs human protagonists wallowing in a banal ménage a trois in Naomi Kawase’s visually rhapsodic but overbearingly metaphorical and emotionally wan Hanezu. Again evoking her favorite motifs of pregnancy, death, and heartbreak within the rural environs of Nara (Kawase’s hometown and location for all her works), the Japanese director sees no need in varying or transcending her personal blend of documentary and poetic-animist style.

Kawase’s pedigree background as a two-time Cannes award winner (Camera D’or and Grand Prix) plus Cannes Competition status this time round will give her a carte blanche to festivals, but commercially, the film won’t persuade many new converts to join its tight, Eurocentric arthouse clan of supporters.

Kawase initiates one into the idyllic, rustic existence of her three central figures in her characteristic style, which is like writing a diary filled with routines and trivia. Kayo (Hako Oshima), a dye-maker co-habitates with Tetsuo (Tetsuya Akikawa), an editor and enthusiastic horticulturist while having an affair with Takumi (Tohta Komizu), a wood carver. One afternoon, Kayo tells him she is pregnant. He shows no reaction. When Tetsuya is away on business, the other two visit their respective parents. When they return, Kayo breaks different news to her two lovers, provoking almost equally devastating reactions.

Like all of Kawase’s fiction films, Hanezu prostrates itself reverently before the majesty of Nature, emphasizing how humans are inseparable from their habitat. Her visuals are as pure and clear as spring water and more awe-inspiring than ever. Sounds of animals and changing weather form a haunting, other-worldly chorus.

In that sense, Hanezu can serve as a celluloid equivalent of yuppie eco-tourism and promotion reel for Nara’s local handicrafts and produce as we feast our eyes on characters cooking delicious organic meals, shopping at farmers’ markets, carving art from rare cedar, trysting on a hilltop shrine or cycling around glistening paddy fields.

The problem is when Kawase tries to elevate the threesome’s tragedy into something primeval and archetypal. She punctuates their goings-on with incantations of ancient verses and frabjous images of Nature accompanied by narrators intoning myths of mountains acting like alpha males. The abrupt outcome at the end is part of a red color scheme betokening the vibrancy and fragility of life, encapsulated by the Japanese title which means “moon in red,” “hanezu” being an antiquated word derived from Manyoshu, an 8th century poetry collection.

However, the relationship is so prosaic, the characters’ inner thoughts so submerged and their reactions (especially Tetsuo’s) so illogical that the story never rises to that level of grandeur Kawase desires. The aforesaid abrupt scene is unsubtle and borders on schlocky.

There’s an attempt to establish a sense of continuity in family (and by extension human) history by referring to experiences of unfulfilled love endured by the protagonists’ grandparents. But it’s clumsily obvious yet incidental like an after-thought. The narrative drifts further into shaky spiritual metaphor with unexplained apparitions of a World War II soldier wandering forlornly, complaining to his love about “waiting” — another theme implied, but left dangling.

In fact, the more Kawase strives for oriental mysticism, the more everything strains under the weight of having to symbolize something. Nowhere is this more so than random scenes of excavations, which the epilogue suggests has something to do with the film’s location being the cradle of the Japanese race — a pompous yet tenuous way of forcing her small human drama into a context so epic as the birth of the nation.
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Two reviews for Kaurismaki's latest:

Le Havre
17 May, 2011 | By Jonathan Romney
Screendaily

Dir/scr: Aki Kaurismäki. Finland-France-Germany. 2011. 93mins



Since the early 1980s, Finnish auteur Aki Kaurismäki has been mining his own peculiar seam and achieving a quiet miracle - making films that gladden the heart the most when they’re at their most unflappably lugubrious. Le Havre essentially offers us the director’s usual menu - poker-faced acting, weather-beaten faces, political compassion, hyper-stylized staging and decrepit barroom interiors lit con amore. But there’s something fresh in this new film, which sees the Finn fully venting his Francophilia for the first time since 1991’s La Vie de Bohème.

Taking on both the Gallic cinema tradition and a current French political issue, Kaurismäki works with a superb Franco-Finnish cast to bring us a typically modest but shining French-language gem that sees him magnificently back on form after the slight dip of 2006’s Lights In The Dusk. Francophone audiences will especially be tickled, but Akiphiles worldwide will be in heaven.

The opening shots set up the tone - a succession of laconic sound and sight gags, establishing a world in which sinister figures wear trenchcoats and fedoras. We’re somewhere between real modern France and the stylized noir world of Kaurismäki’s beloved Jean-Pierre Melville.
Protagonist Marcel Marx (veteran Wilms) is a philosophical ex-artist in the Northern French port, trying to eke a living as a shoeshine man in a world where everyone wears trainers. He lives in impoverished happiness with wife Arletty (Outinen) in a working-class neighbourhood seemingly left over from a Marcel Carné film, with a faithful neighbour in the shape of big-hearted boulangère Yvette (Didi).

While Arletty is away in hospital - unknown to Marcel, her condition is incurable - the shoeshiner befriends Idrissa (Miguel), a young African immigrant on the run from police; the film is set against the background, glimpsed in TV coverage, of the French authorities’ controversial and drastic closure of the refugee camp known as ‘Le Jungle’.

Marcel offers Idrissa shelter with himself and his faithful mutt (played by Laika, the fifth generation in a dynasty of Kaurismäki regulars), and tries to find a way to reunite Idrissa with his mother, who’s living in London.

The very simple plot involves Marcel trying to raise money for Idrissa’s escape - which he does by arranging a charity gig by antique French rocker Roberto Piazza aka Little Bob. Meanwhile, a malevolent neighbour (legendary veteran Jean-Pierre Léaud) has snitched to the authorities, but luckily Inspector Monet (Darroussin), the cop in charge of bringing in Idrissa, conceals a warm heart under his hard-bitten, taciturn exterior.


Together, Wilms and Darroussin bring the freshest new notes to Kaurismäki’s world. Wilms, at one point making an overt nod to his role in La Vie de Bohème, adds an impish courteousness to the film’s otherwise uninflected acting style, while Darroussin’s hangdog phiz and world-weary sang-froid are a sublime fit for the Kaurismäki universe.

The moment when Darroussin walks into a bar holding a pineapple is one of those priceless moments of Tati-esque comedy that defy explanation.

Highlighting the political themes that have been foremost in Kaurismäki’s hard-times fiction at least since 1996’s Drifting Clouds, the director adds a new quasi-documentary element to his cinema, filming one sequence at what appears to be a genuine refugee detainment centre.

The film hits a delicate balance between real-world exteriors and stylized, studio-bound scenes, notably the spit-and-sawdust bar frequented by a memorable variety of grizzled seamen (presumably real dockside faces). The director’s regular cinematographer Timo Salminen shoots with meticulous style, bringing an almost comic-strip economy both to exteriors and to the sets in Kaurismaki’s favourite muted blue and red.

The handling of anachronism is brilliant as ever, and it’s typical of the director’s sour attitude to modernity that the one outright baddie (Léaud’s informer) is the only character who owns a cellphone.

Regular faces Outinen and Salo bring a laconic tenderness to their roles, and newcomer Blondin Miguel has a solemn appeal. French comedy legend Pierre Etaix contributes a sympathetic cameo, and as ever, Laika is the best-lit mutt in European cinema. Music is a typical Kaurismäki mix, including tangos, blues, melodrama-redolent selections from compatriot composer Einojuhani Rautavaara - although viewers may balk at the director indulging his taste for mediocre French rock, in the shape of a live and lukewarm performance by Little Bob.


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


Le Havre: Cannes 2011 Review
by Kirk Honeycutt
Hollywood Reporter


CANNES -- Competition films at Cannes can be many things but seldom would you describe them as pure pleasure. Aki Kaurismaki's Le Havre is that rare exception, harkening back to his 2002 Cannes entry, The Man Without a Past, in the pleasure department. In this film, the Finnish director is certainly dealing with a pressing issue worldwide - that of illegal migration and political, social and economic refugees. But as always he does so in the context of what he charmingly describes as an “unrealistic film.”

One wishes such a delightful film a bon voyage into the wide world of movie theaters but realistically it may play to more people in festivals than in local cinemas. A Kaurismaki film certainly will do well in several European territories but here’s hoping for good luck in North America too. After all, Kaurismaki films are nothing if not optimistic.

Early in the movie the wife of its hero learns she is gravely ill. But the doctor holds out the prospect that miracles can happen. “Not in my neighborhood,” she replies.

Ah, but there's the rub. Miracles do happen in Kaurismaki neighborhoods. It is into one such neighborhood, the narrow streets, storefront groceries and bars of the old fishermen's quarter in the French port city of Le Havre, that a young boy, a poor refugee from Africa named Idrissa [Blondin Miguel], arrives quite by accident.

A large container filled with illegal immigrants bound by ship for London is sent by computer error to Le Havre. Idrissa escapes in a comically unconvincing scene and eventually finds refuge with an aging shoe-shiner named Marcel Marx [André Wilms], who insists he once led a Bohemian life in Paris. Even though his beloved, hard-working wife Arletty [Kati Outinen] is in the hospital, Marcel hides the lad in the house he shares as well with his dog Laika.

The whole neighborhood helps protect and feed the boy although one neighbor is a snitch and police inspector Monet [Jean-Pierre Darroussin] is forever snooping around. To smuggle Idrissa to his mother in London will take serious money so Marcel decides to throw one of those “trendy charity concerts” featuring a local band.

Understand, the whole story, its characters and locales, is something of a fairy tale informed by old movies. Kaurismaki doesn’t “quote” old movies or parody then, he simply acts a though he were on a studio backlot making an old-fashioned film where working-class people can perform heroic deeds, idealism is never scorned and even a crafty cop — think of Claude Rains in Casablanca — can have a soft spot.

To gently underscore this time warp, Kaurismaki lights and films cafes, stores and car interiors as if they were fake sets. In one scene he'll show a mobile phone yet in another a rotary dial telephone. You can spot references to any number of old movie styles and filmmakers but Kaurismaki has so absorbed these into his own DNA that this fairy tale feels completely, organically his own.

The actors make this all seem so easy, so true to this unrealistic life being presented. There is no guile in any performances as everyone behaves as minor characters once did in Frank Capra films or, since this is France, perhaps Jean Renoir or René Clair films.

Wilms projects boundless optimism even as he confines his world to street corners where he is often mistreated, his favorite bar and a small house with his wife and dog. Darroussin acts as if on a mission to rid society of the bad image everyone has of cops - or at least of him. He dresses in black but his heart is otherwise. Outinen's wife lives for her husband to the point she worries about the impact her illness and possible demise will have on him, not her.

The one character who could have used a more expressive characterization is the refugee boy. Idrissa seems more a passive symbol than a flesh-and-blood boy determined to find his mother.
Kaurismaki also brings in Le Havre culture with the concert sequence as that city is a musical center in France. So an aging local rock 'n' roller named Little Bob, a.k.a., Roberto Piazza, and his band headline the fund-raiser.

This is not a film that takes sides or offers solutions to the refugee problems facing the world. All the writer-director presents is a tender, warm embrace to those who find themselves rootless. Le Havre offers them and moviegoers an enchanted port in the storm, a cinematic refuge from real life where good intentions are enough.




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House of Tolerance (L'Apollonide, sourvenirs de la maison close): Cannes Review
by Deborah Young
Hollywood Reporter



CANNES -- Both an elegiac salute to the demise of Paris’s fin-de-siècle brothels and a poetic critique of the white slave trade, Bertrand Bonello’s House of Tolerance fascinates with its exquisite period atmosphere and repulses in its cruel spectacle of young women trapped in a life from which there is practically no exit. Despite plentiful nudity, there is very little a contemporary viewer will find sexy here, though the title alone should elicit strong initial commerce from art house regulars and beyond.

On the down side, there are longeurs during which the attention wanders in the course of an atmosphere piece lasting over two hours. The fact is, the world’s oldest professsion is also the world’s oldest film subject and, from Pretty Baby to The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, to mention but two titles that readily spring to mind, brothels have been cinematically explored high and low.

Bonello’s direction is deft and often dreamlike, keeping close to the dozen-odd pretty girls who inhabit the house and letting their stories and personalities overlap. The audience is invited to share in their unhappy fate as they entertain well-bred rich men all night, every night. It’s all work and no play, yet ominously, the former seamstresses and laundresses find it easier than their previous jobs.

The character who emerges most poignantly is Madeleine [newcomer Alice Barnole], baldly known as “the Jew.” Her delicate pre-Raphaelite features fall victim to a gentlman-maniac who slashes her mouth with a knife, leaving a hideous double scar that freezes her face in a Joker-like laugh. As “the Woman Who Laughs,” her new monicker, she is exiled to the kitchen and laundry room, until being summoned to appear as a sex freak for a perverse libertine soiree, very reminiscent of the scene in Abdellatif Kechiche’s recent Black Venus.

Though all the residents look lost and depressed, a sultry, quick-witted Algerian girl [the proud Hafsia Herzi] seems better able to defend herself than an aging opium smoker. The laughing Julie [Italian actress Jasmine Trinca], nicknamed Kaka for her erotic speciality, and the buxom 16-year-old newby Pauline [non-pro Iliana Zabeth] illustrate the different destinies awaiting them.

Faced with the constant threat of syphilis and pregnancy, the girls submit to regular gynecological exams in fear and trepidation. They live like bonded servants to the madame [played by a worldly and maternal Noémie Lvovsky], who advances them money for their perfume and designer dresses, thus keeping them in debt to her. The madame herself has two small kids and entrepreneurial worries. The rent is rising and the houses of tolerance are closing as the girls take to the streets, casting a twilight glow on an entire way of life.

Coming from the director of The Pornographer and Tiresia, the film takes a very relaxed attitude to filming its attractive female cast in corsets, transparent undergarments and full frontal nudity. Bonello’s empathy with these sensual Odalisques is such, however, that they never come off as sexually arousing. The specter of the Woman Who Laughs walking around the house like a wounded ghost is enough to quench any desire.

What makes this film stand out is its lyrical cinematography [by Josée Deshaies] and costume design [courtesy of Anais Romand] that create a lush claustrophobia highlighting the golden cage these high-class prostitutes of yore lived in.

Alain Guffroy’s turn of the century sets immerse this closed world in its own unique atmosphere of heavy perfumes and bored captivity, eerily visualized as a domesticated black panther on a leash that one of the aristocratic gentlemen likes to bring with him.

The film’s most questionable artistic choice — though one that many viewers will ultimately side with — is the unexpected use of modern music in several crucial scenes. The aching emotional wail of The Moody Blues’ Nights in White Satin is a strong statement that this is not just a period film, but it relates a contemporary tragedy as well.
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House Of Tolerance
Screendaily

Dir/scr: Bertrand Bonello. France. 2011. 125mins



For most of Bertrand Bonello’s House Of Tolerance (l’Apollondide: Souveniers de la maison close) about an old-time French brothel, the old style of making conversation before engaging in “commerce” (sex with clothes on) was still in place in a large but windowless three-story building, arranged vertically from the lushness of the first floor through one level of so-so love rooms to the cramped attic with shared beds for the girls at the top; privacy is an unknown concept.

Bonello set his film at the end of the 19th century, a transitional time for the sex industry. Brothels could no longer pay for themselves, so the community of women who lived and worked in them split up, individuals moving to the more solitary and dangerous life peddling flesh on the street.

The overall feel is claustrophobic, and Bonello and the Madame do not let the women go outside, at least alone, for fear of being charged with solicitation. Most of the women were in serious debt to the Madame, so did not have the freedom to move out and possibly attempt to earn money in a different fashion. As the owner says, “Freedom exists, just not here.”

The director has said that he wanted to make a film about prostitution from a historical perspective and from the prostitutes’ point of view. Much of his research he found in the book Daily Life in the Bordellos of Paris, 1830-1930, by Laura Adler. What is up on the screen is a stuffy prison of a workplace, so architecturally self-conscious that its use becomes mannered. The overall feel is enervation and resignation. Even though the women stick together, it is a community of inertness.

Except for a few downplayed dramatic scenes — one of the women (Lvovsky) has her face sliced by a client, another (Trinca) succumbs to syphilis, the youngest girl (Zabeth) escapes — almost no dramatic tension passes through the edifice. Lethargy looms over this particular House of Tolerance.

Such bleakness in a genre that has known catfights and general pizzazz will not translate well into profits, except perhaps in some French markets. The film is too uneven in structure and aesthetic to generate much interest from festivals, but might do okay business in ancillary in the US, where the Weinstein Company has the rights.

Bonello attempts token contemporising of his narrative. Black American soul songs from the 1960s accompany sequences of people working and dancing six decades back. A worse offense is the last scene, just in case we are unaware of how the grand whore houses of the late-19th century shut down, and the women became streetwalkers who, unlike the prostitutes living in the house, shared no solidarity. Possessing static architecture and a cast of low-key actors, the film does not have the energy required to infect even the most vulnerable viewer with its despair or its occasional lightheartedness. The project feels constipated through and through.
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The Tree of Life: Cannes Review

5:30 AM 5/16/2011 by Todd McCarthy

The Bottom Line
A unique film that will split opinions every which way, which Fox Searchlight can only hope will oblige people to see it for themselves.

Venue: Cannes Film Festival, Competition

Cast:
Brad Pitt, Sean Penn, Jessica Chastain, Fiona Shaw

Director-screenwriter:Terrence Malick

Brad Pitt gives one of his finest performances in Terrence Malick's drama about the beginnings of life on Earth and the travails of a 1950s Texas family, writes Todd McCarthy.

CANNES -- Brandishing an ambition it’s likely no film, including this one, could entirely fulfill, The Tree of Life is nonetheless a singular work, an impressionistic metaphysical inquiry into mankind’s place in the grand scheme of things that releases waves of insights amidst its narrative imprecisions. This fifth feature in Terrence Malick’s eccentric four-decade career is a beauteous creation that ponders the imponderables, asks the questions that religious and thoughtful people have posed for millennia and provokes expansive philosophical musings along with intense personal introspection. As such, it is hardly a movie for the masses and will polarize even buffs, some of whom may fail to grasp the connection between the depiction of the beginnings of life on Earth and the travails of a 1950s Texas family. But there are great, heady things here, both obvious and evanescent, more than enough to qualify this as an exceptional and major film. Critical passions, pro and con, along with Brad Pitt in one of his finest performances, will stir specialized audiences to attention, but Fox Searchlight will have its work cut out for it in luring a wider public.

Shot three years ago and molded and tinkered with ever since by Malick and no fewer than five editors, The Tree of Life is shaped in an unconventional way, not as a narrative with normal character arcs and dramatic tension but more like a symphony with several movements each expressive of its own natural phenomena and moods. Arguably, music plays a much more important role here than do words — there is some voice-over but scarcely any dialogue at all for nearly an hour, whereas the soaring, sometimes grandiose soundtrack, comprised of 35 mostly classical excerpts drawn from Bach, Brahms, Berlioz, Mahler, Holst, Respighi, Gorecki and others in addition to the contributions of Alexandre Desplat, dominates in the way it often did in Stanley Kubrick’s work.
Indeed, this comparison is inevitable, as Tree is destined to be endlessly likened to 2001: A Space Odyssey, due to the spacy imagery of undefinable celestial lights and formations as well as because of its presentation of key hypothetical moments in the evolution of life on this planet. There are also equivalent long stretches of silence and semi-boredom designed, perhaps, to provide some time to muse about matters rarely raised in conventional narrative films.
That Malick intends to think large is indicated by an opening quotation from the Book of Job, in which God intimidates the humble man by demanding, “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding.” Job is not cited again but is more or less paraphrased when, in moments of great personal distress, a smalltown mother cries out, “Lord, why? Where are you?” and “What are we to you?”

Tree doesn’t answer these questions but fashions a relationship between its big picture perspective and its intimate story that crucially serves the film’s philosophical purposes. Much of the early-going is devoted to spectacular footage of massive natural phenomena, both in space and on Earth; gaseous masses, light and matter in motion, volcanic explosions, fire and water, the creation and growth of cells and organisms, eventually the evolution of jellyfish and even dinosaurs, represented briefly by stunningly realistic creatures, one of which oddly appears to express compassion for another.

Juxtaposed with this are the lamentations of a mother (Jessica Chastain) for a son who has just died, in unexplained circumstances, and for a time it seems that placing the everyday doings of the O’Brien family of a quiet Texas town in the shadow of the seismic convulsions pertaining to the planet’s creation represents an inordinately elaborate way of expressing what Bogart said in Casablanca, that “the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.”

But while that may be true, it is also the case that those very problems, and everything else that people experience, are all that matter at the time one is experiencing them and are therefore of surpassing importance. Whatever else can — and will — be said about it, Tree gets the balance of its extraordinary dual perspective, between the cosmic and the momentary, remarkably right, which holds it together even during its occasional uncertain stretches.

Least effective is the contemporary framing material centered on the oldest O’Brien kid, Jack, portrayed as a middle-aged man by Sean Penn. A successful architect, Jack looks troubled and preoccupied as he moves through a world defined by giant Houston office towers and atriums shot so as to resemble secular cathedrals. While the connection to Jack’s childhood years is clear, the dramatic contributions of these largely wordless scenes are weak, even at the end, when a sense of reconciliation and closure is sought by the sight of flowers and disparate souls gathering on a beach in a way that uncomfortably resembles hippie-dippy reveries of the late 1960s.

But the climactic shortfall only marginally saps the impact of the central story of family life. Occupying a pleasant but not lavish home on a wide dirt street in a town that matches one’s idealized vision of a perfect 1950s community (it’s actually Smithville, population 3,900, just southeast of Austin and previously seen in Hope Floats), the family is dominated by a military veteran father (Pitt) who lays down the law to his three boys seemingly more by rote than due to any necessity. He’s compulsively physical with them, playfully, affectionately and violently, and yet rigidly holds something back.

Within Malick’s scheme of things, Dad represents nature, while Mom (Chastain) stands for grace. Great pals among themselves, Jack (Hunter McCracken), R.L. (Pitt look-alike Laramie Eppler) and Steve (Tye Sheridan) range all over town and would seem to enjoy near-ideal circumstances in which to indulge their youth.
But working in a manner diametrically opposed to that of theater dramatists inclined to spell everything out, Malick opens cracks and wounds by inflection, indirection and implication. Using fleet camerawork and jump-cutting that combine to intoxicating effect, the picture builds to unanticipated levels of disappointment and tragedy, much of it expressed with a minimum of dialogue in the final stages of Pitt’s terrific performance.
Embodying the American ideal with his clean-cut good looks, open face, look-you-in-the-eyes directness and strong build, Pitt’s Mr. O’Brien embodies the optimism and can-do attitude one associates with the post-war period. But this man had other, unfulfilled dreams — he became “sidetracked,” as he says — and as his pubescent oldest son begins to display a troublesome rebelliousness, fractures begins to show in his own character as well, heartbreakingly so.

Voice-over snippets suggestive of states of mind register more importantly than dialogue, while both are trumped by the diverse musical elements and the rumblings and murmurs of nature, which have all been blended in a masterful sound mix. Emmanuel Lubezki outdoes himself with cinematography of almost unimaginable crispness and luminosity. As in The New World, the camera is constantly on the move, forever reframing in search of the moment, which defines the film’s impressionistic manner.

Production designer Jack Fisk and costume designer Jacqueline West make indispensable contributions to creating the film’s world. That not a single image here seems fake or artificial can only be the ultimate praise for the work of senior visual effects supervisor Dan Glass and his team, while the presence of Douglas Trumbull as visual effects consultant further cements the film’s connection to 2001.

Venue: Cannes Film Festival, Competition
Release: May 27 (Fox Searchlight)
Production: River Road Entertainment
Cast: Brad Pitt, Sean Penn, Jessica Chastain, Fiona Shaw, Irene Bedard, Jessica Fuselier, Hunter McCracken, Laramie Eppler, Tye Sheridan
Director-screenwriter: Terrence Malick
Producers: Sarah Green, Bill Pohlad, Brad Pitt, Dede Gardner, Grant Hill
Executive producer: Donald Rosenfeld
Director of photography: Emmanuel Lubezki
Production design: Jack Fisk
Costume designer: Jacqueline West
Editors: Hank Corwin, Jay Rabinowitz, Daniel Rezende, Billy Weber, Mark Yoshikawa
Music: Alexandre Desplat
PG-13 rating, 138 minutes
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Sorry, no Tree of Life until tomorrow. But the fest goes on.

House of Tolerance
By Leslie Felperin
Variety


Arguably writer-helmer Bertrand Bonello's most straightforward pic, and none the worse for it, "House of Tolerance" explores life in an upmarket brothel at the turn of the last century. Although there's heaps of nudity, disturbing violence, weirdness and a general air of bored erotic lassitude, all hallmarks of Bonello's work ("The Pornographer," "Tiresia," "On War"), pic also presents an accessible, credible portrait of what life was like for sex workers way back when, with all the career's pleasures (few) and perils (many). Subject matter and comely cast should get offshore distribs casting come-hither looks in the pic's direction.

Unfolding mostly within the confines of a single building and featuring a would-be utopia not unlike the commune in "On War," the story takes place in the Apollonide, a bordello run by former hooker Marie-France (helmer-thesp Noemie Lvovsky). Madame Marie-France treats her femme staff relatively well for the time, apart from the fact that she docks money from their earnings for all their fancy finery, keeping them permanently in debt and therefore virtual slaves to the "house of tolerance," as such places were known then.

Of the 12 femmes working there, about six come to the fore as defined characters. At 28, embittered Clotilde (Celine Sallette, "Regular Lovers") is nearly on the scrap heap, but her great legs still make her a favorite of a dilettante artist (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing), with whom Clotilde is half in love. Cheerful Julie (Italian thesp Jasmine Trinca) also has a regular john (Jacques Nolot) who dotes on her, but not so deeply that he'll help her out of her debt, despite his fortune. Statuesque beauty Lea (Adele Haenel) has many admirers whom she quietly despises; Algerian Samira (Hafsia Herzi) is more easygoing, and is happy to show the ropes to new girl Pauline (Iliana Zabeth, whose zaftig curves are perfect for the period).

Unluckiest of all is Madeleine (newcomer Alice Barnole), a sweet-natured naif whose trusting nature ruins her career when one client (Laurent Lacotte) ties her to a bed and then slashes her cheeks with a knife, leaving her hideously scarred and thus earning her the nickname "the Woman Who Laughs," an allusion to the Victor Hugo novel "The Man Who Laughs." Even so, she becomes an object of fascination to some of the clients, including one (helmer Xavier Beauvois) who pays just to sit and talk with her.

Bonello leaves the aud in no doubt that theirs is a hard, risky job. A chilling scene depicting the women being examined by a doctor (played by a real gynecologist, per press notes), searching for any traces of disease or pregnancy, underscores the potential deadliness of the profession at the time. Elsewhere, mention is made of ridiculous scientific studies from the period, then accepted as fact, that prostitutes had smaller heads than average, just like thieves, a supposed sign of low intelligence.

These women, however, are clearly not stupid, just desperate, although the script makes it clear that most of them freely chose this profession rather than become seamstresses, servants or agricultural workers. They may fake their pleasure for the clients, but there are still good times to be had downstairs before retiring to the bedroom, chatting, playing games and drinking endless bottles of champagne while wearing the fanciest, gaudiest outfits high-class brothel money can buy. If the Cannes competition jury gave out prizes for costumes, Anais Romand would be a prohibitive favorite for her intricate, lusciously detailed work here.

Bonello's regular d.p. and partner Josee Deshaies does similarly exquisite work with the lensing, subtly modulating the lighting schemes from warm, golden hues to colder tones for the moments of quirky surrealism that give the pic a distinctive flavor, even if they're a bit silly. Likewise, onetime musician Bonello's self-penned score alongside use of playfully anachronistic soul music and '60s garage-band tunes inject a contempo sensibility that keeps the period flavor from becoming too cloying. Without these perverse (not in the sexy sense) touches, the pic might have risked playing like "The Best Little Whorehouse in Paris" or a violent reworking of Louis Malle's "Pretty Baby."
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Post by Sabin »

I saw the theatrical versions upon its release and I recall loving it at the time, but it was an incredibly distracted time for me and a second viewing shortly after left me incredibly cold. It's amazing filmmaking no doubt, but unlike Days of Heaven, Badlands, or The Thin Red Line, I don't find it to be an inherently profound meditation. And unlike those movies I found nothing to really grapple with, nothing challenging. The Thin Red Line becomes a new movie every time I see it. Not so with this film.

So I saw the director's cut about a year ago, and not under perfect circumstances I'll grant you. I saw it on a modestly-sized television. Not really the theatrical experience it deserves, so I certainly will go out of my way to watch it again if it ever shows at LACMA or the New Bev, but I remember feeling much the same way.
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Post by dws1982 »

FilmFan720 wrote: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.

I thought we all learned long ago that trailers don't have much to do with the quality of the film? Ajami, Carlos, and Let Me In are three of my favorites of 2010, but none of them had trailers that exactly made me giddy in anticipation. (I generally don't really watch trailers though.)

Not sure which cut of The New World you saw, Sabin, but the 170 minute cut (available on DVD and Blu-Ray) is amazing, and in many ways a completely different movie from the 135 minute cut.




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