Cannes 2008 - Odds and Sods

Cannes is winding down and many journalists have already bolted from what is being called a lackluster festival in some quarters. I couldn’t let a whole day go by with a single two-sentence post, so here’s a collection of Cannes odds and ends I’ve overlooked in the past few days. All of these films played in competition.

After getting booed at last year’s Cannes with We Own The Night, director James Gray and star Joaquin Phoenix returned with Two Lovers - and walked away with mixed reviews. Phoenix plays a young man, medicated for a bipolar condition, living back at home after a busted engagement, who is torn between two very different women: Sensible Vinessa Shaw and less sensible but more exciting Gwyneth Paltrow. We should all have such problems. Sing it with me now: “Torn between two lovers, feelin’ like a fool…”

Ironically, though Shaw plays the girl-next-door type, Paltrow is literally the girl next door.

Variety’s Todd McCarthy liked the “sure handed use of particular New York locations, both in Brooklyn and Manhattan, that serve the story in resonant ways” and he calls the film “an involving, ultimately touching romantic drama” that is “old-fashioned in good ways that have to do with solid storytelling, craftsmanship and emotional acuity.”

Jeff Wells found it “attractively composed, persuasively acted but slightly too earnest and on-the-nose.” Though he found Vinessa Shaw miscast, there’s no word on whether he hit up James Gray for nude photos of her. He did say mentions of the incident would be cause for a lifetime ban from Hollywood Elsewhere. Tempting. (That was an easy shot, I know, but I learned about low hanging fruit from the best.)

Screen Daily’s Allan Hunter thought Phoenix was the best thing about Lovers, but wonders why Cannes keeps inviting Gray back (this is his third trip in a row). He says it’s “well-crafted and ably acted but never especially moving and winds up feeling like something from the classier end of the American TV movie spectrum.” I didn’t know there was a classier end of the American TV movie spectrum. Maybe it only plays on the BBC…

SpoutBlog’s Karina Longworth seemed a little embarrassed about kinda sorta liking it saying that “even as certain elements are effectively thrilling in their depiction of tortured passion, it’s all put to the service of a narrative that is occasionally offensive in its total lack of surprise.” Yet, after an hour she “became totally sucked in” and found that “in its final third, Two Lovers becomes an extremely strong parable about the madness of romantic love, and maybe even its impossibility.”

Good news about Atom Egoyan’s Adoration is more difficult to find. It tells the story of a high school student who hears the story of a pregnant woman who is arrested with a bomb in her luggage. He writes a story imagining himself as the woman’s child, now grown up and then he presents the story as fact.

 Glenn Kenny is only able to muster up a lowly paragraph about it wherein he describes finding at the film’s heart “a simpering sanctimony that could well bring out the neo-con you never knew you had in you.”

Variety’s Justin Chang finds an “Egoyanesque miasma of elegantly fractured chronology and provocative ideas” but says “this ambitious think-piece ultimately smothers its good intentions in didactic revelations, earnest pleading and incessant violin music.” I often find reviews that fall back on the word “didactic” to be themselves didactic, incessant violin music or not.

Meanwhile, Lucrecia Martel returns to Cannes with her first film since her 2004 festival hit The Holy Girl. The Headless Woman is a minimalist psychological thriller about a woman’s guilt after hitting someone or something with her car late one night.

J. Hoberman of The Village Voice bravely awards it “The Cri de Coeur for the Best Film in Competition Least Likely to Win a Prize.” Its real life reward for its troubles? “walk-outs, boos, and disastrous reviews.”

IndieWIRE’s Anthony Kaufman just thinks the critics were tired and cranky. He found it “moody and mysterious.”

Philippe Garrel’s romantic drama with a supernatural twist, Frontier Dawn, was equally divisive. Variety’s Leslie Felperin dismissed the story of a Parisian photographer who enters into an affair with a recently married model “a risible slice of pretentious hokum,” but Karina Longworth sees some on-paper similarities to Gray’s Two Lovers. She says it’s a “strange, swoony, genre-bending challenge” and a “capital-A work of Art.” And she means that in a good way.

My money is on Longworth.

Next up is Paolo Sorrentino’s political drama Il Divo which tells the story of seven-time Italian prime minister and senator for life Giulio Andreotti. Variety’s James Weissberg calls it “an intensely political film so wildly inventive and witty that it will become a touchstone for years to come.”

Finally, and sadly, Cinematical’s James Rocchi stiff-arms Wim Wenders’ promising Palermo Shooting. Finding it “beautifully shot” but “pretty much inert,” Rocchi says “there are plenty of funny moments in Palermo Shooting; it’s too bad they weren’t intended to be funny.” He concludes “Palermo Shooting is hardly the worst film I’ve ever seen at Cannes — Southland Tales still takes the Palme d’Junk in my book — but it’s still a little sad to see a major filmmaker make such a series of major mistakes in the name of a fairly minor film.”

Filed under: Film Festivals

Related Posts: - ‘Blindness’ to Open Cannes? - Cannes 2008 - Jour Deux - Cannes 2008 - Che Sera Sera - Wenders: From Düsseldorf to Tokyo via Palermo and Cannes - LiC Rides the Quentin-Go-Round