Cannes 2009: Almodovar, Resnais and Haneke

Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon

Another day, another favorite for the Palme D’Or. This week, some eyes turned toward Michael (Cache, Funny Games) Haneke’s The White Ribbon as the one to beat for the Cannes Film Festival’s top prize. Sony Pictures Classics, which picked the film up before the start of the festival, also recently purchased one of the other festival favorites, Jacques Audiard’s The Prophet.

Other than that, there have been a number of competition titles that have played while we were focused on Inglourious Basterds and The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus. Here are some odds and ends from the week at Cannes.

Tuesday, May 19

Broken Embraces (Los Abrazos Rotos). Spain
Director: Pedro Almodóvar; starring Penelope Cruz, Lluis Homar, Jose Luis Gomez, Blanca Portillo, Lola Duenas, Ruben Ochandiano, Tamar Novas, Kira Miro, Chus Lampreave and Carmen Machi
In Competition

Screen Daily and Variety (which both liked the film with reservations) already reviewed Pedro Almodóvar ’s latest film when it premiered in Spain so there didn’t seem to be any hurry covering it in these pages. Nevertheless, we’re very much looking forward to it even though the reception for it seems mixed.

Guardian UK, Peter Bradshaw

Pedro Almodóvar has always managed to combine elegance and exuberance, and his latest movie is no exception: a richly enjoyable piece of work, slick and sleek, with a sensuous feel for the cinematic surfaces of things and, as ever, self-reflexively infatuated with the business of cinema itself. Yet I wonder if Almodóvar isn’t in danger of retreading old ideas. It doesn’t quite match the heartfelt power of his 2006 Cannes film festival contender, Volver; Broken Embraces is always conspicuously concerned with passion, but without being itself fully passionate.

The Boston Globe, Wesley Morris

Broken Embraces is a gabfest, loquacious even by the director’s own admittedly wordy standards. Melodrama talks its way into a thriller then back to melodrama then into not-terribly-funny comedy. Redefining the limits and rules of genres has always interested the Spaniard. But now ‘Almodovar’ is its own genre it’s several, in fact and suddenly the director seems boxed in by himself.

AV Club, Mike D’Angelo

Broken Embraces…finds Pedro Almodóvar on candy-colored autopilot, shuffling various elements from his previous films around with such studied dispassion that I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that he made this latest one to fulfill a contractual obligation.

Vincere. Italy/France
Director: Marco Bellocchio; starring Giovana Mezzogiorno and Filippo Timi
In Competition

The little known story of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s first wife and son.

Variety, Jay Weissberg

Conceived as grand opera set inside delineated space, it’s a thrilling, at times brilliant piece of staging that never forgets the emotional pull of either the tragic personal tale or the ramifications of history…While the history is fascinating, it’s the film’s style that takes the breath away. Bellocchio sets up his scenes like acts from an opera, alternately theatrical, spectacular, intimate and resounding. Blasts of oratorio, insistent texts overlaid on images, even thunder and lightning become tools containing all the “unnatural” excesses of opera: The full import is conveyed as rightfully larger-than-life.

The Hollywood Reporter, Natasha Senjanovic

The director also pulls career-high performances from Mezzogiorno and Timi that are, respectively, tragic and mesmerizing. They deserve kudos for making such controversial personalities engaging and real, and they lift the film notches above standard biopic fare. Vincere belongs to Mezzogiorno, as Timi disappears once Mussolini renounces Ida, only to reappear later as the dictator’s grown son, who goes by a different name and can do uncanny impersonations of the country’s leader.

Wednesday, May 20

Wild Grass (Les Herbes folles). France/Italy
Director: Alain Resnais; Starring: Sabine Azema, Andre Dussollier, Anne Consigny, Emmanuelle Devos, Mathieu Almaric
In Competition

The latest from arthouse favorite Alain Resnais (Hiroshima mon amour).Using Christian Gailly’s novel L’incident as a springboard, Resnais connects the lives of a group of melancholy adults.

Variety, Jordan Mintzer

At the ripe age of 87, and exactly half a century since dropping a cinematic atom bomb with Hiroshima mon amour, Alain Resnais continues his career-long experiment in filmmaking with the playfully flamboyant melodrama Wild Grass. More freewheeling than 2006’s Private Fears in Public Places, but with a similar networking structure that connects the destinies of several melancholy adults into one intriguing web, the pic is marked by superb performances and a dazzling technical display by the helmer and praiseworthy cinematographer Eric Gautier.

Always a strong and demanding director, the helmer gets marvelous performances from all the cast members, with [Andre] Dussollier’s representing one of the better ones of his long career. As usual, [Sabine] Azema is completely on point in portraying someone who’s all over the place — a sentiment illustrated by her hairstyle, which looks like it was concocted with the help of a humidifier. Less forceful in its depiction of doomed extramarital affairs than his masterly Mon oncle d’Amerique, yet sharper in wit and comic virtuosity, Wild Grass shows that although Resnais has grown more light-hearted in old age, he hasn’t lost his desire to challenge the viewer on all levels.

Screen Daily, Dan Fainaru

Alain Resnais’ Wild Grass showcases one of the great masters of modern cinema with a romantic fantasy which displays the comfortable but consummate confidence of an artist who knows exactly what he wants to do and how to do it. If, once upon a time, audiences were scared away by the complexity of his work, here Resnais is offering a deceptively simple and elegant picture, which will grow in depth and meaning with every additional viewing.

The Hollywood Reporter, Duane Byrge

Narratively, Wild Grass is a fractured romance, that never jells on any level, except for the backdrop visuals. Visually scrumptious, as if culled from the pages of good-taste magazines, it has the appeal of a designer catalog, and also the depth.

Indeed, filmmaker Alain Resnais has graced the frame with a lush look and surfaced it with an inviting glossy sheen, but never properly connected the characters to a cohesive narrative plot. Just because the characters are erratic does not mean the narrative should be. Structured as a dark-psychological romance, it’s merely a poseur, a walk-through of unpredictable behavior…With its thin narrative and elliptical story jumps, Wild Grass crashes and burns in a pretentious and unsatisfying manner.

Thursday, May 21

The White Ribbon (Das weisse Band). Germany/Austria/France/Italy
Director: Michael Haneke; starring Christian Friedel, Leonie Benesch, Ulrich Tukur, Ursina Lardi and Burghart Klaussner
In Competition

Michael Haneke’s look at the residents of a small German Protestant town in the run-up to World War I.

Screen Daily, Mike Goodridge

When he is on top form Michael Haneke’s artistry and unerring control of his material is hard to beat. And he is on top form in The White Ribbon, a meticulously constructed, precisely modulated tapestry of malice and intrigue in a rural village in pre-World War I northern Germany. It’s a rich, detailed work pregnant with the sinister undertones and evil deeds for which the film-maker’s work is legendary.

indieWIRE, Eric Kohn

Pairing visual mastery with a quietly immersive story, The White Ribbon plays like a morbid version of Our Town, patiently revealing the inward discord beneath the surface of a settled community. It’s a frightening depiction of mortality.

Time Out London, Dave Calhoun

More than ever, the playful, challenging, sometimes shocking director of Hidden, Funny Games and Time of the Wolf solidly resists answering the ‘what’s it all about?’ question and makes you work hard to make sense of what you’re seeing. As in Code Unknown, he resists focusing on one story or a limited number of characters and instead offers a wide, rich canvas of people and experiences linked only by the fact that they are neighbours and increasingly all subject to a burgeoning threat from within.

Filed under: Film Festivals
Tags: Broken Embraces, Cannes Film Festival, Marco Bellocchio, Michael Haneke, Pedro Almodovar, The White Ribbon, Vincere, Wild Grass Alain Resnais