As Cannes winds down, 'Twilight' team get their teeth into selling new projects

AS THE Cannes Film Festival wound into its closing weekend, the celebrities continued to flock to La Croisette. Last night Robert Pattinson, star of the Twilight vampire series, trod the red carpet for the premiere of David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis.

A few days earlier, Kristen Stewart, also a Twilight team member, walked the gauntlet for the screening of Walter Salles’s take on Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Cosmopolis, adapted from a slim novel by Don Delillo, concerns an asset trader trapped claustrophobically in his gridlocked limousine. At the morning press conference, Mr Cronenberg was asked whether he saw Pattinson’s character – isolated from normal life – as some sort of vampire.

“We just didn’t deal with that,” the Canadian director said. “It’s very easy to say he’s a vampire or a werewolf. But that’s superficial. An actor can’t play an abstract concept either. I can’t say: ‘You are the dynamo of capitalism.’ This is a real person. It’s not Twilight. I don’t think of any of my own films when making the next.”

Away from the competition screenings, Ronan Keating was at the film market to promote an Australian comedy entitled Goddess. Keating stars alongside Laura Michelle Kelly, who recently appeared as Mary Poppins in the West End. He told the London Evening Standard that he had long yearned to appear in a movie.

“I’ve been going to castings and readings for the best part of 20 years,” he said. “I read for Moulin Rouge – twice – and I read for some bigger Hollywood movies, too. But I wasn’t anywhere near good enough.

“I thought, because I was a celebrity who had been in 45 music videos, that I could do it. But I wasn’t ready. I studied and took lessons. It’s taken a long, long time for it to come to me.”

The festival ends with an awards ceremony at the Palais des Festival tomorrow night. Critics have rated the competition a success.

Michael Haneke’s Amour, following the painful death of an elderly woman, remains favourite for the Palme d’Or. But there has been a late run by Leos Carax’s Holy Motors. Greeted with extravagant cheers at its press screening – plus a few boos – the hugely eccentric, defiantly surreal film has been attracting equal numbers of rave reviews and eviscerations. Were it to triumph it would be the most divisive pick since Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark won in 2000.

TRAPPED IN THE AUTOMOBILE: CRONENBERG STAGEBOUND

COSMOPOLIS ***

Directed by David Cronenberg.

Starring Robert Pattinson, Paul Giamatti, Samantha Morton, Sarah Gadon, Mathieu Amalric, Juliette Binoche

(Playing in competition, 109 min)

IT WOULD take a genius of David Cronenberg’s calibre to turn Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis into a masterpiece. Published in 2003, and influenced by James Joyce’s Ulysses, the book found an asset trader making his way through a gridlocked New York City on the day of a presidential visit. Like Proust’s writing chamber (DeLillo’s own overreaching reference), his absurdly well-appointed limousine is soundproofed to exclude any direct connection with contemporary reality. Almost the entire story takes place in that car.

The dialogue is discursive in the extreme. Yes, it’s going to take a Cronenberg to make sense of this.

Well, the Canadian filmmaker, known for creepy films such as Dead Ringers and The Fly, is incapable of directing an uninteresting movie. Cannily casting Robert Pattinson – an actor who makes a virtue of blankness – Cronenberg creates a characteristically bloodless and forbidding universe.

Eric Packer is, in so many ways, a classic Cronenberg hero: that is to say, he is less a personality than an embodiment of certain contemporary neuroses. One can easily understand what Cronenberg saw in the material.

The director has, however, fallen far short of delivering a masterpiece. Speaking at the press conference, Cronenberg explained he was reluctant to change a word of the original dialogue.

That decision tells.

Deliberately claustrophobic, featuring mannered, inauthentic blocking, the piece is very much like a play. Indeed, Cosmopolis is so like a theatre piece, it’s hard to credit it was ever a novel.

When Mathieu Amalric, playing an anticapitalist protester,gets grabbed by Packer’s minder, the bruiser makes sure to hold him long enough to permit delivery of a lengthy monologue. Everybody the hero encounters gets their own audition speech.

Despite the source novel being nearly a decade old, the script has interesting things to say about the current economic chaos.

One of the film’s themes is the near-magical, abstract nature of the financial world.

But the film will insist on “saying” those things, rather than illustrating them. Suffocating in a bad way.