Publicist Jeff Hill has announced that Sony Classics will release Michael Haneke‘s Amour in the U.S. under the original French title, and not Love, as David Poland and others have called it.

It may not be a home run or even a triple, but Abbas Kiarostami‘s Like Someone In Love has provided more pleasure and intrigue than any film I’ve seen at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. It’s a trifle on one level, but it’s plain and true and masterful — a pitch thrown straight without a shred of pretension. I’m probably going to fail in trying to describe what it amounted to for me, but that’s okay. I only know I was mesmerized start to finish…even though I dropped off for about eight or ten minutes.

Tadashi Okuno, Rin Takanashi in Abbas Kiarostami’s Like Someone In Love.

Set in present-day Tokyo, it’s basically about a contest for the attention and affections of Akiko (Rin Takanashi), a young, drop-dead beautiful, none-too-bright student who moonlights as a prostitute. In one corner is her 20something garage-mechanic fiance, Noriaki (Ryo Kase), who’s basically about possessiveness and jealousy and rage. In the other is an elderly sociologist and author, Takashi (Tadashi Okuno), whom Akiko visits late at night for an erotic tryst that which doesn’t amount to much beyond her getting undressed and falling asleep in his bed.

(My lights also went out during this scene — odd. I was told what had happened after the screening by Eric Kohn and Owen Gleiberman.)

The next morning Takashi drives Akiko to her university, and witnesses a testy argument between her and Noriaki on the school steps. She goes inside and Takashi and his Volvo remain at the curb, engine idling. Noriaki notices the old gent, becomes curious, comes over and asks for a light. And then “who are you?”, and “how do you know Akiko?” The old man doesn’t exactly say he’s her grandfather — Noriaki assumes this because he knows Akiko’s grandmother is in town to visit — and he gradually suggests that he’s not. But of course, he doesn’t tell Noriaki what’s really going on.

They begin to talk. Noriaki explains his obsession for Akiko, and how he’s determined to marry her because she’s the perfect wife and he doesn’t want to lose her, etc. Takashi tells him he lacks experience, and that a wiser man wouldn’t badger Akiko about her whereabouts — he would open the cage and let the bird fly free. But Noriaki has found a business card with a photo of a woman who looks like Akiko (it’s actually her photo) offering her services, and can sense she’s constantly lying to him. Which she is, of course.

Noriaki is such a hardhead, such a hammer. Akiko, an empty Coke bottle who doesn’t know what Charles Darwin did and can’t be bothered to call her grandmother and make arrangements to meet her (she tells a cab driver to cruise by a public park where granny is waiting, watching but not stopping to get out and converse), has apparently led Noriaki on into thinking they’re engaged because he pays her bills, but why she’s picked such an uneducated, hair-trigger clod is a mystery. She’s breathtaking. She could have anyone.

In any event Akiko gets into the car with Takashi and Noriaki, the latter saying he’ll ride along for a bit. Noriaki then informs Takashi that his Volvo engine belt is worn down and needs replacing, and he persuades the old fellow to drop by his garage so he can replace it. At the garage an old student of Takashi’s happens to recognize him and says hello. This exchange concerns Akiko as Noriaki has overheard it and she’s told him that her grandfather is a fisherman. He might get wise. “But everyone has two grandfathers,” Takashi reminds her. “Oh, yes,” she says, slightly relieved but not entirely. How dumb is this girl? She never says boo. Putting more than five or six words together in a sentence seems like a tremendous effort for her.

Takashi and Nokiko leave the garage, leaving Noriaki to his clients. Takashi drops her off at a book store. And then she calls him a short while later, conveying anguish and stress. And then things escalate. I’ll stop here with the synopsis, but suffice that Noriaki smells what’s up and is determined to have it out.

The one problem I have with Like Someone In Love is the ending. It doesn’t really fit or pay off or anything. It just happens, and I’m not even sure what happens as far as a certain character’s health and fate are concerned. Kohn and Gleiberman weren’t 100% sure either.

The fact that I’ve just typed out seven paragraphs of story exposition obviously indicates my absorption. I could honestly watch it again right now (a repeat screening in the Lumiere begins in 15 minutes) if I didn’t have five or six things to do. More writing, a lunch, an encounter with David and Brandon Cronenberg, an Oscar Poker podcast recording, a Studio Babelsberg party, more filing, a Weinstein Co. preview reel.

The slowness of the pace of Like Someone To Love and the way this and that detail is revealed like cards in a solitaire game is fascinating. It’s the Yasujiro Ozu influence again, and I’ve always been a fan of that. I’ll definitely see this again. I’ve already decided to buy the Bluray.

The Weinstein Co. threw a party tonight on the roof of the JW Marriot (formerly the Noga Hilton) to celebrate The Sapphires, which everyone, myself included, has so far enjoyed to varying degrees. I wasn’t close enough to the bandstand to eyeball everyone, but Chris O’Dowd (who kills in the film) and at least three or four of the lead actresses (Jessica Mauboy, Deborah Mailman, Shari Sebbens, Miranda Tapsell) were singing basic Motown when I came in, half-soaked.

All those umbrellas clustered near the steps of the Salle Debussy prior to tonight’s 7:30 pm screening of Abbas Kiarostami‘s Like Someone To Love (which I found curiously spellbinding and in a sense “better,” for me anyway, than Certified Copy) reminded me of the Amsterdam assassination scene in Alfred Hithcock‘s Foreign Correspondent. Vaguely, I mean.

Yes, I’ve posted a clip like this before, but if you’re never going to go as a journalist this is how it feels and smells as you’re approaching the Grand Palais for a morning screening. No harm in repeating this, right?

A healthy portion of Wayne Blair‘s The Sapphires, which I saw this afternoon, is cool, snappy, rousing, well-cut and enormously likable. (And dancable.) That would be the first 30% or 40%, when the true-life tale of an Aboriginal Supremes-like group assembled and took shape in Australia in 1968. This 40-minute section may seem a little too slick and familiar to some, but it definitely works.

But the main reason the film delivers overall is Chris O’Dowd‘s performance as Dave, a charmingly scuzzy boozer and Motown fanatic who steers the four girl singers (played by Deborah Mailman, Jessica Mauboy, Shari Sebbens and Miranda Tapsell) away from country and towards soul music, and then takes them to Vietnam to entertain U.S. troops. Dowd’s manner and personality are a total kick — an absolute hands-down winner and the best reason to see The Sapphires, even when it turns sketchy in the last half or so. (He was Kristen Wiig‘s cop boyfriend in Bridesmaids.)

I was saying to myself during the first 10 or 15 minutes, “Whoa, this is pretty good…not as high-throttle razzmatzzy as Dreamgirls but I like it better.” And then it kept on going and hitting the marks for the most part. But then the quartet goes to Vietnam and the smoke and bombs and shrapnel become part of the narrative and the film, sorry to say, turns into a catch-as-catch-can slipshod hodgepodge — good music, relationships with guys, personal friction, exotic atmosphere. Unfortunate as this sounds, the Vietnam War is used strictly as a lively, occasionally dangerous backdrop as the girls sort out their various personal issues.

But when it’s not really working The Sapphires at least keeps the ball in the air with reasonable agility and sass. The analogy, come to think, isn’t really Dreamgirls as much as Hustle and Flow and The Commitments, at least during those first 40 minutes.

The soul classics are delightful to savor throughout. The music put me in a good mood right away and kept me there…well, during much of the running time.

Blair is a talented director who knows how to cut and groove and put on a show. It’s too bad that Vietnam and what appears to have been a slim budget overwhelm him somewhat. The script is by Aboriginal actor-writer Tony Briggs and Keith Thompson, and based on Brigg’s 2004 stage play, which was based on his mom’s true story (as the closing credits infom).

If I’m going to make the 3:30 pm screening of the Weinstein Co”s The Sapphires (“an Aboriginal Dreamgirls,” a friend tells me) I have to bolt in 20 so here’s what I tweeted about Michael Haneke‘s Amour earlier this morning:

Tweet #1: “Michael Haneke’s Amour is a very finely made, corrosively honest and delicately realized Chinese water-torture movie about slowly dying and loving mercifully right to the end.”

Tweet #2: “Jean-Louis Trintingnant and Emmanuelle Riva deliver frank affecting performances as an 80-something couple coping with drip-drip finality.”

Tweet #3: “But who apart from that certain strate of cultivated urban filmgoers will pay to see Amour? My 80something mom and her friends at her assisted-living facility would turn it off if they saw it on DVD, trust me. They watch escapist dreck in their TV room. Never films of substance.”

Tweet #4 and #5: “I spent half my Amour-watching time deciding what form of suicide I’ll choose when I get that old and my life becomes that pathetic. Pills. As romantic as it sounds, I don’t want to be torn apart by wild beasts. I want to expire on a nice couch while watching a Bluray of Derzu Usala.”

Tweet #6 and #7: “I don’t know how the boomers are going to handle death in their ’80s and ’90s, but I’m betting many will go by their own hand…but with flair. Amour is two hours and 7 minutes long. Sublime and refined and honest and sensitive, but old age and withering away with diapers is not for sissies. I know — I saw my father do it four years ago.”

Tweet #8 and #9: “Amour deserves and will get much respect critically, but nobody wants to die like this or watch this process. This is how it’ll possibly be, says Michael Haneke, if you’re lucky enough to have a partner who cares as deeply and tenderly as Trintignant does for Riva. Great!”

SPOILERS HEREIN: Those early wowser reviews for Thomas Vinterberg‘s The Hunt turned out to be misguided, in my view. I just came out of an 11 am screening and no offense but it’s attractively photographed, well-acted, middle-of-the-road TV movie crap.

It’s a small-town drama is about an innocent divorced man (Mads Mikkelsen) accused of child molestation, and how all his asshole “friends” very quickly fall away from him. And then, after torrents of ugliness, how everyone does a gradual turnaround. And how turn-the-other-cheek Mikkelsen accepts this reversal and accepts.

The deplorable behavior and rank stupidity seem somewhat credible on one level, but on another level appallingly false. “Why does this movie feel so oppressively full of shit?,” I kept asking myself. Forget the Crucible-resembling element, and the old, old story about small-town panic leading to the near-ruination of a man’s life. The bottom line is that this isn’t a satisfying story. Stupidity reigns, evil walks, justice isn’t served and a bullet slams into a tree at the very end. Zinngg!

Would best friends and longtime drinking and hunting buddies (except for one or two) really turn on an old friend like that, even when law officials have found a significant flaw in his accusers’ stories? Would a five-year-old create a ferocious fantasy because she feels faintly slighted when a certain adult neighbor tells her that kisses on the lips are only for parents and grandparents? Are parents so rock stupid as to completely discount this five-year-old when she recants said fantasy more than once? Would small-towners really descend to the level of terrified blind steers in a situation like this?

Maybe all this has happened (perhaps even countless times) but I didn’t buy it, not for a second. Not as Vinterberg showed it to me. The b.s. meter was going off constantly. “Beep-beep-beep-beep-beeeeeep-beepity-beep-beep-beeeeeep!”

First Showing‘s Alex Billington tweeted that he wanted to punch out several characters or words to that effect. Yeah, me too.

Tweetos: David Jenkins called it “worst in show. A jumped-up, cynical TV movie with chronic lack of ambition & zero insight into human psychology.” Mike D’Angelo wrote “let’s just say you’ve more or less seen this one once you know the premise.” Billington called it “infuriating, frustrating…a film about lies, full of lies. Too long. Ugh.”

Wells to Ira Parks, sent this morning: “Complaints are insistent and building. Your meta inhabitings are better as punctuations and counterpoints. You need to stop blanketing the site with this stuff. Take it easy.”