May
20
Chacun Son Cinema, Allen and Charles Hawk New Movies
Word on the Croisette is Wild Bunch is selling Woody Allen's new Spanish film starring Javier Bardem, and CAA is selling director Larry Charles' follow-up to Borat, starring ace interviewer Bill Maher. The movie challenges the religious beliefs of a range of clerics and experts of every religious persuasion. There was a private screening in the Riviera of some footage yesterday, which was "hilarious," according to one interested indie buyer who hopes that the movie is too provocative to be scooped up by a major studio. In one exchange, apparently, Maher grills a Republican U.S. Senator who believes in the end of days. When challenged about being an appropriate decision-maker for the American people, the guy responds, " You don't have to take an IQ test to get this job."
How could I resist the lure of 32 film directors assembled in the Salle Bunuel? (35 directors made 32 films, because there are two sets of brothers, the Dardennes and the Coens.) With a canny sense of how to dominate all the news coverage, Roman Polanski walked out in a huff because the journos were asking stupid questions. Before he left, he and Atom Egoyan tangled on the issue of how movies will be seen in future; Polasnki (whose short was a neat joke) thinks cinemas and the communal experience will continue; Egoyan was riffing on the digital future. (His film bridges the PDA present with the silent past, complete with clips from Jean-Luc Godard's Vivre Sa Vie and Carl Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc.) That was the main discussion among several of the filmmakers, but many were ignored, which seemed a waste. Polanski should have been angry at the festival for not organizing the thing better so that each filmmaker made some kind of introductory remarks about their films. (Here's the review.)
There was both a press conference and round tables, yet some people were confused about who they were talking to, and what film each director had made."The Cinema isn't the cinema anymore," said David Cronenberg, whose mordant short took a dim view of cinema's future. "The form of the cinema as we know it and love it is already a thing of the past." Walter Salles insisted that cinema must be "a collective adventure. I don't look forward to seeing a movie on a phone in 30 years time." He may not have to wait that long!
Jane Campion, with a mane of silver hair and bare legs, stood out as the only woman in the throng, and her comic short featuring a full-figured green fly scampering inside a projector stood out as well. "My film is an hommage to Bunuel," she said. "It's Dadaist and feminist. I'm sure the men too wish there were more women amongst us. It's strange to be here with a great big football team, like this. I'm making the best of it. It is sad. All of us would like to see more movies about how women see the world."
Gus Van Sant, whose short was an hommage to Buster Keaton's Sherlock, Jr., was succinct: "When asked, we deliver."
I talked to Michael Cimino afterwards, whose off-the-mark offering was one of two set at Santa Monica's Aero Theatre. He looked scrawny and unhealthy, with a bad shag haircut, aviator shades, smooth plastic skin on his face and bad teeth. He lives in L.A. and N.Y. and has been publishing novels in other languages, not English; his current first book in a trilogy is already over 500 pages. He's through with cinema unless he can direct Andre Malraux's Man's Fate, he said: "A film of consequence. I'm writing it. To make a movie just to make a movie doesn't interest me."
I loved watching the shorts, trying to guess who did what. The trick was to stand out from the pack and figure out a way to avoid cliche. Oddly, three films feature blind people (Gonzalez Inarritu's is the best) and several involve sex in cinema, literally. Along with the two Canadians, the Asians did particularly well, as a group: Zhang Yimou's was one of my faves. Magical. I hope the Cannes fest circulates the films in some form, whether to other festivals, as individual shorts on the theatrical circuit or AtomFilms.com or through a distributor as one film. They should be seen. Kudos to Gilles Jacob for putting this monumental effort together.
UPDATE: After Chacun's debut, the competition film screenings started off with one short; the ones I saw held up wonderfully on second viewing, including the Polanski, Van Sant, Coens and Takeshi.
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