Roger Friedman‘s 2.20 “Cannes exclusive” isn’t about the certainty of Martin Scorsese‘s Killers of the Flower Moon debuting at the 2023 Cote d’Azur festival — that assumption has already gained ground. Ditto the loose talk about Chris Nolan‘s Oppenheimer, James Mangold‘s Indiana Jones and the Wheel of Fortune Dial of Destiny, Woody Allen‘s Coup de Chance and Sofia Coppola‘s Priscilla.
Friedman’s new info (alleged but not confirmed) is partly about the festival’s opening-night attraction — Pedro Almodovar‘s A Strange Way of Life, a 40-minute, English-language short costarring Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal. With just about every significant feature running 120 minutes these days (and often longer), one can’t help but admire Almodovar’s decision to keep A Strange Way of Life to one-third of that running time.
In my mind a 40-minute film isn’t a “short” — it’s a tweener.
The other announcement is about Maiwenn‘s Jeanne du Barry, a historical drama set during the French revolution that may, according to Friedman, screen on the second night of the festival. Alternately called La Favorite, the film will star Maiwenn as Jeanne Becu (aka Madame du Barry) in a rags-to-riches-to-guillotine story. Accused of treason, Becu lost her head during the French terror, and more precisely on December 8, 1793.
Johnny Depp allegedly plays the aged King Louis XV, who enjoyed Becu as his final mistress. The only problem is that Louis XV died in 1774, or 15 years before the French Revolution of ’89 and nearly 20 years before Becu’s execution so I don’t get it.
Wikipedia says Netflix will release Jeanne du Barry in France in 2023 (probably right after Cannes ’23), but that the streaming release won’t happen for another 15 months, or sometime in the fall of ’24. The Wiki page also states that the film, which finished shooting last October, was financed by the Red Sea International Film Festival. I don’t know…sounds kinda fishy.
The length of Scorsese’s Flower Moon is still in the vicinity of three hours and and 20 minutes. One possible reason is that the story Scorsese is looking to tell (based on David Grann’s 2017 book of the same name) simply required that running time to make it all work. Another possible reason is that Scorsese was fearful of Flower Moon being accused by Film Twitter of being a white savior tale and so he decided to add a fair amount of “Native Americans had their own agency” stuff so he and the film wouldn’t get in trouble with Native American wokesters.
The “Flower Moon has allegedly been woked into an anti-white savior film” angle was fully explored by Jordan Ruimy on 1.20.23. The first hint of this was reported the same date by Variety‘s Zack Sharf.
