Tattoo on Lars Von Trier’s right hand. Pic taken by Indiewire contributor Eugene Hernandez.
“Well, you know, Mr. Thompson, you’re pretty young. A fellow will remember a lot of things you wouldn’t think he’d remember. You take me. One day, back in 1896, I was crossing over to Jersey on the ferry, and as we pulled out, there was another ferry pulling in, and on it there was a girl waiting to get off. A white dress she had on. She was carrying a white parasol. I only saw her for one second. She didn’t see me at all, but I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since that I haven’t thought of that girl.”
A couple of hours ago Drive director Nicholas Winding Refn described his film, which costars Ryan Gosling and Carey Mulligan, as a “kind of fantasy” thing that was partly inspired, he said, by the vibe of driving around and listening to great music on the car stereo. He also said that in one sense it’s “almost a John Hughes film.”
That scared the hell out of me. My initial impression had been that Drive is a lean ’70s flick in the vein of Michael Mann‘s Thief featuring a quiet hero in the mold of Steve McQueen, etc. (This was fortified by moderator Trevor Groth, who said he’s seen it, during the discussion.) So I asked Refn what he meant exactly by the dreaded term “John Hughes.”
He basically meant, he said, that Drive, which will have its first Cannes press screening tomorrow night, is a somewhat lighter thing during the first half and then turns into something darker in the second half when Gosling’s character, a stunt driver, “goes a little crazy.” Refn mentioned, I think, Pretty in Pink , but I couldn’t tolerate that notion. (Not Ringwald…no!) So I asked if Drive might perhaps be analogous to Jonathan Demme‘s Something Wild, which definitely does the light-goes-into-darkness thing, and he said yeah, that wasn’t a half-bad analogy.
Refn also said he doesn’t drive, doesn’t have a license, is “car-ophobic” and is terrified of going on Magic Mountain rides. And yet “I like speed,” he said. Go figure.
During an American Pavillion q & a this afternoon, I asked Melancholia costar Stellan Skarsgard if anything that indefatigable game-player Lars von Trier said during this morning’s press conference was sincere. Skarsgard said VonTrier was sincere when he said his next film would be a porno, although most likely not with Kirsten Dunst (as the director had playfully implied).
Melanchola costar Stellan Skarsgard at American Pavilion — Wednesday, 5.18, 4:15 pm.
Meanwhile, Sony Classics has announced its North American territory acquisition of Lars von Trier and Martin Scorsese‘s The Five Obstructions: Trier vs. Scorsese. The collaboration doc, modelled on a previous film Von Trier made with director Jorgan Leth, will be about Von Trier giving Scorsese a series of instructions — “cinematic challenges” — in the making of a short film of some kind.
I tried to see Aki Kaurismaki‘s Le Havre, one of the biggest festival favorites so far and a possible Palme d’Or winner, at a noontime Salle de Soixentieme showing. I didn’t make it in so that’s that. I’ll see it when I see it.
A taxi from Cannes to Nice airport costs a fortune — 70 or 80 euros, or over $100 bills. And there’s something in me that just seethes at this. So my plan on Friday morning is to get up at 4:30 am and catch a 5:40 am train that will get me into “Nice Ville” (i.e., the main “gare”) by 6:20 am. That gives me a comfortable 40 minutes to find a cab and get down to Nice airport by 7 am. My plane for Paris leaves at 8:05 am.
“For a long time I thought I was a Jew and I was happy to be a Jew,” Melancholia director Lars von Triersaid this morning, “then I met (In A Better World director) Susanne Bier and I wasn’t so happy. But then I found out I was actually a Nazi. My family were German. And that also gave me some pleasure. What can I say? I understand Hitler…I sympathize with him a bit.”
(l. to r.) Charlotte Gainsbourgh, Lars Von Trier, Kirsten Dunst at this morning’s Melancholia press conference.
“I don’t mean I’m in favor of World War II and I’m not against Jews, not even Susanne Bier. In fact I’m very much in favor of them. All Jews. Well, Israeli is a pain the ass but…now how can I get out of this sentence? Ok. I’m a Nazi.”
Please, please don’t take this guy seriously. Okay, go ahead…what do I care? But he lives to say stuff like this. He’s an artist, a madman…unbalanced. And he loves getting this kind of attention.
Update: Von Trier has apologized for his Nazi comments. “If I have hurt someone this morning by the words I said at the press conference, I sincerely apologize,” Von Trier said in a statement. “I am not antisemitic or racially prejudiced in any way, nor am I a Nazi.”
So Ed Harris is going to be a convincing John McCain in Jay Roach‘s Game Change, an adaptation of John Heileman and Mark Halperin‘s book which began filming last month. But am I to presume that the characters of Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama will not be appearing in the film? No actors have been announced as playing these two in press stories.
Is it okay if I say that no-Barack-or-Hillary strikes me as totally whacked? How do you do this film with actors playing McCain and Sarah Palin (i.e., Julianne Moore) and no one playing Obama and Clinton? I read the book and believe me, Obama and Clinton are definitely major characters so what am I missing?
Lars von Trier‘s Melancholia is a morose, meditative in-and-outer that begins stunningly if not ecstatically and concludes…well, as you might expect a film about the end of the world to wrap itself up. Von Trier’s ensemble piece “isn’t about the end of the world but a state of mind,” he said during this morning’s press conference. My thinking exactly.
But Melancholia is a much more striking thing for where it starts and what it attempts than how it plays.
And yet I believe it’s the best…make that the gloomiest, most ambitious and craziest film Kirsten Dunst has ever starred in. Way bolder than Spotless Mind. It’s kind of La Notte-esque, now that I think about it. Dunst pretty much scowls all through Melancholia and does three nude scenes. What I really mean, I suppose, is that she’s never operated in such a dark, fleshy and grandiose realm.
I can understand Cannes critics going “wow!” over the film’s audacity or whatever (the moody-gloomy beauty, the melancholy current), but I can’t honestly see how they could call it a top contender for the Palme d’Or. It’s basically just a stylishly nutso, intriguing, semi-bombastic ensemble piece about despair in the face of eventual ruination. You know…the kind of thing that most HE readers have in their heads each and every day.
I felt elation only in the very beginning, and somewhat at the very end. But otherwise it mostly felt like a meditative slog. It’s not without its intrigues but lacking tension and a through-line and a story, really, of any kind. I don’t imagine this film will be embraced by pro-family Christian groups, or even the rightwing end-of-days crowd (although…naah, forget it).
I tried to ask Von Trier what the F-U-C-K tattoo on his right-hand fingers was about. A tribute to sensual joysex? The middle word in life? A nihilistic fuck-off statement? But press conference moderator Henri Behar didn’t pick me.
After the stunning, tableau-like, slow-motion opening, a brief impressionistic symphony, Melancholia gets down to basic business. Situation, circumstance, character, mood.
Justine (Dunst) is getting married to Michael (Alexander Skarsgard) and her control-freak sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) has orchestrated the wedding with husband Keifer Sutherland‘s money, and not the funds of Dunst’s father (John Hurt). Charlotte Rampling has a couple of scenes as Dunst’s blunt, cynical mom.
But right after the wedding Justine (allegedly based on Von Trier himself) slips into gloom-head nihilism and suddenly stops being attentive to Skarsgaard and starts meandering and moping around and fucking some guy (Brady Corbet) she barely knows near a golf course sandtrap.
Did I mention that the Earth is apparently on some kind of collision course with a planet called Melancholia, which has recently emerged from behind the sun? And that no one turns on a TV news station throughout the whole film, and that Gainsbourgh goes online only once?
The movie is never “boring” but only rarely gripping. It’s Von Trier, after all, but when all is said and done it’s basically a downhill swamp-trudge with tiny little pop-throughs from time to time.
There’s an overhead tracking shot of two horseback riders galloping down a trail during a foggy morning that’s heartstoppingly beautiful. That plus the beginning I will never, ever forget.
Melancholia is definitely better than Von Trier’s Antichrist — I’ll definitely give it that. Death dance, death art…when worlds collide. Von Trier had a mildly intriguing idea here but didn’t know what to do with it, or he perhaps didn’t care to try. All he does is riff about how tradition and togetherness are over and very few of us care. My sense is that Von Trier experimented and jazz-riffed his way through most of the filming.
All I know is that I feel the way Dunst’s Justine feels during most of the film, and I’m not dealing with the end of the world. Vaguely scared, unsettled…something’s coming.
Forget Von Trier’s Nazi remarks during the press conference. He’s turned into a very dry and clumsy kidder. Nothing is even half-sincere — absurdist put-on all the way.
“My next film…and Kirsten demanded it…will be a porn film,” Von Trier said at one point. “That’s how women are. Really hard-core. That’s what I’m writing now.”
The social engineers who arranged the Big Fix after-party at the Schweppes beach bar opposite the Carlton apparently figured it would take guests 45 minutes to walk from the Salle de Soixentieme screening to the after-party. Except it took EW‘s Dave Karger and myself about 12 or 13 minutes, taking our time; we arrived there at 10:20 pm. Despite this the Big Fix people told their goons not to let anyone in until 11 pm. Charming!
Team Big Fix deserves a firm slap across the chops. “Please come to our party…and we’re sure you won’t mind having to stand around on a sidewalk for the better part of an hour before we let you in.” Michelle Rodriguez (“How ya livin’?”) and her small posse talked their way in but that’s because she was (and probably still is) Michelle Rodriguez. Deadline‘s Pete Hammond was toughing it out but I said “eff this” and went home. Karger bailed way before I did.
Laid-back machismo of Vincent Lindon following yesterday afternoon’s screening of Pater at Grand Lumiere.
Jodie Foster/Mel Gibson Beaver approach in front Grand Palais.
If you thought the prospects for a relatively stable, healthy society were doomed after seeing An Inconvenient Truth and then extra-double-doomed after seeing Collapse, Josh and Rebecca Tickell‘s The Big Fix is the whipped cream and the cherry on top. It’ll make you feel triple-screwed, deflated, poisoned, abused, tattooed and up shit creek.
And it’s all perfectly true. I’ve heard and read every last soothsaying, doom-predicting word it delivers in articles, books and yaddah-yaddah, and it’s all on the money.
The Big Fix begins as an earnest but mild-mannered doc about the aftermath of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill and how lying British Petroleum’s cavalier attitude about safety was the father of it. So it starts somewhat mildly with a tour of some of the Gulf of Mexico towns hardest hit by the spill with the two filmmakers + the gently smiling executive producer Peter Fonda in tow for celebrity value. I was kind of wondering if The Big Fix was going to pick up steam or if this was it.
And then wham…it hits a vein when it begins showing how BP has been spraying the gulf with the disbursement chemical called Corexit, which hides the oil by turning it into little speckballs instead of big fat gobs and has been creating major health risks for for coastal dwellers and marine life alike.
And then Rebecca herself starts exhibiting disturbing skin-rash symptoms, and we’re told near the end that her longterm health prospects may be uncertain.
Yes, The Big Fix needs a bit of trimming. Lose the simple-Simon, me-and-my-wife-making-a-movie opening with Fonda and kick it into gear a bit faster. But the way this thing trampolines from an evil-BP, hand-wringing lament piece into a tough portrait of inevitable corporate Armageddon…wow! It just goes to town and links it all together and hits you with fact after fact after fact. “Are you getting this?,” it’s basically saying, “or are you going back to sleep now?”
This is serious. The extremely selfish mega-rich are running out the string and the bought-and-paid-for politicians (like Louisiana’s reprehensible Mary Landreau) aren’t going to do a damn thing to turn any of this around. We’re seriously fucked. Or, as Don Cheadle said to Miguel Ferrer in Traffic, “No…you’re FUCKED!”
And it bitchslaps Barack Obama big-time for being an obliging tool of oil-rich corporate America…a sell-out. It delivers the toughest anti-Obama diatribes seen or heard outside the realm of Republican-funded hitjobs, and the Tickells are green lefties, mind. Considering the news and general evidence presented it seems hard for much of a pro-Obama case to be made. He frowned and empathized and basically cruised through the spill. BP, the film reminds, has only paid off on one citizen lawsuit.
The planet is being raped and poisoned and choked and is inexorably winding down. No mild-mannered remedies, the film says. Take to the streets and bring this shit to an end or wait for more crises, but either way it’s not going to be pretty.
There’s too much debt, too much greed, not enough oil and it’s all going to start falling apart — in fits and starts, bit by bit and then more and more, and then eventually…well, look out. A vast and terrible turnover that will devastate and destruct is just around the corner. Ten years, twenty years…forget it. Unless everyone wakes up and starts really screaming.
A journalist friend with some inside knowledge of the character of this Cannes jury says the following: (a) chairman Robert De Niro is not the most knowledgable guy in the room; (b) DeNiro is also a comme ci comme ca type who’s not likely to try to lobby for personal choices or views, (c) Chopsocky director Johnnie To has a somewhat myopic, know-nothing view of other films or filmmakers — he pretty much lives in his own realm; (d) the hippest and most knowledgable jury members are Linn Ullmann (journalist daughter of Liv Ullmann) and director Olivier Assayas (Carlos).
Cannes Film Festival jury (l. to r.): Olivier Assayas, Linn Ullmann, Jude Law, Martina Gusman, Uma Thurman, Robert De Niro, Nansun Shi, Mahamat Saleh Haroun, Johnnie To.
