A Mix of the Past and Future in Film
Les films d'ici
Mads Mikkelsen stars in "Michael Kohlhaas" at the Cannes festival.
By JOAN DUPONT
Published: May 14, 2013
CANNES — Wednesday night is the big night: The stars will be out, and the couturiers, the jewelers, the photographers and fans, the blaring music, the glaring lights, all for the opening of the 66th Cannes International Film Festival.
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Cannes Film Festival
A 1963 photo of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward is on the festival's official poster.
Baz Luhrmann’s version of “The Great Gatsby,” based on the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan will be shown in 3D: an appropriate dimension for a Cannes opening. Steven Spielberg, who first came to the festival with “Sugarland Express” in 1974, will lead his jury up the red-carpeted staircase. The jury includes Nicole Kidman, who kicked up her heels in Mr. Lurhmann’s “Moulin Rouge,” the Cannes opener in 2001.
The festival has a penchant for familiar faces, big winners and Hollywood-size events, dating back to the days when it took place in a pocket-sized palais. There was time then between screenings for a swim or a set of tennis. You could cross paths with Kirk Douglas, a jury president chosen by mistake — the festival meant to invite Douglas Sirk — and take tea with Satyajit Ray at the Hotel Suisse. You could see Rainer Werner Fassbinder down a Bloody Mary for breakfast, and hear how Geraldine Chaplin kept the pleats in her Fortuny gown — she knotted the dress and buried it in the earth.
That was in the 20th century. Today the intimacy is gone, but the festival retains a certain ancien régime allure, starting with a selection committee that, like a secret society, can never be challenged because no one knows who makes it up. Don’t even ask.
Although Gilles Jacob, president of the festival, says he is surrounded by women, there are few in sight.
As for those in the running for the Palme d’Or, last year there were no women directors and this year, only one: Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi with “Un Château en Italie” (A Castle in Italy) inspired, as was her first film, “Il Est Plus Facile Pour un Chameau” (It’s Easier for a Camel), by her family.
At a news conference last month, Mr. Jacob praised the New Zealand filmmaker Jane Campion — “our good fairy, the sole woman who ever won a Golden Palm” — announcing that she will preside over the Shorts Competition jury as well as that of the Cinéfondation, a section for new talents. “I call her Lady Jane,” he said.
There are plenty of women on Mr. Spielberg’s jury: Besides Ms. Kidman there are the Indian actress Vidya Balan, the Japanese filmmaker Naomi Kawase and the Scottish filmmaker Lynne Ramsay. Agnès Varda of France presides over the Camera d’Or, a jury that gives the prize for best first film. But where are the Lady Janes who go for the gold?
Claire Denis, who delves into the shadows of a sinister Parisian apartment in her bold film “Les Salauds” (The Bastards), has been relegated to Un Certain Regard, a kind of upper-crust parallel section of the festival that protects radical films from those fits of nervous laughter at Palais screenings, and, perhaps, also spares Mr. Spielberg’s jury. Another film in the section, Alain Guiraudie’s spooky crime drama, “L’Inconnu du Lac,” (Stranger by the Lake), takes place in a beach cove, a haven for homosexuals on the prowl, with a stranger who has the feline grace of Alain Delon and turns out to be more violent than any shark in “Jaws.”
Un Certain Regard shows films in the Théâtre Claude Debussy, a smaller, calmer venue than the Palais. Sofia Coppola is here with “The Bling Ring,” Valeria Golino with “Miele” and Rebecca Zlotowski with “Grand Central.” The section is rich: It also includes James Franco’s “As I Lay Dying,” based on William Faulkner’s novel, “Omar” by the Palestinian director Hany Abu-Assad and “Manuscripts Don’t Burn” by Mohammad Rasoulof of Iran.
In the main competition, Asghar Farhadi — who made “The Separation” (which won an Oscar, a Golden Globe and a César — competes with his first film in French, “Le Passé” (The Past), set in Paris. The cast is led by Bérénice Bejot of Michel Hazavanicius’s movie “The Artist,” playing opposite Ali Mosaffa, an Iranian actor, and Tahar Rahim of Jacques Audiard’s film “Un Prophète.” Sabrina Ouazani, the star of Abdellatif Kechiche’s film “L’esquive,” (Games of Love and Chance) has a small but significant part.This year, Mr. Kechiche is competing with “La Vie d’Adèle” (Blue is the Warmest Color), adapted from Julie Maroh’s graphic novel. In “A Touch of Sin,” the Chinese director Jia Zhangke casts his keen eye on the new violence in Chinese society.
NuImage/Millennium Films
Jim Parrack, left, and James Franco in "As I Lay Dying.''
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As usual, the young bloods of Cannes past are strong contenders. Steven Soderbergh who won the Golden Palm with “Sex Lies and Videotape” in 1989 is back with “Behind the Candelabra,” Alexander Payne with “Nebraska” and Jim Jarmusch, a favorite since he won the Camera d’Or in 1984 for “Stranger Than Paradise,” with “Only Lovers Left Alive,” a vampire movie.
The Coen brothers — who won the Palme d’Or with “Barton Fink” in 1991 and are regulars at Cannes — are back with “Inside Llewyn Davis,” set in Greenwich Village in the ’60s. James Gray competes with “The Immigrant.” Mr. Gray also co-wrote Guillaume Canet’s “Blood Ties,” filmed in New York, to be shown out of competition.
In competition, Arnaud Desplechin’s film “Jimmy P. (Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian),” set in postwar Midwest America, stars Mathieu Amalric — who won best actor awards in 2005 for Mr. Desplechin’s “Rois et Reines” (Kings and Queen). In the new film, Mr. Amalric plays a psychoanalyst from abroad who comes to treat an American Indian veteran at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas. Benicio del Toro, who won a best actor award at Cannes in 2008 for Mr. Soderbergh’s “Che,” is the patient.
Mr. Amalric also plays opposite Roman Polanski’s wife, Emmanuelle Seigner, in Mr. Polanski’s adaptation of David Ives’s play “Venus in Fur,” which is based on Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch’s erotic novel. Arnaud des Pallières adapted “Michael Kohlhaas,” from Heinrich von Kleist’s 1811 novel, and set it in 16th-century France, with Mads Mikkelsen, David Bennent, Bruno Ganz and Denis Lavant.
François Ozon is in competition with “Jeune et Jolie” (Young and Beautiful), starring Marine Vacth, a film about a lycée student who turns to prostitution.
And out of the competition, Claude Lanzmann presents “Le Dernier des Injustes (The Last of the Unjust), a testimonial documentary on Benjamin Murmelstein, the rabbi that Adolf Eichmann put in charge of Theresienstadt, designed as a model ghetto camp in Czechoslovakia.
The Director’s Fortnight section, run by Edouard Waintrop, a critic at the newspaper Libération, also celebrates the return of a legendary filmmaker: Marcel Ophuls, who presents “Un Voyageur.”
One wonders what Fitzgerald would have made of it all: The bustling Croisette, where each pavilion in the International Village flies its colors, and the American Pavilion, which serves free “Sodastream cocktails in eco-friendly bottles.” Nespresso even has its own beach, and gives its own Grand Prix. How would the author, who died of a heart attack at 44 in Hollywood, react to seeing his characters on screen through 3D glasses? Perhaps he would think: “I’ve finally made it in the movies.”
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