Contender for best actor serving 20 years for murder

THE BREAKOUT star of this year’s Cannes Film Festival currently sits in an Italian jail. Last night the festival hosted a gala screening of Matteo Garrone’s Reality.

The director of Gomorrah, an acclaimed Italian crime drama, has surprised fans of that picture by turning his hand to comedy. Reality was greeted with restrained praise from the legion of critics.

The performance by Aniello Arena has, however, stirred up a great deal of interest.

Arena, playing a Neapolitan fishmonger who enters the Big Brother reality show, is already being mentioned as a possible contender for best actor. Were he to win there would be little chance of him attending the ceremony. He has spent the last 20 years in jail for a double murder.

Garrone explained that a judge allowed Arena, member of a prison theatre company, to quit jail during the day to shoot the film. Arena was, however, barred from leaving Italy to attend Cannes.

The film offers a belated attack on the phenomenon of reality television, but Garrone claimed that he did not intend to point any fingers.

“What we were trying to do was to portray with great love a character while denouncing an aspect of society, but the aim was not at all to be critical,” he said.

Meanwhile the dispute about the exclusion of female directors from the main competition continues to bubble on. Jury member Andrea Arnold, the British director of Fish Tank and Wuthering Heights, was asked about the scandal at a press conference and responded in characteristically spirited fashion.

“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.”

The main competition continues today with the greatly anticipated new film from John Hillcoat. Scripted by musician Nick Cave, Lawless stars Shia LaBeouf and Tom Hardy in a tale set among bootleggers in the US during the prohibition years.

Tomorrow Michael Haneke, who won the Palme d’Or, the festival’s main prize, in 2009, returns with a forbidding drama entitled Love.

While much of the press attention focuses on the competition, most attendees concern themselves with business. Yesterday it emerged that Cate Blanchett and Mia Wasikowska are set to star in Carol, the latest picture by Irish film-maker and theatre director John Crowley.

Based on an early, notorious novel by Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt, the film concerns a romantic relationship between two women in 1950s New York.

When it was published under a pseudonym in 1952, the book caused something of a minor scandal. Stephen Wooley, best known for his work with Neil Jordan, is to produce the picture.

The Cannes Film Festival runs until May 27th.