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16 articles
Cannes 2013. Running the Gauntlet: An Interview with Takashi Miike
8 hours ago
Shield Of Straw (Takashi Miike, Japan)
Competition
Above: Takashi Miike. Photograph by Quentin Carbonell
Takashi Miike's Shield of Straw couldn't have arrived any sooner at the festival or in anymore pleasing a shape: that of a pitch-perfect thriller, interrupting the monotony of the lackluster Cannes competition at the festival's halfway point. Shield of Straw may be one of his sleekest, most generously-budgeted films, but none of Miike's eccentric qualities are compromised in the creation of what is an expertly crafted work of suspense that continually moves its drama and action forward. Miike carefully sets up the film's conceit in its opening few minutes so that he can have free reign the rest of the way. An enormously wealthy old man whose granddaughter was brutally murdered by a pedophile publicly puts a bounty on her killer's head. The reward is 100 billion yen, making every citizen in the city a potential assassin. »
- Adam Cook
Cannes 2013. The Gloaming: Claire Denis' "Bastards"
23 hours ago
Bastards [Les Salauds] (Claire Denis, France)
Un Certain Regard
Bastards [Les salauds] begins, like Garrel's A Burning Hot Summer, at night, with a suicide. An explanation for the gesture will never come, although, through the film's near imperceptible ellipses, it comes close. A film of profoundly somber gloam, of loneliness and anger and even stifled madness, of complicity and solitude, its sadness is almost absolute.
A torrid string connects a cast predominantly made up from Claire Denis' family of actors: Vincent Lindon, Michel Subor, Alex Descas, Grégoire Colin. There are so many of them that they stand out as coming from somewhere before, some shared place, and their figures seem at once human and also something more so, grander, archetypal. (Lola Créton creates a similar effect in a small role with such a brief but so recognizable presence that it both reaches outside the story, as well as expanding something within.) The string »
- Daniel Kasman
Cannes 2013. Dialogues: James Gray's "The Immigrant"
24 May 2013 4:34 AM, PDT
The Immigrant (James Gray, USA)
Official Competition
Adam Cook: With The Immigrant, James Gray takes a considerable turn from his previous work. His filmography has been dominated by male characters, intricate family relations, and operatic melodrama. Here we have a female protagonist alone in America (Marion Cotillard), separated from her family, with a completely different approach to the dramatic trajectory of the film. The result gives one pause: Gray is moving towards something new. More than anything else, it's exciting to try and articulate just what that something new is.
Daniel Kasman: The world has the same feeling—hushed, intimate, burnished by time and histories of emotion—but you are right, the focus is subtly very different, and it changes nearly everything. For one, Joaquin Phoenix who was so integral to Gray's previous three films that the mise en scène could not be separated from his body and his intensity, »
- Notebook
Cannes 2013. The Past, Present Tense: Claude Lanzmann's "The Last of the Unjust"
23 May 2013 10:11 PM, PDT
The Last Of The Unjust (Claude Lanzmann, France/Austria)
Out Of Competition
Above: Lanzmann and Murmelstein in Rome, 1975.
Claude Lanzmann has brought to Cannes a new film whose heart is the interview footage shot for the Shoah project of Austrian Benjamin Murmelstein, the so-called last (and as of the 1975, the only surviving) of the Jewish Elders, those nominally in charge of the Nazis' Jewish ghettos. Filming Murmelstein in exile in Rome in 1975, Lanzmann pulls from the man some consider a Nazi collaborator and some consider a hero long and anecdotal recollections of his experiences working with Eichmann, the various logistical organizational concerns of his pre-war emigration efforts for Jews in Vienna, and his wartime years first as an administrator in the Czechoslovakian “model ghetto” of Theresienstadt and later as its Jewish leader, or "Elder of the Jews."
This old interview is intercut, in a variation on Shoah's structure, with »
- Daniel Kasman
Cannes 2013. Dialogues: Steven Soderbergh's "Behind the Candelabra"
23 May 2013 3:44 PM, PDT
Behind The Candelabra (Steven Soderbergh, USA)
Competition
The third in our series of Cannes dialogues between Adam Cook and Daniel Kasman is on Steven Soderbergh's Behind the Candelabra, which screened in Competition.
Daniel Kasman: The political body: Soderbergh's supposedly final film continues his run of digital features focuses on the existence and commerce of, as well as the impact on, the body in contemporary society. In Behind the Candelabra, it is in Liberace's (Michael Douglas) precise control of his public and private image in dress and look, and in the figure of Scott (Matt Damon), who becomes his lover, then boyfriend, then essentially his husband in an evolving relationship that starts nearly as prostitution and later involves plastic surgery, drugs for bodily upkeep, and, in general for both men, concerns the impact of their aging bodies on their relationship and luxury lifestyle. The bodies of this public figure (publically straight, »
- Notebook
Cannes 2013. Hollow Cinema: Nicolas Winding Refn's "Only God Forgives"
23 May 2013 10:34 AM, PDT
The pop pleasure and genre subversion of Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive was enough to bewitch the majority of its viewers, but beneath its surface sensations were some fundamental filmmaking issues. In his new film, which also stars Ryan Gosling in vapid-stare mode, everything that covered up the bullshit is gone, leaving a hollow core of Refn’s cinema exposed. With minimal dialogue, Refn relies on the strength of his visual prowess and the presence of his actors. However, both of those "qualities" are entirely lacking: Refn has an inability to construct coherent space, and his caricatural figures stare and curse and fight without resonating as anything beyond mannequins (and I don't mean this in an interesting way). Taking place almost entirely in seedy Thai clubs and dark street exteriors, Refn tries to paste an Oedipal allegory onto a Bangkok underworld aesthetic onto an existential mood piece. Gosling's brother is »
- Adam Cook
Cannes 2013. "Did you eat my daughter?": Jim Mickle's "We Are What We Are"
23 May 2013 8:54 AM, PDT
We Are What We Are (Jim Mickle, USA)
Quinzaine Des RÉALISATEURS
Critics' praise went to Jim Mickle's film after its premiere at Sundance for the cleverness and the—yes—delicate hand of his remake of Mexican Jorge Michel Grau's urban middle-class cannibal horror Somos lo que hay. Quinzaine has therefore an excellent point here "following up" its 2010 programming.
Praise is totally deserved considering the remarkable job done in transposing the horrific Mexican family story in the context of a crisis- and climate- stricken Catskills community, and in reversing the story's parental figure. So here is Mickle's dark family, the Parkers: after the death of the mother, the grieving father remains alone with his two daughters and younger son. The fatum hanging over the girls is to take on the family tradition and perform the ritual that allows the whole family to feed.
Even more maybe than the cannibal »
- Marie-Pierre Duhamel
Cannes 2013. Borderland Comedy: Serge Bozon's "Tip Top"
22 May 2013 10:13 PM, PDT
Tip Top (Serge Bozon, France)
Quinzaine Des RÉALISATEURS
After a wait of 6 years, Serge Bozon has followed up his expansive and beautiful La France with a far more modestly scaled what's-it: Tip Top, a pseudo-detective film at once burlesque and jabbing, adapted from one of a series of novels by Welsh author Bill James. It overlaps not just genres (crime, comedy) but production "genres" or types; in the sense that a minimalist Rotterdam arthouse movie is a "festival film," Tip Top feels both a distinctly auteurist film from Bozon, and a strange lower-middle range product of Euro-financing (France, Luxembourg, Belgium) involving a certain specific combination of border-crossing actors, regional locations, and a deadpan, glammed up smalltown modesty. It makes for variegated film texture combining the poetic and the mundane, complicated considerably by an unabashedly ethno-political context.
The crime investigated by internal affairs detectives Isabelle Huppert and Sandrine Kiberlain, that of »
- Daniel Kasman
Cannes 2013. Dialogues: Johnnie To's "Blind Detective"
22 May 2013 4:33 PM, PDT
Blind Detective (Johnnie To, Hong Kong)
Midnight Projections
The second in our series of Cannes dialogues between Adam Cook and Daniel Kasman is on Johnnie To's Blind Detective, which screened out of competition as a Midnight Projection.
Adam Cook: Blind Detective stands out among Johnnie To’s recent work as one of his most outlandish and over-the-top films. In some ways, it feels like it meets halfway between his earlier comedies, made before he became such a rigorous craftsmen, and his present formalism. That being said, it retains a certain looseness and spontaneity that distinguishes it from just about anything he's made. How do you define this film within his oeuvre?
Daniel Kasman: I've seen a lot of To but not in any way a majority, and have especially large gaps in his earlier work (80s thru early 90s) and in a certain amount of comedies which certainly »
- Notebook
The Noteworthy: R.I.P. Alexey Balabanov (1959-2013), Miyazaki's "The Wind is Rising", Hoberman on Jacobs
22 May 2013 12:25 PM, PDT
News.
The highly celebrated Russian director Alexey Balabanov has passed away at the age of 54. James Gray–whose newest film The Immigrant premieres in Cannes this Friday–has announced his next project: a sci-fi film produced by Rt Features. Variety has the details. Laurent Cantet, director of The Class, also has a new project: "Vuelta a Itaca is a Cuban set drama about Amadeo, who returns to the Havana after a 16-year exile. Over one night, he and his childhood friends retrace their lives." via Dark Horizons. At Cannes this weekend, Claude Lanzmann presented The Last of the Unjust, a companion piece to Shoah that focuses on one man whose interviews were left out of that masterwork. Check out this wonderful piece on Lanzmann and the new film in The Guardian. Above: Concept art and a frame from Hayao Miyazaki's new film, Kaze Tachinu (The Wind is Rising). Further details, »
- Notebook
Cannes 2013. A Pinoy Ballad: Anthony Chen's "Ilo Ilo"
22 May 2013 3:49 AM, PDT
Ilo Ilo (Anthony Chen, Singapore)
Quinzaine Des RÉALISATEURS
Set in Singapore on the verge of the Asian crisis of 1997, Anthony Chen's first feature starts with a blurred shot: the back of a young boy doing something noisy and strange in front of a window. It works as a metaphor of what the film will tell: blurred reality, blurred futures, blurred conscience of the world in a young boy's mind before affection will make him grow up.
In young Jiale's middle-class family, Dad is a not too successful sales executive and Mom is a public officer, and she's expecting her second child. This is why she insists on hiring a maid. And since it is how the market goes, the maid will be Filipino. Teresa arrives in the family's small flat: not talkative, a good Catholic, keeping much to herself but frequently listening to music from home on her Walkman. »
- Marie-Pierre Duhamel
Cannes 2013. Fragile History: Rithy Panh's "The Missing Picture"
21 May 2013 10:06 PM, PDT
The Missing Picture (Rithy Panh, Cambodia/France)
Un Certain Regard
The festival's second pointedly inventive autobiography has none of the dark whimsy of the Jodorowsky, trading it instead for a grave retelling of Rithy Panh's childhood in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. A recreation of the era and Panh's personal anecdotes is accomplished through the creation of countless clay figures—carved and painted, we see, by hand, out of “earth and water”—staged in static scenes through which the camera moves and the director cuts. They fill in a gap, the missing image of the title: a missing photographic record of the human experience of the horror and oppression behind the government's official ideology. (An image not missing: the official image, the propaganda image, that of Cambodian films of the time.) Panh's narration with moving straightforwardness segues between historical recount, deeply personal recollections, and broader criticism, illustrated by the »
- Daniel Kasman
Cannes 2013. Gods and Men: A Conversation with Alain Guiraudie
21 May 2013 4:34 AM, PDT
Alain Guiraudie's Stranger by the Lake, which played in the Un Certain Regard section at the 66th Cannes Film Festival and which Mubi's Adam Cook has written about here, remains one of the early stand-out titles. Set in and around a southern French gay cruising spot that's situated on the banks of a lake, the film charts the romantic intrigues of a disparate group of men whose rampant lust and desire transport them to strange and dangerous places. Recalling Jarman and Fassbinder as much as more classical French dramatists such as Éric Rohmer, this is Guiraudie's sixth feature film.
David Jenkins: What were the literary and cinematic inspirations for Stranger by the Lake?
Alain Guiraudie: I'm not sure I had any direct cinematic influences, but before I wrote it I re-read Jean Genet's Querelle and also re-watched the film by Fassbinder. It was more to make »
- David Jenkins
Cannes 2013. Passing Shots: Satyajit Ray, Joel & Ethan Coen, Alex van Warmerdam
20 May 2013 11:11 PM, PDT
Charulata (Satyajit Ray, India)
Cannes Classics
There are few things more valuable at a film festival than catching a retrospective screening that puts it in perspective, resets your cinephilic enthusiasm, and reminds you what movies can be. Satyajit Ray’s Charulata (1964) served just that purpose as Cannes neared its halfway mark. Beginning with a beautiful sequence of pure cinema, for the first time I saw the link between Ray and Martin Scorsese (who holds the Indian filmmaker in the highest regard). Alone in a room in her home, the title character wanders to a window with her binoculars, opens the shutters and watches people outside. To track them, she moves from window to window, opening each shutter and observing their movement. It's hard not to think of the young Henry Hill looking out his window in Goodfellas, and even more recently, Hugo peering from behind the clock in the train station, »
- Adam Cook
Cannes 2013. Night Snack: Johnnie To's "Blind Detective"
20 May 2013 6:40 AM, PDT
Blind Detective (Johnnie To, Hong Kong)
Out Of Competition
After the Peckinpah-ian hard-boiled detectives of Drug War and the mist and cold of Northern China, back to another fantasy detective, or rather ex-detective (Andy Lau) paired with a devoted and sentimental woman cop (Sammy Cheng). Is Johnnie To building a personal collection of freak ex-cops? The previous one was "mad" (Mad Detective [San Tam], 2007), this one is blind, yet the two characters share the same capacity to mentally witness and re-enact the circumstances of the murder cases they inquire upon. And the same "theory": if you want to understand how "it" really happened, live it. Like scriptwriters who would examine one option after another of a scenario, and then play out the scenes to test them. Yet this time, To and his Milky Way gang let themselves go wilder in the blending of thriller, action, comedy (if not romcom), burlesque and over the top fantasy. »
- Marie-Pierre Duhamel
Cannes 2013. Passing Shots: Farhadi, Kore-Eda, Kashyap, Jodorowsky
19 May 2013 5:22 PM, PDT
The Past (Asghar Farhadi, France)
Competition
I had forgotten what had rubbed me the wrong way about Farhadi's A Separation, but it didn't take The Past more than five minutes before a single cut jolted my memory of the writer-director's schematic, super-literal style of filming his scripts. For such an actor-based approach—the last three films of Farhadi's being heated, nearly claustrophobic personal encounters in small spaces—The Past's lack of a sense of the cinematic freedom one can get from forming a film around the actors (rather than the other way around) is disheartening. The deliberateness of every gesture and prop, every feeling, thought and subtext spoken out loud seems a kind of humanist-realism version of Haneke's relentlessly obvious cinema. It is minus Haneke's chiding, of course, but is certainly didactic, cloaked in the “unfolding” of “drama” (in the Classical Hollywood sense of invisible form, rather than Haneke's clinical-analytic »
- Daniel Kasman
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