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Our Films, Their Films: A World of Cinema (Pt.1) by Abu Dhabi Film Festival
The Abu Dhabi Film Festival is represented here in the south of France along with thousands of journalists, producers, directors and an incredible variety of hangers-on who have all made it for the 63rd Cannes Film Festival. A home for what many people consider excellent cinema, Cannes is without a doubt an international attraction but just as important is how the Festival seems like the center of the film world for 10 glorious days.
The locals and festival organizers have already made good on the promise to deliver one of the biggest events in the film calendar. The Festival opened on May 12 with the arrival of Cate Blanchett and Russell Crowe for the premiere of their Ridley Scott-directed film Robin Hood, which retells the legend of the eponymous archer and champion of the poor.
All eyes, however, are on the Official Competition. Its lineup is known for being top notch and you can fully expect that some of them will be truly great movies. There are 19 films competing for the coveted Palme d’Or, and director Tim Burton is leading the entire jury this year as they watch all the films in competition, make a shortlist, re-watch a select group of contenders again and finally announce their decision at the closing ceremonies.
There are a number of exciting directors with new films here, including Alejandro González Iñárritu (Biutiful), Abbas Kiarostami (Certified Copy), Takeshi Kitano (Outrage), Lee Chang-dong (Poetry), Mike Leigh (Another Year), Doug Liman (Fair Game), Nikita Mikhalkov (The Exodus – Burnt by the Sun 2) and Bertrand Tavernier (The Princess of Montpensier). If you are not familiar with these directors and their cinema then pencil their names down and go discover the kinds of films that have paved the way for their place in Cannes this year. Many of them are serious artists with an unflinching dedication to creating cinema that is outside the dumbed-down movies we are told to consume and forget as routine.
For instance, if you have not heard of the director Ken Loach, whose film Route Irish was added last minute to this year’s Cannes Competition lineup, then here and now is a good starting point to explore his cinema. He has just opened a YouTube channel and posted several of his movies for free (http://www.youtube.com) and if you can access them in your country (there are always copyright issues) then start with the popular Kes (1970). Of the current crop of Palme d’Or nominees, Loach is the most recent winner; The Wind That Shakes the Barley, about two brothers whose loyalties divide them during Ireland’s fight for freedom, took home the top prize at Cannes in 2006. His latest film, Route Irish, is the story of an employee of a private contractor in Iraq, like Blackwater, whose friend is killed.
Algerian filmmaker Rachid Bouchareb (Little Senegal [2001]) has written to the festival calling for mutual respect and a calm climate when his movie Outside the Law is screened this coming Friday. There were reports earlier that French war veteran groups threatened to demonstrate outside the Palais des Festivals. The film is about three Algerian brothers who become involved in the movement for Algerian independence. Another movie that has stirred people up is Draquila – Italy Trembles. Directed by Sabina Guzzanti (whose 2005 film Viva Zapatero! was dubbed the “Italian Farenheit 9/11″), Draquila had a special screening last Thursday and has been a big success at the box office in Italy. As you might have heard, Italy’s culture minister, Sandro Bondi, said he would boycott Cannes because the movie criticizes Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s handling of the relief efforts for the L’Aquila earthquake last year.
There is quite a bit of passionate talk of The Housemaid directed by South Korea’s Im Sang-soo (The President’s Last Bang [2005]) with many certain that it will be a strong contender for the Palme d’Or. It is based on a 1960 movie of the same name by Kim Ki-young and it would be worthwhile seeing the original if you can find it in your region (try http://www.mubi.com). South Korean cinema is producing some fascinating films at the moment, and The Housemaid is a thriller that takes on the lives of people who have been hollowed out and irreparably damaged by wealth. It takes place almost entirely within the huge modern house of a very rich man and his wife who make an art of living expensively and shamelessly. The story concerns itself with the young woman he has hired as a nanny. She forms a very tender relationship with their seven-year-old daughter and lovingly assists the wife during a pregnancy with twins. The plot skillfully weaves together the man, his wife, his daughter, the older woman who runs his household, and the mothers of the wife and the nanny into an unforgiving portrait of anger and decay. The film is constructed meticulously to bring you inside the lives of each of these characters, and the nuanced performances of the actors work like an unstoppable chess match until the final blow made at the end.
Another Year by director Mike Leigh, also a strong contender for the Palme d’Or, follows a happily married middle-aged couple during a year of their life. It explores Tom and Gerri’s relationships with their friends, who are not so happy, and only son, and how people close to them seem to depend on their happy and stable marriage. Mike Leigh has long been a great director and with the premiere of Another Year he again proves that audiences will respond to a sure and perceptive film. After Vera Drake in 2004 and Happy-Go-Lucky in 2008, Leigh moves confidently into territories other filmmakers sometimes avoid or overlook. The film looks at how we accept our lives, ourselves and one another when we realize that we all are struggling in the same boat no matter what illusions we might have had. The director has previously won the Palme d’Or for his 1996 film Secrets and Lies, and through all his films he has movingly celebrated the lives of normal people, of us.
A Screaming Man by Chadian director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun (Abouna [2002]) is another visually stunning film in competition. Set in present-day Chad during a civil war, the film is about Adam, a 60-something pool attendant at a luxury hotel who is forced to leave his job as the new owners decide to employ his son instead. Humiliated and resentful he sells his son to the army, a decision he later regrets.
The marvelous French director Bertrand Tavernier returns to Cannes for the first time since Daddy Nostalgia in 1990. This year he presents The Princess of Montpensier, a period drama about a princess forced to marry a prince while being passionately in love with another man.
Like Tavernier, Takeshi Kitano, a truly gifted director, has not had a film in competition at Cannes in many years, not since Kikujiro in 1999. He returns to crime drama, the genre that made him famous, with Outrage. It involves two warring factions in the yakuza, or Japanese mafia, and by the end of the film just about everyone on both sides is dead.
As he did with Vicky Cristina Barcelona, which had its world premiere out of competition at Cannes in 2008, Woody Allen has returned with his latest offering, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger. Sir Anthony Hopkins, Josh Brolin and Naomi Watts star in the quirky and at times humorous tale of a group of dysfunctional family members.
Also screening out of competition, Oliver Stone’s sequel to Wall Street, which is subtitled Money Never Sleeps, is an eye-opener about how easily people in the financial world can be disposed of, and the huge sums of money entrusted to people on an hourly basis. It picks up Gordon Gekko’s (Michael Douglas) story after he’s released from prison, and involves his relationship with his daughter Winnie (Carey Mulligan), her fiancé Jacob (Shia LaBoeuf), the man who brought Gekko’s firm down (Josh Brolin) and Jacob’s father figure (Frank Langella). Douglas and Stone had a huge hit with their original Wall Street back in 1987, although the film was intended as a warning about a culture of greed in American finance. Looking back now it seems that it became more of an inspiration for young men to grow up and be just like Gordon Gekko convincing themselves that greed is good.
Director Martin Scorsese was in Cannes to introduce the premiere of a new restoration of Luchino Visconti’s classic Italian film The Leopard, which earned its own glorious history at the Cannes Film Festival by winning the Palme d’Or in 1963. He also discussed his latest and heartfelt project, Living in the Material World: George Harrison, a documentary about the former Beatle who died in 2001. It will feature never-before-seen footage and interviews with Sir Paul McCartney and Eric Clapton.
Following its premiere at the Berlin Film Festival this year, The Illusionist has been showing here at the Cannes market screenings. It will be a magical discovery for anyone regardless of whether or not they know of Jacques Tati, who wrote the screenplay for this film but was never able to make it, and the immortal character he created in all of his films (M. Hulot’s Holiday [1953], Mon oncle [1958], Playtime [1967]): a tall, oblivious Frenchman, bowing from the waist, pipe in mouth, often wearing a trench coat, pants too short, and always at the center of some hilarious confusion. Tati passed away in 1982 and never made the film that he had intended for live action. His daughter Sophie Tatischeff had the original script and passed it along to Sylvain Chomet who has beautifully and tenderly directed this animated film after making his previous film The Triplets of Belleville in 2003. The story involves a magician named Tatischeff who fails in one music hall after another and ends up in Scotland, where at last he finds a fan in a young woman who absolutely adores him. He’s a good magician on a small scale, flawless at every trick except producing a rabbit from a hat. His problem there involves his rabbit that makes it a practice during the act to pop up and peep around at the wrong moments. Time has passed Tatischeff by and audiences prefer pop groups to aging magicians. He reaches the lowest stage of his career, performing in a shop window. This man does what he does very well, but there’s no longer a purpose for him. Tati wrote this story in the 1950s before he found international success with M. Hulot’s Holiday and it seems poignantly drawn from a supreme artist’s life. The character of Tatischeff looks like Tati and also has the unique and iconic body language that instantly conveyed the polite formality, the deliberate movement, the hesitation and the shyness. Each artist works in a world of illusion and every night they must produce that illusion out of a hat, so to speak.
Elsewhere at Cannes… Imagine a cinema but outside with rows of deck chairs lined up and blankets are handed out to patrons. Well it happens here every night on the beach. You will agree that it is really nice to hear the waves of the sea as a backdrop while watching a documentary that explores the history of surfing in films over the last 50 years. Directed by Sam George and Greg MacGillivray, it is called Hollywood Don’t Surf and Quentin Tarantino, John Milius, Steven Spielberg and many others participate in the 81-minute film, which also features some fantastic footage of the water sport.
The best film here this year will quite likely be by a director whom most people have not heard of. Each day is an experience joining fellow cineastes at the Palais des Festivals and then hurrying up and down the rue d’Antibes for a small indie film showing in different venues of the marketplace. There is a good possibility that audiences in Abu Dhabi may eventually be able to see several of this year’s Cannes successes – in theaters, perhaps via Video on Demand or streaming online, and then likely on DVD. For now, think of the Cannes Film Festival as a shoreline where you arrive to find yourself gazing across an open sea and the horizon shines with a cinema of discovery.
About the Author
The Abu Dhabi Film Festival was established in 2007, with the aim of helping to create a vibrant film culture throughout the region. The event, presented each October by the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage (ADACH), is committed to curating exceptional programs to engage and educate the local community, inspire filmmakers and nurture the growth of the regional film industry.
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