Screenwriter »

• A day of Resnais, Hong Sang-soo and Chris O’Dowd.

  May 21, 2012 @ 9:12 pm | by Donald Clarke

  Honestly. Some of the people here. If I may paraphrase John Gielgud in Arthur, one usually has to go to a bowling alley to encounter people of this calibre. I should hurriedly explain that I’m not talking about the distinguished Alain Resnais, the talented Hong Sangsoo or the amiable Chris O’Dowd. The latest film from the 89-year-old Resnais — optimistically titled You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet — was shown to the press at 8.30 this morning. A few hours later the press conference took place upstairs. What tends to happen is that, as it’s often a bit of a struggle to get in, hacks sit around watching the live relay on the TV. Anyway, two English journalists were sitting in front of me hammering out copy to Lord knows what outlet. At one point, the male one said to the female one: “Who was the old geezer who came in late. Reznay? Is that his name.” What the hell are you doing here? The world is full of people who’d kill to attend a festival that screened the new film from the director of Hiroshima Mon Amour, Nuit et Brouillard and Je t’aime, Je t’aime. And you don’t even know who he is. Oh, it makes me so mad.

  

  Hang on. It looks as if the man in the green shirt has already dozed off.

  Anyway, I’m now reluctantly going to be rude about the great man myself. You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet really isn’t very good. Based on Jean Anouilh’s 1941 play Eurydice, the film is a dry, artful contrivance in which a swathe of French theatrical royalty –  Lambert Wilson, Mathieu Amalric, Michel Piccoli and others — play versions of themselves. I’m afraid to say that I saw several critics drifting off to sleepy-land during the screening. More than a few more walked out. Still, you can’t blame Cannes for placing the new Alain Resnais film in the main competition. He’s Alain Resnais, dude. If he delivered a stuffed walrus to the event (and I wouldn’t rule it out) they would be entitled to display that beast in the largest auditorium. Show some bleeding respect.

  We also got to see the latest film from Korean master Hong Sang-Soo. In Another Country was also a tricky beast. A film student  and her mum travel to a seaside town after falling into debt. Three women appear — each played by Isabelle Huppert — and act out different, but linked, stories. It’s a very lively piece featuring funky, relaxed cinematography and well-pitched performances from all concerned. The puzzles are worth solving. The structural games are not too irritating. But ultimately it feels like a competition makeweight that is not likely to trouble the scorers at the end of the day.

  In between the two pictures I had a chat with Chris O’Dowd who is in town for an out-of-competition screening of his new flick The Sapphires. Chris had amusing stories to tell about his first time in Cannes — indeed, his first time at any film festival — that you can read in the paper of record over tomorrow’s marmalade. The Sapphires features Chris as the manager of an Aboriginal soul band. It’s zippy, lippy and it should be with us any time now.

  

• It’s all about Haneke

  May 20, 2012 @ 10:40 pm | by Donald Clarke

  As the grey skies closed in and genuinely torential rain hammered the pavement, the main competition kicked properly into gear with the screening of Michael Haneke’s Amour. The Austrian director is now big favourite for the Palme d’Or with a collection of bookies that I’ve just made up.

  There were other things worth watching today. I finally caught up with Anti-Viral, the first film by Brandon Cronenberg, son of the more famous David. I’ll speak more about it in the paper on Tuesday. But suffice to say the body-horrible apple has not fallen too far from the tree.

  

  Looks ominous out there.

  Master Cronenberg’s film plays in the Un Certain regard section, which is the premiere sidebar event. It’s hard to define what makes it in there and what doesn’t. The notion is that those films are just a little bit more (to use the local lingo) outré. But I have seen some perfectly cosy pictures playing in the supposedly edgy section. I very much enjoyed Beasts of the Southern Wild at this year’s Un Certain Regard.  Darezhan Omirbaev’s Student, a take on Crime and Punishment, went down rather less well. The event closes with a biopic of Renoir (the painter, not the film-maker) by Gilles Bourdos.

  Look, here’s a photo I took from inside the auditorium at a UCR event.

  

  Tomorrow we have the latest film from the 89-year-old Alain Resnais which ventures out under the optimistic title You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet. We also get to see Like Someone in Love, the new film from arch-oddball Abbas Kiarostami. The fun never stops. Does it?

• Cannes review of Amour by Michael Haneke

  @ 11:44 am | by Donald Clarke

  

  AMOUR/LOVE

  *****

  Directed by Michael Haneke

  Starring Emmanuelle Riva, Isabelle Huppert, Jean-Louis Trintignant, William Shimell, Rita Blanco, Laurent Capelluto

  127 min, playing in competition

  You didn’t need a degree in semiotics to deduce that the title of Ulrich Seidl’s creepy Paradise: Love, which played here on Friday, was intended ironically. That is not the case with the grindingly ascetic (even for this director) new film from Michael Haneke. Almost entirely contained within one up-market Paris apartment, Amour is a rigorously unsentimental study of the toll life extracts for allowing us to love. The press emerged from the morning screening to find grim clouds blowing icily across the Côte d’Azur. Even the weather seemed to agree we had just experienced something extraordinary.

  Amour begins with an elderly couple, Anne and Georges, attending a classical concert. The next day, Anne experiences a brief blackout. It transpires that she has had a stroke. She continues to decline — thrown into a misery of desperate bellowing — while Georges stoically tries to cope with her increasing distance. In an early aside, Anne describes her husband as “a monster”. He is certainly robust in his attitude to his wife’s illness: in one horribly disturbing moment, he turns to violence; he ends up barring his slightly prissy daughter (Isabelle Huppert) from the sick bed. But his icy devotion is never in doubt.

  It is a shame that Cannes rarely hands out prizes to more than one film. If Amour wins one of the top awards (which it almost certainly will) then Emmanuelle Riva, who offers a heroic turn as Anne, may miss out on the best actress gong. There will surely be no better performance this fortnight. Best remembered for appearing in Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour back in 1959, Riva somehow manages to suck the life from her own face over the course of the picture. It is asking a lot to demand that an actor make something watchable of blankness. Riva rises to the challenge admirably.

  Jean-Louis Trintignant, who won best actor at this event in 1969, is no less impressive as Georges. His face never breaks. He does not give into rages. But torment leaks quietly from each pore.

  Amour does, however, belong to the director. It is saying something to argue that this is the most austere film yet from the great Austrian director. Pictures such as The Piano Teacher and Hidden did, at least, have their moments of extravagant  blood-letting. Shot in gunmetal shades by the great Iranian Darius Khondji, featuring a largely static camera, the film progresses entirely through small, desperate moments. When the inevitable catastrophe arrives it rushes by in a hurried flash.

  Haneke has long been glibly dubbed “the new Ingmar Bergman”. They are, of course, entirely different directors. But, while watching Amour, it is impossible not to think of morbid Bergman pictures such as Cries and Whispers and Through a Glass Darkly. Haneke’s tone is even more reserved and even less hysterical. One senses a director desperately afraid of making a scene.

  If one were to offer criticism, one might note that, considering the subject matter, Amour is a little too cleanly scrubbed. Protracted deaths usually involve a few more bodily emissions. That lack of distracting grime does, however, make it easier to focus on the picture’s emotional core. Amour is surely now early favourite for the Palme d’Or. If we were previously in any doubt, Haneke is confirmed as the premiere European director of his generation.

   

• Lawless press conference and other Saturday matters

  May 19, 2012 @ 10:00 pm | by Donald Clarke

  To the media room. It’s the press conference for John Hillcoat’s Lawless. I was looking forward to the film very much, but, as you can read below, I ended up finding it a bit flat. No matter. It was nice to get a gawp at all the celebrities associated with the project. Just look at that bunch below. That’s Tom Hardy with the beard. Nick Cave, second from the right, has his arm around wee Shia Labeouf. Jessica Chastain is still in everything; so, it’s little wonder that she ended up at my pre-lunch assignment. Mia Wasikowska wears the pink dress. Hang on! Where’s Guy Pearce? He turned up a few minutes later. Enjoy my crappy photos…

  

  L to R: bloke, Grizzly Adams, Ms Ubiquity, Sir Norman Foster, Alice, bloke, Transformers victim, Grecian 2000 user, bloke.

  It was a reasonably lively chat. Nick Cave was mostly charming, but, having reached the age where he need not suffer fools, proceeded to bark at somebody who dragged up an ancient quote in which he claimed that he was enjoying growing old. “The only people who say that aren’t old yet,” he said. Or words to that effect. I couldn’t be bothered to dig out the recording. He also answered a question from this correspondent about the use of The Velvet Underground’s White Light White Heat in the picture. Look here he is fiddling with his phone next to Jessica and Tom. His hair wasn’t that colour when he was in The Birthday Party.

  

  L to R: M Le Frou-Frou, Gareth from The Office, Dead Joe, Rolf Harris, Nicole Kidman.

  There were a raft of films on today. To my mind, the pick of the bunch was Thomas Vinterberg’s The Hunt. It is surely the best thing he’s done since Festen. A surprisingly mainstream effort, the picture stars Mads Mikkelsen as teacher whose life falls apart when he is wrongly accused of sexual abuse. I would admit that not all of it is plausible. The initial remark escalates a little too quickly onto an all-out witch hunt. But the picture is fantastically gripping and features a top-notch performance from Mr Mikkelsen. It looks like the sort of thing that will definitely get remade in America. See the original when it comes to your town. You won’t regret it.

  

• Cannes Review of Lawless by John Hillcoat

  @ 2:31 pm | by Donald Clarke

  

  LAWLESS

  ***

  Directed by John Hillcoat

  Starring  Shia LaBeouf, Tom Hardy, Gary Oldman, Jessica Chastain, Mia Wasikowska, Guy Pearce

  115 min, playing in competition

  In 2005, John Hillcoat turned a script by Nick Cave into one of the best films of the decade: The Proposition. That Australian western did not, however, get anything like the attention it deserved. Hillcoat and Cave will hope for greater recognition with this gratifyingly violent, nicely shot tale of moonshiners in prohibition-era America. They have a top flight cast: Tom Hardy, Gary Oldman, Jessica Chastain and Mia Wasikowska are all in place. The scenario is attractive. And, now, they have secured a place in the main competition at Cannes. Bring it on.

  Well, the film certainly churns the blood, but its meandering narrative and outbreaks of absurdity prove somewhat off-putting. There is a sense of something half-formed about it. It needs a darn good shake.

  Shia LaBeouf and Tom Hardy play, respectively, Jack and Forrest Bondurant, two brothers running illicit spirits in a renegade corner of Virginia. As we begin, Jack is still naive and weak-spirited, while the supposedly invincible Forrest has established a reputation as the most fearsome hoodlum in the district. Think of Michael and Sonny Corleone at the beginning of The Godfather and you’re halfway there. The younger man realises that the key to success is expansion and duly establishes a business relationship with big-time mobster Floyd Banner (an underused Gary Oldman). Before long, he is driving fancy cars and making advances on the preacher’s daughter (Mia Wasikowska). But a new lawman has arrived in the extravagant perfumed form of Charlie Rakes (Guy Pearce).

  What is Mr Pearce up to? Speaking in a strange fluty voice, camply pulling on gloves like Marlene Dietrich in a Weimar revue, he offers us a villain from an entirely different, more fantastic genre of movie. The Child Catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was a less heightened figure. The Evil Queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs seems, in comparison, like a character from a Mike Leigh film.

  Anyway, the rest of the film will do well enough in an HBO sort of way. Hardy makes something hulky and inhuman of the older brother. The costumes and design, though never dirty enough, show evidence of diligent research. The soundtrack makes convincing and witty — note references to another prohibited drug — use of bluegrass takes on The Velvet Underground’s White Light White Heat.

  If Cave had managed to impose some structure on this allegedly true story then we might have had a film that could sit comfortably beside The Proposition. Nobody should complain about the texture: the screenwriter uses his favoured biblical syntax to winning effect; he finds humour in Forrest’s apparent indestructibility. But, with a villain too absurd to take seriously, Lawless never sets up sufficient levels of jeopardy. It passes the time. But a whole bunch of opportunities appear to have been squandered.

  

   

• Cannes Review of Beasts of the Southern Wild

  May 18, 2012 @ 9:59 pm | by Donald Clarke

  

  BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD

  *****

  Directed by Benh Zeitlin

  Starring Quvenzhane Wallis, Dwight Henry, Levy Easterly, Lowell Landes, Pamela Harper,  Gina Montana

  91 min, playing in Un Certain Regard

  There are many surprising things in this stunning film from up-and-coming American wunderkind Benh Zeitlin. But, if you’ll permit facetiousness, few are as astonishing as the news, conveyed in the final credits, that it is “based on the play Juicy and Delicious by Lucy Alibar”. Whatever else you might say about Beasts of the Southern Wild, you couldn’t accuse it of being stagy. Few more brazenly cinematic pieces will come our way this year.

  The film, which won the Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Festival, is set in a near-prehistoric enclave of Louisiana called The Basin. Its protagonist, who shares a shack and a treehouse with her ailing dad, is an extraordinary young girl called Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis). Gifted a bush of hair and a preternaturally stubborn face, she narrates the film in the sleepy, poetic style of a voice-over from a Terrence Malick film. The Basin is so-called because it lies low in the ground and, as the waters rise, its very existence is threatened. Zeitlin is certainly prone to the odd emphatic gesture. In case we don’t get the message that global warming is afoot, he inter cuts scenes of pummelling rain with shots of icecaps falling into the sea. But this is the sort of film that thrives on creative extravagance. Every frame buzzes with the desire to amaze, dazzle and excite.

  Events really get going when father and daughter are driven from their home by the swollen river. They fashion a raft from a disused truck bed and begin a journey to nowhere. The film is bursting with cultural references: Huckleberry Finn, the biblical flood, Heart of Darkness. But it has a southern zest all its own. The superb Quvenzhané Wallis gives us the best wise child we have encountered for quite some time. She is a variation on the face that stared out from a hundred news reports concerning the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The easy rhythms of her speech offer a gentle backbeat to the chaos billowing from every bayou.

  And what beautiful chaos it is. Zeitlin is clearly a man who wants to get noticed. Scored to blistering, percussive music by the director and Dan Romer, the film finds space for wild parties, exploding alligators and the emergence of sinister prehistoric beasts.

  If one were being picky, one might accuse Zeitlin of trying just a little too hard. But there is a point to all this. As well as offering a delicious audio-visual feast, the film firmly makes the case that those who have least to blame for global warming — those living close to nature — will be the ones who ultimately suffer the most. If we have to be taught such a grim lesson then this is the way to do it. We will hear more from Benh Zeitlin.

  

   

• That sexism row bubbles on.

  @ 12:49 pm | by Donald Clarke

  Not that you care, it was actually bleeding raining this morning. The sun has, however, now grudgingly come out to turn all pale-faced northern journalists an unpleasant shade of lobster pink. Today, we are looking forward to Sundance hit Beasts of the Southern Wild and Cristian Mungiu’s intriguing sounding Beyond the Hills. I’ve just been to the press conference for Ulrich Seidl’s Paradise: Love , which was a great deal more light-hearted than the film. This morning’s film was Reality, the latest from Matteo Garrone. Fans of that director’s Gomorrah should prepare themselves for a shift in gear. The new picture is a serious comedy concerning a Neopolitan fish-monger who ends up on Big Brother. A full review will land here later. But I will say that I found it a mildly distracting minor work. If the jury want to generate copy they may well hand the best actor prize to the lead Aniello Arena. He would, however, be unlikely to attend. The actor has been in prison for 20 years and was only let out on a daily basis to make the film.

  

  Some stepladders yesterday.

  There is still a deal of chatter about the absence of women from the main competition. If the standard was at its highest then this would not be such an issue. But the inclusion of the distinctly ho-hum After the Battle just causes us to ask the question more forcefully.

  Andrea Arnold, director of Fish Tank and Red Road, is, in my experience, not one to mince her words. Ms Arnold, a member of this year’s jury, came out fighting at a press conference. ”I would absolutely hate it if my film was selected because I was a woman,”she said. “I would only want my film to be selected for the right reasons and not out of charity because I’m female. I would say it’s true the world over in the world of film. There’s just not that many film directors. I guess Cannes is a small pocket that represents how it is out in the world.”

  It’s an odd one. There were no woman directors in the 2010 event. But, last year, the organisers managed to dig up four pictures by people of that gender.

• James Bond on the beach

  @ 12:09 am | by Donald Clarke

  

  Through the wonders of modern technology, I am able to relay this near-live image of Dr No screening on the beach at the lovely Cannes Film Festival. By now you will have read my review of Ulrich Seidl’s Paradise: Love, which plays in the competition tomorrow. If not, then do do immediately.  Obviously, severe Austrian films — and severe films from other parts of the world — are what you sent me here to examine. But other things do go on in Cannes. Apparently people who aren’t pathologically anti-social spend puzzling amounts of time drinking lurid pink drinks on yachts. The streets are alive with people who, though rich, don’t look as if they’ve done an honest days work in their lives.

  And, of course, there are fun events like the season of Bond films playing down on the sand. Now, here’s a thought. I mentioned yachts and — by extension — sinister master criminals. Before the Bond film started I glanced out at the large boats in the Mediterranean and  noticed that, among the gleaming white vessels, there was one dubious, lurking black boat. If a Bond villain were to make shore in Cannes this is surely the mode of transport he’d employ. Nobody is to make any jokes about Harvey Weinstein. Argh! There’s a snake in my boot.

  Anyway, here’s a grainy snap. You can’t deny that it looks suspicious. The black boat is, well, the black one in the middle.

  

   

   

• Cannes review of Paradise: Love by Ulrich Seidl

  May 17, 2012 @ 7:10 pm | by Donald Clarke

  

  PARADISE: LOVE

  ***

  Directed by Ulrich Seidl

  Starring Margarethe Tiesel, Peter Kazungu, Inge Maux, Carlos Mkutano

  120 min, playing in competition

  When Ulrich Seidl, a director who makes other Austrians seem jolly, announced that his latest project was to be the first part of a trilogy, veterans of his work could be forgiven for viewing this as more of a threat than a promise. With films such as Dog Days and Import Export — brilliant in their horrid ways — Ulrich demonstrated a near pathological addiction to misanthropy. We can safely assume his latest film, playing at Cannes in the main competition, will have nothing in common with The Lion King.

  As it happens, that’s not quite true. When a party of Austrian ladies arrive for their holiday in Kenya they are tutored in basics of the language. The tour leader does, indeed, force them to bellow “Hakuna Mutata” over and over again. Similarities end there.

  This is, however, certainly a less frightening beast than Seidl’s earlier films. The excellent Margarethe Tiesel plays Anna Maria, a larger single woman with an annoying teenage daughter and an unseen cat. Depending upon your view, she emerges as either a Silly Old Fool or a monstrous foot soldier of post-colonial tyranny. Seidl probably expects us to see her as a bit of both.

  The first half of Paradise: Love (might that title be ironic?) is quite superb — and properly funny — in its representation of western boors at play. The film could (we’ll come to this) be accused of depicting Africans in an unflattering light. But its take on Austrian manners is considerably more savage. The women sunbathe in military rows like pink sausages waiting for the grill. A rope on the beach separates the hawkers from their targets. The tourists’ attitude to the natives veers from the patronising to the hugely offensive. How can “the negroes” be told apart? Well, some are taller than others. As they cackle lasciviously at the barman it’s hard to shake off thoughts of the Fat Slags from Viz.

  Eventually, Anna Maria hooks up with a young Kenyan who seems interested in her rather than her money. But he is, in fact, just playing a craftier game. He introduces her to a sick child and asks for cash to pay the hospital. Anna Maria gives in, but soon begins to suspect the truth.

  That episode asks the viewer all kinds of worthwhile questions. Is poverty an excuse for larceny? Can such a relationship ever function as an engagement of equals? This dry, cold film-maker would never permit any easy answers.

  It is certainly worrying that virtually every Kenyan in the film appears to be on the make. But Seidl takes such a pessimistic view of all human nature that it would seem incongruous if things were otherwise. Anna Maria is, at first, allowed a degree of decency. Her desperate, futile attempts to connect with her daughter reveal a soft heart. Her loneliness virtually burns a hole in the screen.

  But, in the picture’s later stages, Seidl can’t resist wielding the knife and the woman is encouraged to behave more and more like a decadent western sow. The bad sex gets worse. The attitude towards the Kenyan hosts deteriorates further. By the end, we feel — as we often do with Seidl — that he’s simply trying to turn our stomachs. What a shame. He had a small masterpiece on his hands before he  returned to picking indulgently at scabs.

  Still, there’s enough here for us to anticipate the sequels with guarded enthusiasm. The subsequent films may, at least, explain why the current picture begins with a sequence depicting mentally challenged adults driving dodgem cars. Is it a metaphor for the girls’ holiday? Beats me, guv.

   

   

   

• Slipping into Cannes with Wes Anderson

  May 16, 2012 @ 10:46 pm | by Donald Clarke

  

  Is Marilyn celebrating Cannes’s 65th birthday by blowing out a birthday cake? It’s not really that significant an anniversary. Is it? At any rate, the star is everywhere in this Mediterranean resort. There she is above the Palais des Festivals. I had just emerged from the first two screenings of the festival to discover that everything is as expected. Punters lurk about holding signs requesting tickets for the evening’s gala screening of Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom (see below). Everyone’s walking very slowly. Maniacs flogging bizarre horror films lurk in the market beneath the main venue.

  

  Jesus, people. The thing opens next week, anyway. Get a life.

  Moonrise Kingdom? Hmm? We’ll be running a full review on Friday. I will say here, however, that it looks very, very like a Wes Anderson film. I mean that in both a good and bad way. It is a delight to sink back into that sensibility. But, as has been the case with many of the director’s recent films, the aesthetic does not appear to be attached to anything concrete. The film features Bruce Willis, Ed Norton and (surprise, surprise) Bill Murray  in a tale of errant youths — as bright as most children in the director’s pictures — who light out for the country. It’s got more to do with the mighty Benjamin Britten than any other film you’ve seen this century. Most of the big stars were out in force for the premiere. I didn’t actually see any of them. But I did spot Zhang Ziyi lurking round the artistes’ entrance. Will this do?

  I know what you’re really interested in. You want to know what the complimentary bag is like. Well, rather surprisingly, it doesn’t have Marilyn Monroe’s mug on it. But it’s rather nice I suppose. Interestingly, one of the ways of showing off here is to carry round your stuff in a bag from a previous festival. By doing this you demonstrate that you are not some fresh-faced blow-in. It probably also confirms that you’re a bit of a prat. But we won’t go there.

  

  Donald’s got a brand new bag.

  Tomorrow we have the new film from Jacques Audiard. That director’s Rust and Bone has, apparently, something to do with Killer Whale trainers. Well, that sounds like a bit of a swerve for the director of A Prophet. I don’t expect a sequel to Free Willy. There’s also an interesting sounding documentary on Roman Polanski. What am I secretly looking forward to? Well, at the weekend, as part of the Un Certain Regard strand, we get to see Sylvie Verheyde’s Confession of a Child of the Century. Get this. Charlotte Gainsbourg and Pete Doherty play decadent lovers in 19th century France. Gainsbourg and Doherty? We can’t miss that. Maybe, we’ll finally find out what Pete Doherty is for.

  

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