It's not every day when a man has to make a public statement to announce that he isn't a Nazi, and yet that is just what Lars von Trier has had to do. In an effort to put out the fire he caused during the controversial Melancholia press conference at the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday, Von Trier apologized for saying -- among other things -- that he sympathized with Hitler.
The post-Melancholia press conference this morning was going swimmingly. Maybe too swimmingly. The stars (Dunst, Gainsbourg) were there, members of the fine supporting cast (Hurt, Kier, Skarsgård) were there, and von Trier was there, looking sporty and happy in a simple black T-shirt. He jovially fielded questions about the artists who inspired him while he was making the movie (Wagner, Breugel, Antonioni, Tarkovsky, Bergman) and about whether or not he was happy with the film: "I'm not really sure. Maybe it's crap. Of course, I hope not. But there's quite a big possibility that this might be" -- he pauses -- "really not worth seeing." I can assure you he's wrong there, but never mind, because then von Trier hurled a bottle rocket.
It's 11:45 on Tuesday night in Cannes, and seemingly just outside my window are the loudest fireworks I've ever heard. Good thing I'm not asleep yet, and too bad I'm not still in tonight's screening of Naomi Kawase's Hanezu, one of the slowest competition films I've seen since I've been here. The audible snorer a few rows ahead of me could have used a firecracker or two to jolt him awake.
Lars von Trier's Melancholia is neither the provocation nor the yowl of anguish that his last picture, Antichrist, was. For those reasons, it's less effective and also far less of a workout: Antichrist was the first von Trier movie I genuinely loved, after a decade's worth of railing against the sufferdome atmosphere of pictures like Dogville, Dancer in the Dark, and even the mildly bearable Breaking the Waves. Antichrist stunned and upset me, but it also filled me with compassion toward the man who made it, a feeling I'd never imagined I could have. The gift of Antichrist -- with its horrific depictions of emotional suffering, its wailing-wind subtext of "Nature is everywhere, inside you and out, and it is not your friend" -- was that von Trier had surprised me. That is a critic's greatest pleasure -- or at least it's mine.
In the press notes for Aki Kaurismäki's lovely, unassuming, buoyantly sad-sacky Le Havre, French journalist Christine Masson asks the famously depressive Finnish filmmaker if his favorite cinematic references -- Bresson, Becker, Melville, Tati, René Clair, Marcel Carné -- are present in the film. "I certainly hope so," he says, "because I didn't bring anything myself."
This morning I awoke to the patter of rain on my window and the throb of a celebrity gossip gene sparking to action in my head. For whatever reason, this usually only happens with power couples -- recent revelations about Taylor and Burton or Schwarzenegger and Shriver come to mind -- probably because the sincerity and profile of their love, however transitory or immodest, makes them emotionally relatable while trafficking in mystique that more civilian celeb couples just don't have. They are eminently accessible, yet entrancingly elusive. Shaking off sleep and wondering what world event might have prompted this early-morning psychic schism, I figured it could only be one thing.
Monday marked the Cannes Film Festival midpoint, a time to pause, reflect and -- cry. When a friend warned me last week that at some point I would burst into tears -- from exhaustion, frustration, anxiety, or some combination of the three -- I thought she was merely sharing her own personal experience. But this morning alone, I heard three critics mention the potential onset of a crying jag; one had just heard a male Australian critic announce cheerfully, "Usually by this time in the festival, I've broken down and wept, but not this year!"
I was with French director Bertrand Bonello's L'Apollonide for about seven-eighths of the way through, which reminded me how painful it is to be tossed out of a picture just when you thought you were secure in its embrace. L'Apollonide -- its English title is House of Tolerance -- takes place in a Parisian bordello at the turn of the last century, and mostly, it's a sensuous, lurid, fascinating picture. The madam (Noémie Lvovsky) runs her house with a strict air of elegance and an even stricter set of rules. Bonello details the women's daily routines, including their assignations with their regular and their random clients, with respectful curiosity.
Since pretty much the time the world press arrived on the scene last week, the burning question facing this year's Cannes Film Festival was, "Will Tree of Life director Terrence Malick show his face?" We pretty much know now that he won't, but that didn't stop Guardian gadfly Xan Brooks from digging further into the "Where's Terry?" phenomenon with the help of such friends as Movieline's own Stephanie Zacharek.
The 64th Festival de Cannes has officially been taken over by Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. In addition the world premiere of The Tree of Life, the Hollywood power couple is also celebrating the purchase of Jolie's directorial debut. Click ahead to find out the title of her controversial Bosnian war drama, and what other major future releases found possible distribution in the French Riviera over the weekend.
The Tree of Life press conference this morning was almost as hot a ticket as the screening itself. I wandered by to see if there was any chance of funneling myself in, à la française, but nothing doing. It's now clear, though, that the reclusive Malick did not show up for the press conference with stars Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain, as much as his many fans here had hoped he would.
Every day, critics and journalists exiting the Palais must fight through throngs of onlookers holding up hopeful hand-drawn signs, begging for invitations to the evening's highly restricted screenings (not that most of us are able to provide them). This morning, as I was leaving the screening of Tree of Life, I saw a young man holding a placard on which he'd scrawled, "I would die for an invitation to Tree of Life." Oh, my dear boy, I certainly hope not.
Despite what you may be thinking, the most elusive and sought-after figure on the Croisette hasn't been Johnny Depp. Here at Cannes, where film-geekery runs high, everyone is wondering: Will the notoriously reclusive Terrence Malick emerge from the shadows for a personal appearance? He's become the "Where's Waldo?" of the festival.
In a curious but pleasant development, a latecomer to the Cannes competition lineup, announced just a week before the festival began, has suddenly become a possible front-runner for the Palme d'Or. Michel Hazanavicius' The Artist, a silent film shot in Hollywood in black-and-white, screened this morning, and its sly charms seemed to win over a sizable portion of the audience -- including me.
Rob Marshall's Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides is the most modest picture in the Pirates franchise since the 2003 Curse of the Black Pearl -- which doesn't mean it's necessarily modest. On Stranger Tides, shot in 3-D, offers more muted special effects, more swashbuckling and swordplay and perhaps fewer needless plot twists than either the 2006 Dead Man's Chest or the 2007 At World's End. Both of those movies took everything that was casual and fun about the first picture and shackled it with million-dollar handcuffs. They were expensive-looking and clumsy, out to impress us rather than settle for anything so mundane as to simply entertain us.
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