Cannes 2009 – Jours trois et quatre: Campion, Lee and Park

Abbie Cornish in Jane Campion’s Bright Star

Moving right along with LiC’s survey of what’s going on in Cannes. Check out Day 1 and Day 2 here or read on for Day 3 and Day 4.

Friday, May 15

Bright Star. UK/Australia
Director: Jane Campion; starring Abbie Cornish, Ben Whishaw, Paul Schneider and Kerry Fox.
In Competition

With her first feature since In the Cut in 2003, 1990s arthouse favorite Jane Campion (The Piano) returns to Cannes with this story of poet John Keats told from the perspective of his one-time love Fanny Brawne. The film is named for an 1819 sonnet Keats is believed to have written soon after his engagement to Brawne.

Screen Daily’s Allan Hunter says Bright Star unfolds “with a classical poise, exquisite craftsmanship and a piercing tenderness. It is Campion’s most fully realised, satisfying achievement in a long while.” Continuing, he says: “Taking her lead from the sensuality of Keats’ verses, Campion has created a film that revels in the beauty of the English countryside. Gorgeous camerawork from Greig Fraser sees the changing seasons reflected in glowing daffodil fields, meadows strewn with bluebells and snow-dusted winter woods. The central love affair is expressed through modest caresses, clasped hands and lingering glances rather than anything more explicit. It is a dreamy film to make the viewer swoon.”

Admitting he probably sounds “horribly simplistic,” indieWIRE’s Eric Kohn laments the lack of sex in the film that Hunter mentions. “…Jane Campion’s Bright Star desperately needs a sex scene. The movie puts such prominent focus on the romantic attraction shared by two characters-early nineteenth century poet John Keats (Ben Whishaw) and his neighbor, budding fashion designer Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish)-and yet the full culmination of their desire remains solely implied. As a result, Bright Star not only takes place in English during the 1800’s; it seems like a product of that very era.”

In Variety, lead critic Todd McCarthy zeroes in on a dressed down Abbie Cornish as Fanny. “The majority of her performance’s success rests in her eyes, which are remarked upon by Brown for their amber hue and which, one senses, see and process so much. All of Campion’s films center upon strong, complicated women, and Cornish’s Fanny takes her place among the most memorable of them.” Unforunately, McCarthy doesn’t find as much to like in the male half of the film. “What’s missing is an equally compelling sense of Keats’ singular attributes. Everything one reads about the poet emphasizes his extreme sensitivity to nature and his almost swooning reaction to sensory stimuli. While these qualities are embedded in the filmmaking here, most particularly in the work of production and costume designer Janet Patterson and cinematographer Greig Fraser (who previously shot the shorts The Water Diary and The Lady Bug for Campion), they are not so evident in the writing of Keats’ character or in the performance of Whishaw, which is appealing but not nearly as trenchant as that of his costar.”

Meanwhile, writing for GQ’s online component Men.Style.com, Tom Carson isn’t buying the film at all. He doesn’t see a story in this romance where “next to nothing of any consequence seems to have actually happened between [Keats and Brawne] before his illness packed him off to Italy to die.” Besides the cinematography by Greig Fraser, the sole bright spot for Carson is when Ben Wishaw as Keats coughs up blood for the first time. Why? He explains: “Coming along just when you’ve almost given up hope that this stopped clock of a movie will ever end, it’s a welcome reminder that eventually the credits will roll and life-yours, not his-will go on.”

However, over at The Guardian UK, Peter Bradshaw is much more enthralled. He suggests “Campion has put herself in line for her second Palme d’Or…[She] brings to this story an unfashionable, unapologetic reverence for romance and romantic love, and she responds to Keats’s life and work with intelligence and grace. Any movie about a romantic poet has to be careful how glowingly it depicts the great outdoors but this film looks unselfconsciously beautiful, and Campion and her cinematographer Greig Fraser never harangue the audience with their images. Poets, like musicians, need silence above all, and much of the film is played out in a deeply quiet calm.”

Thirst (Bak Jwi). South Korea/USA
Director: Park Chan-wook; starring Song Kang-ho, Kim Ok-vin, Kim Hae-suk and Shin Ha-gyun.
In Competition

Already a box office hit in Korea before turning up at Cannes, Thirst has Park Chan-wook (Oldboy, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance) putting his spin on the vampire genre with this story of a priest-by-day and vampire-by-night.

The Hollywood Repoter’s Maggie Lee seems to like it though she acknowledges her establishment colleagues my have a hard time warming up to it. “Park takes his famed eroticization of violence, pain and cruelty to new, feverish heights, and garnishes it with deliciously sadistic gallows humor,” she says. “Those who thrive on gore, twisted sexuality and brutish handling of women can drink their fill from this film. More serious arthouse critics, however, may balk at the script’s soapy excesses, as well as the tonal discordance of yoking the horror-fantasy genre to a love tragedy with classical, literary trappings.”

Based on Derek Elley’s reaction in Variety, she might be right. He professes to like Park’s previous work but he calls Thirst “an overlong stygian comedy that badly needs a transfusion of genuine inspiration.” He continues, “The two-hour-plus pic is slow to warm up and largely goes around in circles thereafter, with repetitive (and often plain goofy) jokes about hemoglobin lust and bone-crunching, sanguinary violence.”

Look on the bright side Derek. You got to dust off your thesaurus and use the words “stygian” and “sanguinary” in the same paragraph.

In Screen Daily, Darcy Paquet calls it a “visually arresting vampire movie…certain to create a stir.” With Park working in “a more lyrical mode than before,” she says “this complex and supremely inventive work sees the filmmaker back in top form.”

However, noting that it runs for over two hours, AV Club’s Mike D’Angelo laments that Thirst “has no sense of rhythm or flow whatsoever. From the moment we first meet our tragic hero, a priest turned bloodsucker played by Song Kang-ho…Thirst moves like it’s just remembered the parking meter is about to expire ten blocks away and can’t find anything but flip-flops to wear. New settings and characters are introduced so willy-nilly, and consecutive scenes have so little formal or tonal consistency, that you’re generally floundering even as you’re gasping.”

Yuki & Nina. France/Japan
Directors: Nobuhiro Suwa and Hippolyte Girardot; starring Noe Sampy, Arielle Moutel, Tsuyu, Hippolyte Girardot and Marilyne Canto.
Directors’ Fortnight

French actor Hippolyte Girardot (Manon of the Spring, Flight of the Red Balloon) makes his directorial debut alongside Japanese director Nobuhiro Suwa (2/Duo) in this story of a little girl who runs away with her best friend rather than move with her mother back to Japan following her parents’ divorce.

Variety’s Alissa Simon says the film is “marked by Suwa’s signature long takes and improvised perfs,” but that it offers “very little in the way of emotional engagement.” She goes on to say: “Like the undernourished script, the pic’s symbolism seems stale and dry.”

Though he says the film is “neither cute enough to charm the tots nor perceptive enough to catch their parents’ fancy,” Screen Daily’s Dan Fainaru nevertheless likes the little girl, saying the “carefully shot and superbly framed” story “is completely carried by Noe Sampy’s Yuki, simple, unpretentious, but profoundly sincere.”

Police, Adjective (Politist, Adjectiv). Romania
Director: Corneliu Porumboiu; starring Dragos Bucur and Radu Costin.
Un Certain Regard

12:08, East of Bucharest director Corneliu Porumboiu returns with this story of a cop who begins having doubts about his assignment trailing a suspected 16-year-old pot dealer.

In Variety, Jay Weisberg says “Porumboiu is one of the few helmers working today who so completely understands both the power of language and the power of visuals. He brings this intelligence to bear on the corrupting influence of a system that exerted control for generations, arguing that such systems die very hard deaths.”

Screen Daily’s Dan Fainaru agrees, saying “The clever simplicity of the visual language here draws the viewer’s imagination into play; there is no distracting music; the camera work never exceeds a horizontal pan; the bare-bones dialogue wastes no words. It all looks remarkably naïve and innocent, but most certainly isn’t. Dragos Bucur’s winning soulful sincerity perfectly suits the lead part, providing a natural patsy for the unscrupulous composition of Ivanov in the final sequence.”

Saturday, May 16

Taking Woodstock. USA
Director: Ang Lee; starring: Demetri Martin, Eugene Levy, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Imelda Staunton, Emile Hirsch, Liev Schreiber, Paul Dano and Mamie Gummer
In Competition

I generally love Ang Lee and this adaptation of the memoir about a gay Catskills motel manager who became wrapped up in a defining moment of an entire generation was on LiC’s list of 20 to Watch for 2009, but it appears to have opened to mixed reviews.

Calling it “gentle, genial and about as memorable as a mild reefer high,” Variety’s Todd McCarthy says “Taking Woodstock takes a back-door approach to revisit the landmark musical weekend through the antics and efforts of some of the people who made it happen.” The result is that, “despite being temporally defined by the run-up to the fest and the weekend itself, the pic has a formless, unstructured feel, as its attention jumps from incident to incident in almost random fashion. Some distantly heard music serves notice that Woodstock itself has begun, but the stage is only ever glimpsed from atop a faraway hill. The musical performances are clearly not the subject of the film, but there’s no denying that their absence makes Taking Woodstock feel oddly incomplete; the table is set, but the meal never gets served.”

Screen Daily’s Allan Hunter says “The underlying themes of family tensions and personal epiphanies are quintessential Ang Lee territory but this is a slender anecdote compared to the award-winning reach of more recent Lee ventures like Brokeback Mountain (2005) or Lust, Caution (2007).” He finds it “Enjoyable in places and merely humdrum in others” while concluding that “Taking Woodstock ultimately feels like a minor Ang Lee digression in between more memorable works.”

Eric Kohn of indieWIRE says: “Considering the iconic event at its center, the most surprising aspect of Taking Woodstock lies with the decision to make it into a rather flat comedy. Even with the ever-versatile Ang Lee behind the camera, this messy historical fiction plays like a two hour Saturday Night Live sketch, and not a very good one, either.” He adds, “Lee’s direction never does much to enliven the proceedings…A split screen device blatantly ripped from the classic Woodstock documentary just distracts from the action, and an acid sequence falls low in the pantheon of cinematic acid trips. Occasional archival footage pops up in expository sequences, which does little except provide a reminder that the real thing contained many more entertaining qualities than this undercooked project. Worst of all, Taking Woodstock remains on the sidelines of event, with only passing references to the actual music. That may pertain to the context of the story, but it sure would have helped if the movie contained a catchier soundtrack.”

Better luck next time, Mr. Lee.

A Prophet (Un Prophete). France/Italy
Director: Jacques Audiard; starring: Tahar Rahim, Niels Arestrup, Adel Bencherif, Reda Kateb, Hichem Yacoubiand Jean-Philippe Ricci.
In Competition

The fifth feature from Jacques Audiard (Read My Lips, The Beat That My Heart Skipped) is about a young French-Arab who rises through the criminal ranks while on a 6-year stint in prison.

Says indieWIRE’s Anthony Kaufman: “Successfully balancing art-film portraiture with a gangster picture’s plot, the film may be one of the more conventional movies in this year’s Cannes competition, but judging from the sustained applause after its Cannes premiere on Saturday morning, it’s also been one of the more satisfying.”

Writing for Screen Daily, Jonathan Romney says A Prophet is “immensely detailed both in its accounts of prison life and of the politics of organized crime” and that it “comes across as both a realistic film and a deeply cynical one.” However, he cautions “Audiard fans may miss the subtler psychological shadings of his earlier films, as well as some of his more fabulist story-telling tendencies and stylistic flourishes.”

Though he finds it “a little long at 2 1/2 hours” Peter Brunette of The Hollywood Reporter says “What’s most immediately remarkable about the film is the raw intensity of its hyper-realistic encounters, hugely enhanced by the superb acting of newcomer [Tahar] Rahim. This naturalism is nicely counterpointed with a few unabashedly stylized, very lyrical sequences in which Audiard demonstrates his signature mastery of offbeat visual and sound effects.”

Go Get Some Rosemary. USA
Directors: Josh Safdie and Benny Safdie; starring Ronnie Bronstein, Sage Ranaldo, Frey Ranaldo and Eleonore Hendricks.
Directors’ Fortnight

I despised Josh Safdie’s debut film The Pleasure of Being Robbed so his follow-up (with brother Bennie) about a man-child refusing to grow up despite having a wife and kids doesn’t sound promising. At all.

Rob Nelson’s review in Variety doesn’t say much to inspire confidence: “Go Get Some Rosemary tests the viewer’s tolerance for a protagonist whose flighty irresponsibility borders on unforgivable — and arguably extends to the filmmakers. Darlings of the Directors’ Fortnight, the Safdies have at least improved the tech credits on their Gotham-set sophomore feature, though their shaky-cam affectations remain mildly sick-making, seemingly by design.”

No thanks.

Jaffa. France/Israel/Germany
Director: Keren Yedaya; starring Dana Ivgy, Moni Moshonov, Ronit Elkabetz and Mahmoud Shalaby.
Special Screenings

This story of a Jewish woman who falls in love with an Arab Mechanic caught my eye because it stars Ronit Elkabetz who was so terrific in The Band’s Visit. Both Elkabetz and co-star Dana Ivgy starred in the director’s 2004 film Or (My Treasure).

The Hollywood Reporter’s Ray Bennett calls it “an absorbing and touching family drama…Ivgy gives a fine performance as a young woman who is overjoyed to be in love and expecting but whose life is turned upside down and utter despair beckons.

Shalaby is appealing, Moshonov and Elkabetz turn in typically insightful performances, and Assaf renders the detestable Meir with great magnetism. The cinematography is matter-of-fact until the moving final scene, when it genuinely enhances the drama, but Shushan’s score is a touch too mournful throughout.”

Variety’s Jay Weissberg didn’t find as much to like, calling it “a disappointing follow-up” to Or which won the Camera d’Or. “Where the earlier pic was all raw energy and unprocessed emotion, Jaffa is modeled on semi-glossy Egyptian mellers, but Yedaya lets the air out, leaving empty characters with no connections to each other or the audience. Best seen as a temporary blip in a promising career”

Mother. South Korea
Director: Bong Joon-ho; starring: Kim Hye-ja and Won Bin.
Un Certain Regard

The Host director Bong Joon-ho spins a story of an overprotective single mother and her childlike 27-year-old son who is accused of murdering a schoolgirl.

Screen Daily’s Mike Goodridge says that “the surprises of the story as it spirals into Vertigo-style flashback and shocking revelations elevate the film beyond mere thriller into high-octane Almodovar territory. Lee Byeong-woo’s wonderfully Herrman-esque score underlines the Hitchcockian influence, while cinematographer Hong Kyung-pyo (Eye For An Eye, Taegukgi) invests the rain-soaked milieus and gloomy interiors with stylized panache and bold lighting reminiscent of the all-at-night action of The Host.”

For Alejandro Amenabar’s Agora, Brillante Mendoza’s Kinatay and Johnnie To’s Vengeance check out Day 5.

Filed under: Film Festivals
Tags: A Prophet, Abbie Cornish, Ang Lee, Ben Whishaw, Benny Safdie, Bong Joon-ho, Bright Star, Cannes Film Festival, Corneliu Porumboiu, Dana Ivgy, Demetri Martin, Emile Hirsch, Eugene Levy, Go Get Some Rosemary, Hippolyte Girardot, Imelda Staunton, Jacques Audiard, Jaffa, Jane Campion, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Josh Safdie, Keren Yedaya, Liev Schreiber, Mamie Gummer, Mother, Nobuhiro Suwa, Park Chan-wook, Paul Dano, Police Adjective, Ronit Elkabetz, Taking Woodstock, Thirst, Yuki & Nina