Cannes 2008 - Half Way

In Competition: Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s Le Silence de Lorna 

Here are a few more nuggets to come out of the ongoing Cannes Film Festival

Le Silence de Lorna (Lorna’s Silence). Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Belgium’s two-time Palme d’Or winning brother/director team, return to Cannes with another tale of the urban poor. This time, an Albanian woman plots a marriage of convenience to a junky in order to procure citizenship and then she plans to remarry a Russian mobster for money. Everything is fine until a divorce from the junkie proves more difficulty than she thought. You just know this is going to end badly for someone, don’t you?

Of the brothers, Glenn Kenny says “at the moment they’re making film after film of such unassailable excellence that it’s getting a little predictable.” He’s not complaining however. Though he doesn’t think it will win the festival’s big prize, he finds Lorna to be “every bit as nuanced, surprising, and deeply moving” as the Dardenne’s previous Palme d’Or winner, L’Enfant.

Variety’s Justin Chang finds the Dardenne formula a little too familiar by now and he says “the film doesn’t pack the same cumulative wallop as the brothers’ earlier work,” but he still liked Lorna’s “low-key artistry, immaculate construction and fine performance by relative newcomer Arta Dobroshi.”

In another Directors’ Fortnight screening, Variety’s Robert Koehler took in Lisandro Alonso’s Liverpool, a seemingly simple story of a sailor returning to his home in Tierra del Fuego where his past catches up to him. Already a fan of Alonso’s previous films, Koehler says “Brilliance of the overall conception and execution will immediately hit some viewers, while others may need to mull things over. On balance, Liverpool’s accomplishment looks to win over new converts to a director who’s enjoyed a passionate cult following but nothing like mainstream acceptance.”

The special out of competition screening of Terence Davies’ first film since 2000’s House of Mirth, the documentary Of Time and the City, is getting plenty of positive buzz. For Screen Daily, Howard Feinstein calls Davies’ ode to Liverpool “an outstanding work about the hometown he may have left behind but has clearly not ceased to haunt him.” He concludes that the film “is honest and open, censoring nothing in a sincere if relentless quest for truth.”

Time Out London’s Geoff Andrew proclaims it “the one truly great movie to emerge so far.” High praise indeed. He goes on to say “Watching the film, you realise that Britain has no other filmmaker to match Davies in terms of his purely cinematic sensibility. Fine as our other far-from-inconsiderable big names are, it’s hard to imagine any of them creating sheer filmic poetry as may be found here.”

Sunday saw another special screening, this time a tweaked and rescored version of Wong Kar-wai’s reinvention of the wuxia genre Ashes of Time, previously only seen in this country on poorly transferred DVDs. Appropriately titled Ashes of Time Redux, the film stars a bevy of Hong Kong favorites including the late Leslie Cheung, Tony Leung, Brigitte Lin and Maggie Cheung, and of course photography from the great Christopher Doyle. According to The Hollywood Reporter’s Peter Brunette, “The film is still a formal wonder, as it was 15 years ago, full of Wong’s signature step-printing technique, his off-kilter shooting angles and a flamboyant visual style that often produces something more like an abstract expressionist painting than a movie.”

Here’s hoping this one plays in theaters before it hits DVD.

Filed under: Film Festivals

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