Je t'aime... moi non plus: Artistes et critiques (2004)

User Rating:

5.3/10   

Director:

Maria de Medeiros

Writer:

Maria de Medeiros (writer)

Release Date:

9 May 2007 (France)

Genre:

Documentary

Plot:

Documentary about the love-hate relationship between filmmakers and film critics with interviews made at Cannes Film Festival. |

Cast

Michel Ciment	...	Himself
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Hany Abu-Assad	...	Himself
Woody Allen	...	Himself
Pedro Almodóvar	...	Himself
Vicente Aranda	...	Himself
Bruno Barde	...	Himself
Xavier Beauvois	...	Himself
Henri Behar	...	Himself (as Henri Béhar)
Samuel Blumenfeld	...	Himself
Carlos Boyero	...	Himself
David Cronenberg	...	Himself
Tonino De Bernardi	...	Himself
Manoel de Oliveira	...	Himself
Kenneth Duran	...	Himself
Atom Egoyan	...	Himself
Rubens Ewald Filho	...	Himself
Jean-Michel Frodon	...	Himself
Enrique Gabriel	...	Himself
Diego Galán	...	Himself
Amos Gitai	...	Himself (as Amos Gitaï)
Maria Guerra	...	Herself
Danièle Heymann	...	Herself
Nelson Hoineff	...	Himself
Christophe Honoré	...	Himself
Mathilde Incerti	...	Herself
Serge Kaganski	...	Himself
Lloyd Kaufman	...	Himself
Aki Kaurismäki	...	Himself
Gérard Lefort	...	Himself
Michèle Levieux	...	Herself
Bénédicte Liénard	...	Herself
Ken Loach	...	Himself
Todd McCarthy	...	Himself
Elvis Mitchell	...	Himself
Diego Muñoz	...	Himself
Yokishi Nakagawa	...	Himself
Lisa Nesselson	...	Herself
Dominique Païni	...	Himself
Andrei Plakhov	...	Himself
Carlos Reygadas	...	Himself
Javier Rioyo	...	Himself
Gonzalo Suárez	...	Himself
Elia Suleiman	...	Himself
Caetano Veloso	...	Himself
Alexander Walker	...	Himself
Wim Wenders	...	Himself

Runtime:

France:82 min

Country:

France

Language:

English | Italian | Portuguese | Spanish | French

Color:

Color

Filming Locations:

Cannes Film Festival, Cannes, Alpes-Maritimes, France

Company:

Onoma

I love you, I love you not: the ambiguous love-hate relationship between filmmakers and film critics

Portuguese actress/director Maria de Medeiros takes her camera around the Cannes Film Festival to interview film critics and filmmakers about their symbiotic, tempestuous, ambiguous love-hate relationship, which may range from sincere admiration to open adulation, poisonous remarks, physical assaults, murder threats and fascist over-reactions (one L.A. Times critic tells us how James Cameron asked for his head because of a "negative" review of "Titanic").

This documentary helps us witness the ravenous "media circus" of Cannes, with embarrassing scenes like watching 96-year-old Portuguese filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira having to pose with an ID card for photographers as if he was being identified at a police station. Or watching a magazine photographer bluntly "direct" Canadian director Atom Egoyan into making vamp poises. The best moments come from Almodóvar's delightful sense of humor ("if a kid tells his parents he wants to be a film critic when he grows up, take him to a psychiatrist!") while also revealing his resentment for always getting better reviews abroad than in his native Spain. There's a soul-bearing testimony from Wim Wenders ("when we make films, we risk everything: being ridiculed, exposed, rejected"); and there's breathing time in Oliveira's incredible patience, lucidity, modesty and fair-play.

The critics themselves range from witty to vain to overworked to superficial to repugnant. French critics come off best (if you don't count a couple of caricatures) -- no wonder, as France is probably the only country where film criticism is still regarded as a serious, intellectual, quasi-literary activity, and where Bazin, Truffaut, Godard and the others at the Cahiers in the 1950s set the standard of what serious film criticism could be all about.

Though the film is technically precarious (to put it nicely), the theme is a real curio for film lovers. The interviews deal not only with cinema and the "art" of critique, but also compares film criticism in different cultures (one American critic complains that in the US films are primarily expected to be entertaining, whereas in France they are -- or used to be -- expected to be works of art). We also witness the loneliness of the critic's profession, their fight for remaining fresh when facing the loads of films they have to review (especially in festival marathons) and the overall frustration caused by the media's very heavy pressure for nutshell, "thumbs up or down" reviews.

Near the end of "Je t'aime...", Brazilian songwriter/singer and occasional filmmaker Caetano Veloso (whose songs are used ad nauseam on the soundtrack) gives spicy advice: "The artists, the media and the public will always need critics; but artists must always have the right and the will to criticize critics as well". The charm of Maria de Medeiros' documentary lies in the extremely varied (albeit superficial) range of opinions and experiences; film buffs -- and film critics, of course -- should find it interesting, others will probably be bored.