The Film Programme at Cannes
Post categories: The Film Programme
11:00, Thursday, 24 May 2012
Editor's note: The Film Programme is broadcast at 4pm this Thursday 24th May. The programme this week comes from the Cannes Film Festival. -CM
For all its rarified reputation, the Cannes festival is for the large part a trade fair with some top-notch entertainment attached. For the serious filmgoer (aching knees and back from so much sitting, dusty shadows beneath the eyes) there's the opportunity to catch a wide range of international films and talk to filmmakers. Those in town to do deals are wild-eyed with caffeine, riding a carousel of micro-meetings and viewings, muttering into mobile headsets. Then there's the celebrity press pack who lurch and roar at the first hint of the imminent transit across a corridor of say, Brad Pitt. And the cohorts of impossibly glamorous young women stalking the public spaces just to catch someone's eye. They do, inevitably, but not usually the right someone.
The Red Carpet itself is a bit of theatre left over from an age when arc-lights swept the sky as diamond clad deities unfurled slowly from Lagonda or Rolls-Royce. The Red Carpet needs that contrast with the dark sky and the sight of people in off-the-shoulder gowns at two-thirty on a rainy afternoon whilst the audience is in sensible showerproofs seems a disjuncture too far.
So that business apart - it was hard not to be charmed by the opening film (and I didn't put up much of a fight) Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom is a colour-coded elegy for the kind of 1965 family holiday where boredom became a form of transcendental meditation. Or Ken Loach's engaging The Angel's Share - part realist tragedy, part 1950s heist caper - which was greeted here with the wondering admiration that the French have felt for Loach since he first came here in the 1960s. They marvel at the way his films are accessible, whilst conveying a distinct social commentary. In Britain we take this for granted; it's what he does.
The film that in the first week knocked the festival in the solar plexus was Austrian director Michael Haneke's Amour, a study of a devoted couple in their eighties facing the separation of death. The couple are played by Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva, actors much loved as stars from the height of French cinema of the late 1950s and 60s. Trintignant was the lead in Un Homme et Une Femme (1966), for example, whilst Riva was The Woman in what for me is one of the greatest films of all time, Alain Resnais' Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959). Cinema audiences have over the years watched these two grow old - something which must contribute to the intimacy and tenderness of Haneke's drama. At 89, Resnais himself was in Cannes with a new film.
Walter Salles' adaptation of Jack Kerouac's On the Road divided critics, some believing it a decent stab at what might be an impossible adaptation of the zeitgeist road movie, while others finding the famous trio onscreen rather dull. Andrew Dominik's big bruising American gangster picture, Killing Them Softly, with Brad Pitt as a hitman, was heavy on Scorsese homage, using crime as metaphor for the pathology of the American economic system, but it gave Pitt one hell of a closing speech.
For all Cannes is considered highbrow, many of the films on show are remarkably accessible. And 'not-in-the-English-language' does not always indicate profundity - In Another Country, a South Korean film in competition for the top prize, the Palme d'Or, with Isabelle Huppert playing three characters, was delightfully daft but little more. You certainly don't need a doctorate in film studies to appreciate the films of two of our guests this week (although you wouldn't be disappointed if you did). Wes Anderson and Ken Loach's films will both be in cinemas within the next ten days.
Francine Stock presents The Film Programme at 4.00pm on Thursday 24th May.
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