Cannes Film Festival

It was a shock to realise recently that it was actually ten years ago that I went to the Cannes Film Festival. my former employer was a major sponsor of the festival and the trip was the main prize in a film blogging competition.

It was the first time that I had tried blogging, but once I started I could not stop...

The prize included entry to one of the festival screenings: the event itself was quite amazing, in terms of black ties, long dresses and red carpets, but unfortunately the film we saw was not that good and did not appear in any of the critics' tips for an award.

However there was time t wander around some of the other events and I enjoyed a trip around an exhibition hall in which various films - presumably many of them unmade - were being heavily promoted. Clearly some things never change and in today's paper there was a big article about the current crop of wannabees:

 https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/may/26/tsunambee-clowntergeist-and-haunted-airplane-bad-cannes-films-posters

Julieta

The last few weeks have been pretty busy, so this is an attempt to get up to date before the holiday period.

The clocks went forward at the end of March and experience of past seasons has shown that the audience for our screenings declines rapidly once the evenings get lighter: hence we scheduled one final screening for the last day of March. We had chosen Julieta the first subtitled film we have screened this season, and as we set up we wondered if anyone other than the committee would turn up. In the event there was no need to worry as we had an audience of more than 20...

I was pleased to finally catch up with the film as it had been on my "to see" list since I read the reviews. I've not read any of the stories by Alice Munro on which it is based so cannot comment on the authenticity - or otherwise - of the adaptation, but I very much enjoyed the film and thought that the unresolved ending was brilliant.

Here are my notes:

Julieta

Spain 2016       99 minutes

Director:          Pedro Almodóvar Pedro

Starring:            Emma Suarez, Adrian Ugarte, Daniel Grao, and Inma Cuesta

Awards and Nominations

• Nomination for Palme d’Or at 2016 Cannes Film Festival
• BAFTA Nomination for Best Foreign Language Film
• A further nine wins and 45 nominations

“Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar’s latest, his most moving and entrancing work since 2006’s Volver, is a sumptuous and heartbreaking study of the viral nature of guilt, the mystery of memory and the often unendurable power of love. At times, the emotional intrigue plays more like a Hitchcock thriller than a romantic melodrama, with Alberto Iglesias’s superb Herrmannesque score … heightening the noir elements, darkening the bold splashes of red, blue and white.”

Mark Kermode

Antia abandoned her mother Julieta without warning 12 years ago and has not spoken to her since. As a result of a chance encounter which gives her news of her daughter, Julieta returns to her former home to look for Antia while at the same time reviewing the events that led to their estrangement.

The film is an adaptation of three short stories from the book Runaway by Nobel Prize winning author Alice Munro in which the same character appears at different stages of her life. Almodóvar is a great fan of Munro’s writing and earlier in his career had been interested in adapting the stories as his first English language film. He had discussed making the film in Vancouver, where Munro had based her stories, with Meryl Streep playing the main character at 20, 40 and 60 years old, but abandoned the project  as he was unhappy about filming outside of Spain and was uncomfortable about writing and filming in English. Years later he revisited the script but, at the suggestion of his production team, the film would be made in Spanish and set in Spain. He had originally intended to call the film Silence, the title of one of the short stories, but changed this to avoid confusion with Martin Scorsese’s historical drama Silence which was released in 2016.

 After the socio-political satire of I’m So Excited (2013) Almodóvar explained that Julieta was a return to drama and his “cinema of women”, but that the tone was different to his other feminine dramas such as The Flower of My Secret (1995) All About My Mother (1999) and Volver (2006). Despite the proposed involvement of Meryl Streep in his earlier attempt to film the stories Almodóvar now decided to cast two actresses to play the younger and older versions of the film’s protagonist. Almodóvar has often been inspired by classic Hollywood and European films and the double casting in Julieta is a homage to Bunuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire (1977) in which two actresses play younger and older versions of the same character. The influence of Hitchcock is also visible in the film and its soundtrack has deliberate echoes of the Bernard Herrmann’s classic soundtrack for Vertigo (1958).

The film received its international premiere at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, where it was received warmly but did not win any awards. It subsequently received a BAFTA nomination for Best Foreign Language film (losing out to Son of Saul) but, somewhat controversially, was omitted from the shortlist for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2017 Academy Awards in Hollywood.

Here is the trailer:

 

The Lunchbox

I'm running a bit late with this: we screened The Lunchbox nearly a fortnight ago.

I'd been looking forward to it very much and realy enjoyed it: the Indian scenes were extremely atmospheric but the story itself is timeless: all I hope is that if there is an American remake then they do not give it a great big happy ending.

Here are my notes:

The Lunchbox (Dabba)

India 2014                    104 minutes

Director:                      Ritesh Batra

Starring:                        Irrfan Khan, Nimrat Kaur and Nawazuddin Siddiqui

Awards and Nominations

• Won Golden Rail (Critics Week Viewers Choice) at 2013 Cannes Film Festival, plus nominations for Golden Camera and Critics Week Grand Prize
• Nominated for Best Film at 2013 London Film Festival
• A further 21 wins and 30 nominations

 

“The Lunchbox is perfectly handled and beautifully acted; a quiet storm of banked emotions.”

Xan Brooks, The Guardian

The lunchbox that a young wife has prepared for her husband to bring romance back into their marriage is delivered by mistake to the wrong man, an elderly widower who is facing retirement.  The wife realises her mistake and sends the man a note to which he replies, and then they begin a regular correspondence through this unorthodox means of communication.

Ritesh Batra had started his career by writing and directing a series of short films, but in 2007 began to research the dabbawal, the famous Mumbai lunch delivery men, with the intention of making a documentary about them.  However the stories that they told him about their customers gave him the idea for this film and he started to write the script. 

The film was first screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 2013 where it received a standing ovation and won the Critics Week Viewers Choice Award.  After this Sony Pictures Classics picked up all North American rights for distribution, where it became 2014's highest grossing foreign film.  In India it was released on more than 400 screens and received widespread critical and commercial acclaim (and received many nominations and awards at Asian Film Festivals), but it unexpectedly failed to receive the Indian nomination for the Best Foreign Language Film for the 2014 Oscars.

 

Here's the trailer:

 

 

Cannes Film Festival

Seven years go I attended the Cannes Film Festival for the first time.  My then-employer was a major sponsor and each year there were a few tickets provided for employees.  In most years the tickets were handed out after a ballot of interested parties - so there was little chance of winning - but this year the company decided to set up a blogging competition.  I was one of the winners - and I haven't stopped yet.

The organising team were more keen to tell us about the logistics  for the trip, but they could not answer my first question: what screening were we due to attend?  So many films now regarded as masterpieces received their first screening at Cannes, but sadly what we saw was Les Chansons d'Amour:

I didn't manage to find a single review of it and inevitably it did not feature in any of the awards.

I still read all the reviews from Cannes avidly, and sometimes enjoy a good review of a bad film rather than a rave about a masterpiece.  This year Peter Bradshaw's description of Grace of Monaco featuring performances so wooden that they were a fire risk made me laugh our loud several times:

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/may/14/grace-of-monaco-cannes-review-nicole-kidman
 

The Artist

It's the beginning of the new season for our film club, and each year we try to start the programme with a screening that will pull in the punters.

This year we chose The Artist: it had long been on my "must see" list and I was not in the least disappointed.

Here are my notes:

The Artist

France 2011                 100 minutes

Director:                      Michel Hazanavicius

Starring:                        Berenice Bejo, Jean Dujardin, John Goodman, Malcolm McDowell, Penelope Anne Miller

 Awards and Nominations

• Won five Oscars including Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor (Jean Dujardin), Best Original Score and Best Costume Design.
• Nominated for five more Oscars including Best Supporting Actress (Berenice Bejo) and Best Original Screenplay (Michel Hazanavicius)
• A further 109 wins (including Best Actor for Jean Dujardin at the Cannes Film Festival) and 68 further nominations.

“The Artist is a formally daring and sublimely funny movie about the end of silent movies in 1920s Hollywood.  It is itself silent and in black and white, with inter-titles and a full, continuous orchestral score.  Endlessly inventive, packed with clever sight gags and rich in stunningly achieved detail The Artist is a pastiche and passionate love affair to the silent age; it takes the silent movie seriously as a specific form, rather than as an obsolete technology, and sets out to create a new movie within the genre.”

Peter Bradshaw

In 1927 George Valentin (Jean Dujardin), a silent movie star insists on casting Peppy (Berenice Bejo), an unknown dancer, in his next film.  Peppy becomes a huge star as talking pictures arrive in Holly wood, but George continues to make silent films and his career is ruined.  Eventually Peppy comes to his rescue and persuades the studio to allow her to make a musical with him.

Michel Hazanavicius had wanted to make a silent film for many years as a tribute to his heroes of the silent era, but he was only able to secure funding after the financial success of two spoof spy films that he directed.  He studied silent films to identify techniques to make his screenplay comprehensible without using too many intertitles and also calibrated lighting, lenses and camera moves to get the period look right.  The film was actually shot in colour and then converted to black and white, with a slightly lower frame rate than usual to mirror the slightly speeded up look of 1920s silent films. 

The film received its first screening at the Cannes Film Festival, initially out of competition but then moved to the competition a week before the Festival opened.  Subsequent to its success here the film won many awards around the world and also appeared near the top of many critics’ lists of the best films of 2011.

 Here's the trailer:

 

 

From The Archives...

We screened Volver in our first season, some time before I started this blog.

I have to own up to a massive whole in my film watching history: this was the first film by Almodóvar that I had ever seen, although I'd been aware of his work for many years.  Needless to say it blew me away and I now have my own copy of DVD as well.

this is one of the fist examples of me committing to produce notes on a film I had not seen.  Having just re-read the notes I hope they stand the test of time:

VOLVER/COMING HOME

Spain 2006, 121 minutes

Director:          Pedro Almodóvar

Starring:          Penélope Cruz, Carmen Maura etc

Awards and Nominations:  

Cannes Film Festival: 

Winner:                                   Ensemble Cast (Joint Winners of Best Actress)

                                                Pedro Almodóvar (Best Screenplay)

Nomination:                            Golden Palm

Oscar Nominations:                Penélope Cruz (Best Actress in a Leading Role)

                 
BAFTA Nominations:            Best Film Not in the English Language

                                                Penélope Cruz (Best Actress in a Leading Role)       

Volver, which translates into English as Coming Home or Coming Back, is an intriguing melodrama inspired by the trash TV that is the soundtrack to its characters’ lives.  Penélope Cruz is Raimunda, a hard-working woman with a teenage daughter and a feckless, lazy husband.  With her sister Sole she tends the graves of her parents and visits her ailing aunt Paula, who is in the final stages of dementia.  There is a sudden act of violence which destroys Raimunda’s family life and a secret about her late mother Irene that emerges when Irene returns from beyond the grave to contact her astonished daughters.

Almodóvar is the most successful and internationally known Spanish filmmaker of his generation.  He started making films in 1980, but did not have his first international success until Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown in 1988.  He followed this with Live Flesh (1997), based on a novel by English crime writer Ruth Rendell, All About My Mother (1999), which won an Oscar for Best Foreign film and a Best Director Award for Almodóvar and which has just been staged as a play at the Old Vic in London, and Talk To Her (2002) which won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.  All his films are marked by complex narratives, employ the codes of melodrama and use elements of pop culture and irreverent humour.  He describes Volver as a cross between Mildred Pierce, in which a career woman takes the rap for a murder that her daughter has committed, and Arsenic and Old Lace, which involves a pair of old ladies involved in homicide, and in it he somehow manges to connect the various narrative strands into a lucid pattern of generational conflict and female bonding that remains psychologically convincing.

Penélope Cruz gives a brilliant performance as Raimunda, and in a superb female ensemble cast Carmen Maura, outrageous star of Almodóvar’s earlier films, as Irene also stands out.  Penélope Cruz was deservedly nominated for a Best Actress Award for her performance, but not for the fist time the Cannes Jury decided to go one better: having decided that it was impossible to choose between all the performances, they uniquely awarded the Best Actress Award to the Ensemble Cast.

Here's the trailer:

The White Ribbon

These are my notes for the film we are screening this Sunday - and this is the film I've been most looking forward to seeing all year. From everything I have read I do not expect to be disappointed.

The White Ribbon (Das weisse Band, Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte)

Austria 2009 (143 minutes)
Director: Michael Haneke
Starring: Stefan Arndt, Veit Heiduschka and Michael Katz

Awards and Nominations
Winner of Palme d’Or at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival
Winner of the 2009 Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film
Nominated for 2 Oscars, including Best Foreign Language Film
A further 15 wins and 30 nominations

A series of mysterious incidents occur in a Northern German village in the 12 months preceding the outbreak of the First World War. The pastor, doctor and baron rule over the women, children and peasant farmers of the village, but although they exercise stern discipline over the members of their own families - the pastor forces his children to wear the white ribbon of purity as a punishment for wrongdoings – they are unable to identify the perpetrators.

According to Haneke, the film is about “the origin of every type of terrorism, be it of political or religious nature”, but his film refuses to offer up easy answers or even resolve the events it portrays. The story is narrated by the local teacher, looking back in old age, who announces that these events “could perhaps clarify something that happened in this country”. It is not clear what motive the narrator has for remembering – or misremembering – the events: possibly after surviving two world wars and achieving some social standing in Germany his own hindsight is now questionable.

Michael Handke started his career on German television and came to international notice when The Piano Teacher/La Pianiste (2001) with Isabelle Huppert and Benoit Magimel won the Grand Prize at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, while its stars won the Best Actor and Actress awards. Handke won the same award at Cannes for Hidden/Caché (2005) which was also nominated for the Palme d’Or. The White Ribbon received its first screening at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival where it won both the Palme d’Or and the international film critics’ prize.

The Guardian included The White Ribbon at number five in its list of the best films of the noughties (sic) where Peter Bradshaw described it as:

"...a ghost story without a ghost, a whodunnit without a denouement, a historical parable without a lesson, and for two and a half hours this unforgettably disturbing and mysterious film leads its viewers alongside an abyss of anxiety."