I’m starting to disengage on this, the ninth day of the 2014 Cannes Film Festival. Every longish festival (10 or 11 days) starts to run out of gas after the sixth or seventh day, and after that you think more and more about getting the hell out of Dodge. Ken Loach‘s Jimmy’s Hall (modest expectations) screens an hour from now at 8:30 am, followed by Rolf de Heer‘s Charlie’s Country (starring famed Aboriginal actor David Gulpilil, known for his performances in Walkabout, Crocodile Dundee, Rabbit Proof Fence and Australia) at 11 am. The annual outdoor lunch at the top of Le Suquet (i.e, Old Town) runs from 1:30 to 3 pm, and then the 7pm showing of Leviathan followed by Asia Argento‘s Incompresa, an Un Certain Regard selection, at 10 pm. Friday seems like an even weaker day with Sils Maria, the Olivier Assayas drama costarring Juliette Binoche, Kristen Stewart and Chloe Moretz, screening at 8:30 am.
Day: May 21, 2014
Stink of Corruption
A somewhat vested professional woman told me the night before last that Leviathan, the latest film from Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev, is quite essential. She claimed this endorsement was relatively unaffected by her business interests. It screens this evening at the Salle Debussy and Salle Bazin at 7 pm and 9:30 pm, respectively. The Wiki page says it’s “about a man who struggles against a corrupt mayor,” and is “a modern reworking of the Book of Job…a story of love and tragedy experienced by ordinary people.” Something in me flinches when I hear that term, “ordinary people.”
Stuck In Muck
Michel Hazanavicius‘s The Search is basically an attempt to wring emotion out of the civilian agonies suffered during the second Chechen War of ’99. The problem with the film, which got booed a little bit this morning, is a determination on the director-writer’s part to deliver uplift moments, come hell or high water. The second problem is the director-writer’s insistence on spelling everything out with blunt expositional dialogue plus an occasional angry rant or two. As usual I could tell this film was a goner within five or ten minutes. I could hear the granules of sand leaking out of the hourglass and scattering on the floor. Too explicit, too on-the-nose, too much of an effort to elicit emotional reactions, too much “acting”…its just not a grade-A effort. From the very beginning it feels like a movie made by a guy who’s trying his utmost but doesn’t quite get how to make the movie that should have come out of this material.
Eyes Have It
I’ve been a Berenice Bejo cheerleader since succumbing to her performance in Asghar Farhadi‘s The Past, which she should have been Oscar-nominated for. It was a little deflating to watch her perform as best she could in her husband Michel Hazanavicius‘s underwhelming The Search, which screened this morning at 8:30 am. But I wanted a few snaps anyway so I attended the 11:30 am press conference. The serious pros and particularly the Cannes veterans always make eye contact with this and that photographer while everyone is snapping away before the session begins. I didn’t realize while I was shooting that Bejo was giving me this courtesy.
Berenice Bejo, star of Michel Hazanavicious’s The Search, at the start of this morning’s Cannes Film Festival press conference.
