The Screengrab : laurent cantet

Precursors: Time Out (2001)

Nick Schager — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 14:00:00 GMT

Pulse director Kiyoshi Kurosawa returns to American theaters this weekend with Tokyo Sonata, another of his portraits of social loneliness and estrangement in which the head of a disintegrating nuclear family conceals unemployment from his relatives by pretending to head to the office every morning. It’s a ruse previously featured front-and-center in Laurent Cantet’s superlative Time Out, a similar study of existential detachment in which nondescript middle-aged businessman Vincent (Aurélien Recoing) loses his job and responds by fancifully concocting – and then telling his suspicious wife about – a nonexistent new one at the United Nations. Cantet presents corporate France as an impersonal hell made up of cool, reflective surfaces and Vincent’s actions as desperate attempts to achieve autonomy not available in his professional environment. His contentment with his make-believe life, evidenced by his turning down more than one real job offer, as well as his use of a cozy country cabin as his fake office, both speak to his increasingly comfortable retreat into fantasy. The more Vincent lies, however, the more obvious it becomes that even this counterfeit life of freedom requires, ironically, a considerable amount of work. As details about its protagonist’s situation come into clearer focus, Time Out’s thriller-esque affectations prove somewhat less riveting. Yet there’s no shortage of chills in the film’s unhurried, transfixing social-realist depiction of the anomie fostered by modern capitalism, of one man’s inability to separate his identity from his vocation, and of the untenable deceptions in which he eventually cocoons himself as a means of coping with shame and humiliation.

TIME OUT TRAILER

And, also, a trailer for Tokyo Sonata:

2008 in Review: Phil Nugent's Top Ten

Phil Nugent — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 16:00:00 GMT

BEFORE I FORGET: Writer-director-star's Jacques Nolot's measured, surprisingly affecting portrait of an aging gay hustler whose friends are dying off (as he himself enters his twenty-fourth year of being HIV-positive) and who lives in fear of losing the very memories that he's become mired in. A dry-eyed yet very moving experience, this French film arrived in theaters here in late summer and attracted about as much attention as most films do when they're not in English and include plenty of footage of men in their fifties and sixties with their clothes off.

CHOP SHOP Writer-director Rahmin Bahrani, who also made Man Push Cart and the forthcoming Goodbye Solo, makes movies about people different from those at the center of mainstream movie culture, hard-edged but sympathetic explorations of what it means to be economically shut out and culturally isolated. This is real Neo-Realism for our times, and it makes something like Wendy and Lucy look like the overpraised, pity-the-poor-waif hankie movie it is.

A CHRISTMAS TALE: Arnaud Desplechin's two-and-a-half-hour, bracingly grown-up domestic drama has all the things that make the holidays great: inherited terminal illness, drunken name-calling, childhood fantasies that would make Dr. Phil alert the FBI, adulterous yearnings, repressed family resentments, family resentments that couldn't be less repressed if they were spelled out on the side of the Goodyear blimp, and bitterly estranged siblings battling over which of them will get the bragging rights for the crucial donation to mom's bone marrow transplant. All that plus this classic Christmas Eve conversation between a drunken adult and a couple of kids: "Boys, you should go to bed." "We're waiting for Jesus." "But Jesus never existed." "We'll wait anyway. We want to see him"

THE CLASS: Laurent Cantet's improvisational take on the education system. See the Screengrab Q & A.

THE DARK KNIGHT: Because Heath Ledger's Joker convinced me that if I didn't include this one, he'd come back to talk to me about it. This one is also for the woman who was sitting behind me at the Empire 25 in Times Square, who, when Gary Oldman's Jim Gordon let his wife know that he hadn't really been killed by showing up on the doorstep in the middle of the night and the wife slapped him--Ka-POW!!-- across his sheepish face, said, "I know that's right!" and who, when the wife then grabbed him and kissed him while his cheek was still throbbing, whispered, "That's right, too."

THE EDGE OF HEAVEN: Fatih Akin's Head-On was one of my favorite movies of the decade. A pure charge of sadomasochistic romantic torment, it was by turns funny, angry, sexy, and heart-breaking, and it just seemed to flow as naturally as a spring brook. His newest multi-character drama isn't as ferociously inspired as that picture was; the plot is built on a string of coincidences, and Akin lets you hear the gears turning. But it's still one of the most remarkable dramas of the year, from a filmmaker who remains a man to watch.

THE ORDER OF MYTHS: Margaret Brown's jaw-dropping documentary about the parallel, racially segregated Mardi Gras cultures of Mobile, Alabama. Would make for the double feature of the year if paired with another remarkable documentary about race and Southern culture, Godfrey Cheshire's Moving Midway.

THE SECRET OF THE GRAIN: This entry is partly a mea culpa. I first saw Abdellatif Kechiche's Franco-Tunisian family drama, a sprawling film with a basically simple story about an aged immigrant trying to start up a restaurant, when it played last spring at the Tribeca Film Festival, and at the time, I wrote a review that emphasized my problems with it, especially my feeling that it sometimes left its performers stranded in needlessly meandering long takes that did not justify its running time of two and a half hours. I'm not quite ready to take all that back, but I have to admit that, in the six months since, parts of this movie have come back and played themselves over and over in my head when I was least expecting to think about them again, and that I can't say that about many other films I saw this year. It's just now opened commercially in select U.S. theaters, and damned if I don't feel like I ought to see it again now that I'm no longer suffering from festival fever. In the meantime, I sure wouldn't try to talk anyone else out of seeing it.

SYNECDOCHE, NY: The flaws of Charlie Kaufman's long, cluttered film don't look like much to me in comparison to its achievement: a comedy about all the ways that our obsessions with death and futility prevent us from getting anything done with the precious time we have here, which does full justice to this very depressing theme yet also manages to be very funny. People who fault Kaufman for excessive cleverness might as well be complaining that action movies promote antisocial behavior. Kaufman is clever; more than that, he's actually intelligent. And he's one of the few artists in movies actively grappling with what might just be one of the great concerns of the post-modern world: how do people smart enough to see all the reasons for believing that everything is hopeless stop using their intellligence to trip them themselves up?

WALL-E: The first quarter-hour or so of this Pixar haymaker constitute the most astonishing kind of triumph: a fully realized, scarily believable vision of Hell on Earth that I felt like I never wanted to leave, or at least never stop watching. If, once the plot kicks in, it settles down into a mere first-rate satirical animated love story with a kick, I'd hate for that to seem like a complaint.

HONORABLE MENTION: Dear Zachary: A Letter to His Son about His Father, Encounters at the End of the World, The Flight of the Red Balloon, Full Battle Rattle, The Go-Getter, In Search of a Midnight Kiss, Iron Man, Jellyfish, Kung Fu Panda, Let the Right One In, Man on Wire, Milk, My Winnipeg, Patti Smith: Dream of Life, Paranoid Park, Pray the Devil Back to Hell, Slumdog Millionaire, Summer Palace, Taxi to the Dark Side, Trouble the Water, The Unforseen, Up the Yangtze, The Visitor, Water Lilies, Waltz with Bashir, The Witnesses, The Wrestler

BEST MOVIE RELEASED IN THE U.S. IN 2008 WHICH, FOR SOME REASON, EVERY CRITIC IN THE U.S. PUT ON HIS OR HER TEN-BEST LIST FOR 2007: 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days

BEST RESTORATION/BEST RE-ISSUE: The Exiles, Kent MacKenzie's legendary 1961 documentary-style look at the Native American subculture of Los Angeles's Bunker Hill. Not as great as the first two Godfather films, which also got a handsome and timely restoration, but that was going to happen anyway. This was more of a happy surprise.

BEST FILMED THEATER: the "avant-garde" production of Hamlet in Jellyfish; the kids' play in A Christmas Tale

BEST SCENE OF A COUPLE OF GUYS BURIED IN PROSTHETIC MAKE-UP GETTING BOOZED UP AND SINGING ALONG WITH BARRY MANILOW: Hellboy II: The Golden Army

REALLY GOOD TV: The HBO film Longford, Generation Kill, Breaking Bad, the last season of The Wire, the last episode of The Shield, Sarah Palin on the interview circuit, and The Drinky Crow Show on Adult Swim

GREAT PERFORMANCES: Jeffrey Wright, Columbus Short, and Eamonn Walker in Cadillac Records, Catherine Deneuve, Mathieu Amalric, Jean-Paul Roussilllon, and Chiara Mastroianni in A Christmas Tale, Sean Penn and Emile Hirsch in Milk, Robert Downey, Jr. in Iron Man and Tropic Thunder, Danny McBride in The Foot Fist Way and Tropic Thunder, Jeff Bridges in Iron Man, Anil Kapoor and Irrfan Khan in Slumdog Millionaire, Juliette Binoche in The Flight of the Red Balloon, Viola Davis in Doubt, Heath Ledger and Aaron Eckhart in The Dark Knight, Mickey Rourke and Marisa Tomei in The Wrestler, Melissa Leo in Frozen River, Sally Hawkins and Eddie Marsen in Happy-Go-Lucky, Rebecca Hall, Javier Bardem, and Penelope Cruz in Vicki Christina Barcelona, Samantha Morton in Synecdoche, NY, Patricia Clarkson in Elegy and Married Life, Michelle Williams in Synecdoche, NY and Wendy and Lucy, Habib Boufares and Hafsia Herzi in The Secret of the Grain, James Franco in Pineapple Express, Richard Dreyfuss in W., Kristen Scott-Thomas in I've Loved You So Long, Kathryn Hahn in Step Brothers, Michael Shannon in Revolutionary Road, Tea Leone in Ghost Town, Russell Brand in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Jane Lynch in Role Models, Richard Jenkins, Danai Jekesai Gurira, and Hiam Abbass in The Visitor, Ludivine Sagnier in Love Songs and A Girl Cut in Two, Andrew Garfield in Boy A, Famke Janssen in Turn the River, Greta Gerwig in Baghead, Jeanne Balibar in The Duchess of Langeais

BEST USE OF ZOOEY DESCHANEL: The unofficial muse of the Screengrab got the royal treatment in The Go-Getter, a too-little-seen road comedy that marked the writer-director feature debut of Martin Hynes, previously best known as the star of the 1999 short George Lucas in Love. The movie, which also features terrific work by Jena Malone, Maura Tierney, Bill Duke, Judy Greer, Nick Offerman, and its young star, Lou Taylor Pucci, doesn't introduce Deschanel's character unscreen until midway through, though she keeps in touch via cell phone, so the audience gets to have its collective ear tickled by the entrancing sound her voice before being premitted to gaze upon her ethereal loveliness. Slow to turn up in theaters and too quick to vacate them, The Go-Getter was actually completed in 2007, the same year that Deschanel appeared on the small screen in a guest appearance on the increasingly rotten Weeds that came to exactly nothing and as Dorothy as the stinko Wizard of Oz-as-sci-fi-fantasy miniseries Tin Man. This year, she graduated to big-studio movies that sought to exploit her freshness and talent in the name of shoring of has-been directors (in M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening) and tired stars (in The Yes Man with Jim Carrey). No wonder the poor kid's looking to break into music.

SHE'S JUST A GIRL WHO CAN'T SAY NO: In Boarding Gate, Asia Argento ran drugs, escaped a hail of gunfire on a motorcycle, got drugged and raped (off-screen) by a bunch of Japanese businessmen, choked Michael Madsen with his own belt only to discover that he kind of enjoyed it, handcuffed Madsen and shot him in the head, and traveled to Hong Kong to find herself at the mercy of Kim Gordon, all nice work if you can get it. She also slipped into black underwear and matching fuck-me shoes to pose for the poster, holding a big-ass gun that she was going to have trouble concealing in that outfit. In The Last Mistress, she told dirty stories about herself and made eating ice cream look as if ought to count as a violation of the Patriot Act. In Mother of Tears, she swam through an underground sea of sewage and gore, got paralyzed, became psychic, witnessed the murders of her friends by ghouls who throttled women with their own intestines and shoved phallic pikes between their legs until the pointy ends came out their mouths, splattered a woman's head like a cantaloupe during a train ride, and hung out with Udo Kier. That last was one was directed by her father. I can't for the life of me decide what that makes it all better or even worse.

BEST INSIDE SNAPSHOT OF HOLLYWOOD: Nina Davenport's documentary Project Filmmaker began with the actor Liev Schreiber, who was planning to make his first film as a director, Everything Is Illluminated (2005), based on the Jonathan Safran Foer novel. Schreiber was watching MTV when he saw a report about the effects of the Iraq War and saw a 25-year-old Iraqi, Muthana Mohmed, explaining that he wanted to be a filmmaker but the Americans just blew up the country's film school. In a fit of liberal guilt, Schrieber magnanimously sent word that this lad was to be found and hired and brought to the Czech Republic to work on the set of his major studio production. And Schreiber was so impressed with his own gesture that he further instructed that a documentary would be made to record this inspiring episode in annals of the brotherhood of man. The next thing anyone knew, there was a sullen, pissed-off young Iraqi on the set, telling Davenport's camera how freaked out he was to be "working for a Jewish director of a Jewish movie defending the Jewish theory"--that would appear to be the "theory" that the Holocaust happened--and bitterly complaining that while the most important scenes were being filmed, he was made to remain in a trailer, "mixing the snacks." Davenport seems a little overly taken with the notion that Muthana's story parallels that of Iraq itself since 2003, and way too taken with the idea that there's some larger comment to mae about the culture at large that metasized in Baghdad: at one point, she cuts from actual footage of carnage in Iraq to gruseomely made-up extras lying in heaps on the set of Doom, a movie based on a video game, whose star, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, arranged to sent Muthana to film school in London after the little fella's love affair with Liev Schreiber went the way of all flesh. By the end, Davenport herself is trying to explain to Mohmed that she can't continue to shell out money whenever he says he needs it and complaining that he's gotten his hands on her footage and is "holding it hostage." Early on, Liev Schreiber's associates say that Mohmed simply didn't understand the mechanics of how a smart operator makes himself "indispensible" to a director and so uses his time on a film set as a career stepping stone. But they can't say he didn't learn as he went along.

MOST EFFECTIVE MINDLESS SCARE MACHINE: The Strangers

SHITTIEST-LOOKING MOVIE OF THE YEAR: It used to be that back when filmmaking on almost any scale was an incredibly expensive, physically demanding enterprise, low-budget indie filmmakers and proud amateurs who either couldn't afford or achieve decent lighting or camerawork could be counted on to point to the butt-ugliness of their work as proof of their artistic integrity. But recent technological advances have made films that can't meet a certain level of visual polish harder and harder to come by. JCVD is worth pointing to as a real match of form and content, yoking its single, solitary, half-bright idea--let's get all meta with Jean-Claude Van Damme!--not just to a slack and unimaginative execution but to a visual style that makes it look as if Dario Argento had rubbed entrails all over the camera lens, or that the entire country of Belgium had neglected to pay its light bill. Here's to director Mabrouk el Mechri for kickin' it old school.

NOT ALL THAT: Baghead, Ballast, Be Kind Rewind, Che, Doubt, Frozen River, George Romero's Diary of the Dead, A Girl Cut in Two, Heartbeat Detector, I Serve the King of England, Momma's Man, The Pool, Rachel Getting Married, Shotgun Stories, Standard Operating Procedure, Stuck, Tell No One, Trannsiberian, W., Wendy and Lucy

Screengrab Interview: Laurent Cantet Takes Us to School

Phil Nugent — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Laurent Cantet is one of the most daring and stimulating filmmakers to come out of Europe in the past decade, and he keeps challenging himself. Cantet's movies (Human Resources, Time Out, Heading South), contemporary social dramas that he casts with a mix of trained actors and nonprofessionals, explore issues and anxieties--about work, class, gender, aging--that most films shy away from, and they do it without seeming dry or messagey. His newest film, which will be released in America this weekend under the English language title The Class, is his most ambitious project to date. Based on the book Entre les murs ("Between the Walls") by François Bégaudeau, a 37-year-old former teacher turned novelist and essayist (and film critic), it's a high school movie like no other. Working from a script credited to himself, Bégaudeau, and his own regular screenwriting collaborator, Robin Campillo, Cantet gathered together a group of thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds to represent the multicultural classroom presided over by their teacher, played by Bégaudeau. He made some real finds, including the mouthy sparkplug Esméralda Ouertani and Franck Keita, who plays Souleymane, the angriest and most defiantly unreachable of the kids. Once everything was in place, they worked together for a year, with their scenes monitored by three high-definition cameras. (One cameraman focused on the teacher, the second on the kids, and the third was hired to keep an eye out for the happy accidents.) The result is a movie that's bristlingly alive and full of surprises--not the least of which are provided by Bégaudeau's instructor, a hotshot charmer who badly wants the kids to see him as a cool older dude rather than a stuffy instructional figure, and who isn't always able to maintain perspective when faced with a choice between meeting a troubled, needy kid halfway and preserving his own self-image and ego. The Class, which won the Palme d'or at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, is arriving in theaters just in time to confirm its status as one of the best pictures of the year.

SCREENGRAB: So, directing your leading man in this movie, you got to tell a film critic what to do. That must have been fun.

LAURENT CANTET: When he was in front of the camera, he was not a critic anymore. He was very busy, not just because he was acting himself, but also guiding the scene from within the scene, guiding the children to go where we wanted them to go. He had to think of all that while we were filming.

SCREENGRAB: I think this is the first movie you've made that started with someone else's material. How did you get involved with Bégaudeau and his book?

CANTET: I wrote the first script two years before reading the book. It was the story of Souleymane. The book is more documentary than the film itself. The book is sort of a diary. Every day he wrote about what he was doing while he was teaching, and then he rewrote that to make it into a chronicle of the life of the class. There was no real dramatic structure in the book. That's why I was able to bring the story about Souleymane that I had written and connect it to the documentary material that Francois had proposed. Then I began to put the script together with Robin Capillo, and Francois would read it every day and tell us, "I can believe this" or "I don't believe that" or "I wouldn't say this in that way, here's how I would say it." He was really more of an advisor than a co-writer.

SCREENGRAB: One thing that I find exciting about your movies is that you seem to be really interested in exploring the ways that institutions let people down.

CANTET: I wanted to show all the complexities of this institution, the school. On the one side, it helps a lot of children to integrate into society. On the other hand, it excludes a lot of children, children like Souleymane, who can't find his place in the system. Or girls like Henriette, the one who says at the end that she feels she hasn't learned anything.

SCREENGRAB: I was a little surprised at the degree to which the teacher is presented as this flawed character. In some ways, his character really doesn't come off very well. Is that something that Bégaudeau was totally on board with?

CANTET: I didn't--we didn't--want to make an ideal teacher, a heroic teacher. Human beings just aren't like that. And of course, it was no problem for Francois to show that side. Because he was acting, you see. It was the same with the children. The boy who plays Souleymane is nothing like Souleymane, he's very kind. But he was able to show this image that's unlike himself.

SCREENGRAB: So the kids were able to step up as actors? Because I was curious about how much you had to shape the roles to fit who the kids already were.

CANTET: There was a kind of alchemy involved. We worked together for a year, you know, in our workshop that we built inside the school, and at times I couldn't tell what was coming from me, from Francois, from the children themselves. We worked together for three hours each week from October till May, and then we shot during the summer, for seven weeks. I wasn't paid [for the preparation period], nobody was paid. It's just my way of working.

SCREENGRAB: How did you find these kids?

CANTET: It was quite easy. We just found the school that was interested in the project, which happened to be in a very mixed neighborhood, and we organized this weekend, and told the volunteers that they would all be welcome, and we had fifty volunteers at the beginning, twenty-five of whom stayed to the end. I didn't choose them. They simply decided to be part of the film.

SCREENGRAB: Some of the kids who really stick out, like Esmeralda--did you know early on that you were going to be using them a lot?

CANTET: Yes, Esmeralda was at the first meeting, and after two minutes -- [laughs and shakes his head]--it was obvious that she was going to be playing a central role. And we were expecting to find such a character, we had a place for her in the conception. And some kids created their own character. Take, for instance, Wei Huang, the young Chinese boy. In the script, we had a young Chinese boy who doesn't speak French very well, and he's afraid of making mistakes, so he just doesn't speak. That might have made for an interesting character. Except then we met Wei, and Wei is very talkative. He likes to express himself, even though his French isn't perfect, he only arrived in the country two years ago. We weren't going to tell him, "Wei, shut up, be more like the character we've written," because Wei was more interesting than that character. So we rewrote the character to better fit Wei.

There's also a character who's a Goth. The boy himself is not a Goth in real life. But when we talked about costuming, someone asked, "Are we obliged to dress exactly as we do in real life?" I said no, if someone wants to be, say, a Goth... I didn't even get to finish my sentence. He was like, "Yes! Yes, I want to be a Goth!" So I said, let's try it. It gave him a chance to be, during the shooting, what he doesn't dare to be in real life. But he really embodied that character, he really lived with that character. He was able to improvise as that character.

SCREENGRAB: You like working with non-actors.

CANTET: Yes, it's something that is, first, very interesting, because you learn a lot of things, and the film becomes based on what they can bring from their own experience. I really like working with that, and I'm always surprised by what can happen. Accidents can happen, you really have to listen to what's happening and use it to rebuild the scene. It's something that I really like.

SCREENGRAB: How different is it working with non-professionals, compared to working with someone like Aurélien Recoing, whose performance in Time Out, which is one of the most amazing things I've ever seen, must have taken an awful lot of skill to bring off?

CANTET: In fact, with Aurélien Recoing, we worked a little bit the same way. Aurélien rehearsed with the non-professional actors in the cast, learning to work with them, to help them be at ease in the scene. I like to mix professional and non-professional actors in a scene because I think it helps both. The non-actors may be driven a bit by the professionals, who can give them the confidence they need to get through it. And the professionals don't act the same way as they do when they're working with another actor. They have to really listen.

SCREENGRAB: Have you gotten any feedback from the educational community about The Class?

CANTET: [Pause.] Yes.

SCREENGRAB: {Laughter] Oh-kay.

CANTET: In fact, the film divided the teachers in France, between those who liked it, because they could recognize the problems and issues that they have to deal with every day. And then there are others--and I should say, I think they're in the minority-- who rejected the film because they watched it as if it were a documentary film, and they were judging the teacher, and they didn't want to see a feature film like that. They didn't want to recognize themselves in that. But of course, the teacher is what I wanted him to be, and we never set out to make a film that would present this model to the world where we were going, "Oh, that's a good teacher," or pointing a finger and going, "That's a bad teacher!" We just wanted to show, that's a teacher.

Cannes Rundown- The Winners!

Paul Clark — Mon, 26 May 2008 02:24:00 GMT

Laurent Cantet’s The Class (Entre les Murs) won the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, an award that was bestowed on the film earlier today. A last-minute addition to this year’s Competition lineup, Cantet’s film took home the top prize in a year that saw a number of notable titles but no clear frontrunner. The Class was announced as a unanimous Palme winner, and was praised by jury president Sean Penn for its “generosity.”

Due to Penn’s political leanings, many predicted Steven Soderbergh’s Che to be a contender for the Palme, but the film had to make do with a Best Actor award for star Benicio Del Toro. Taking home Best Actress was Sandra Corveloni for Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas’ Linha de Passe.

Here’s the complete list of winners:

Palme d'Or: Entre Les Murs (The Class), directed by Laurent Cantet
Grand Prix (runner-up): Gomorra, directed by Matteo Garrone
Prix de la Mise en Scene (best director): Nuri Bilge Ceylan for Three Monkeys
Prix du Scenario (best screenplay): Jean Pierre and Luc Dardenne for Le Silence de Lorna
Camera d'Or (best first feature): Hunger, directed by Steve McQueen
special mention: Ils mourront tous sauf moi, directed by Valeria Gai Guermanika
Prix du Jury (jury prize): Il Divo, directed by Paolo Sorrentino
Prix d'interpretation feminine (best actress): Sandra Corveloni for Linha de Passe
Prix d'interpretation masculine (best actor): Benicio del Toro for Che
Prix de 61st Festival de Cannes: Catherine Deneuve (Un Conte de noel) and Clint Eastwood (The Exchange)
Palme d'Or (short film): Metron, directed by Marian Crisan
special mention: Jerrycan, directed by Julius Avery

Cannes Rundown, Days 10 and 11- I'd be the screenwriter who speaks Chinese and plays the oboe. That would be cool.

Paul Clark — Sun, 25 May 2008 04:01:00 GMT

As the Cannes Film Festival enters its final days before the announcement of awards on Sunday, here’s one final roundup of reviews. We begin with Charlie Kaufman’s highly-anticipated (by me, anyway) directorial debut Synecdoche, New York. Would Kaufman’s inexperience behind the camera cause him to become timid and soften his edge? If reviews are any indication, don’t bet on it.

AO Scott in the New York Times- “Mr. Kaufman, the wildly inventive screenwriter of “Being John Malkovich” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” has, in his first film as a director, made those efforts look almost conventional. Like his protagonist, a beleaguered theater director played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, he has created a seamless and complicated alternate reality, unsettling nearly every expectation a moviegoer might have about time, psychology and narrative structure.”

But not all were so impressed. J. Hoberman in the Village Voice- “Collapsing in sodden self-reflexivity after a promising 40 minutes, Kaufman’s arch, interminable phantasmagoria—with Philip Seymour Hoffman as a Job-like theater director—retroactively improved all but the most miserablist movies I saw at Cannes.”

Other competition titles:

Jeff Wells on Paolo Sorrentino’s Il Divo- “I knew I was seeing something intensely audacious and stylistically exciting, but the political arena it depicts is so dry and complex and wholly-unto-itself that gradually the film makes you feel as if you're lying in an isolation tank.”

Laurent Cantet’s The Class/Entre Les Meurs, according to Time Out’s Geoff Andrew- “Everything rings absolutely true in this film, and everything is utterly engrossing from start to finish, despite the apparent lack of a straightforward narrative during the first hour… There are no easy answers proffered to the various questions raised about education, schools and society, but the film makes for admirably lucid, subtle and thought-provoking drama throughout. And the kids are terrific.”

Cinematical’s James Rocchi tears into Wim Wenders’ latest, The Palermo Shooting- “After Palermo Shooting ended (with a title card offering the film as a tribute "To Ingmar (Bergman) and Michelangelo (Antonioni)," which made me imagine Bergman and Antonioni saying Uh, thanks, but. ... from the next world), the Cannes press audience booed and laughed and stumbled out into the streets for detailed digressions and discussions on how, exactly, Wenders had, as our British friends say, lost the plot. Palermo Shooting goes fairly off the mark, or fires blanks, or has a damp fuse; I'm not sure about which firearm metaphor applies here, and if Wenders can't be bothered to have any cohesion to his signs and symbols, why should I?... It's still a little sad to see a major filmmaker make such a series of major mistakes in the name of a fairly minor film.”

While I certainly admire Cannes’ devotion to Wenders, perhaps the competition would be better served if, instead of reserving spots for ex-Palme winners past their prime, the selectors would give some love to gifted up-and-comers who deserve a higher profile People like, say, Kelly Reichardt, whose Wendy and Lucy played in Un Certain Regard. Here’s ScreenDaily’s Mike Goodridge- “Reichardt's films are quiet and detailed, and in Wendy And Lucy , she provides an all too believable picture of how fine is the line between getting by and becoming homeless and destitute… Unlike Old Joy, which was a two-hander, Wendy And Lucy is told entirely from the point of view of one character - and her dog, of course. The beauty of the film is not only in telling a story with so few words but in showing the wordless tenderness that exists between woman and dog in a society which has cast her onto its fringes. “

Also of note was the Un Certain Regard prizewinner, Tulpan. Here’s ScreenDaily’s Jonathan Romney on the film- “Shy courtship, stark landscapes and a spirited supporting cast of livestock make Tulpan a vivid, intensely enjoyable debut feature from former documentarian Sergei Dvortsevoi. The Kazakhstan-set film hardly breaks new ground, in both setting and mood pitching its tent very close to The Story Of The Weeping Camel. But it similarly blends intimate, gentle fiction with a strong dose of ethnographic observation, to immensely charming effect.”

Justin Chang in Variety on Albert Serra’s Birdsong- “Patience was no doubt required of the Three Wise Men as they made their way toward Bethlehem, and the same will be required of auds who seek out "Birdsong," Albert Serra's minimalist reinterpretation of the Magi's journey. Hushed, contemplative but often quite droll experiment offers beautifully sculpted images on a black-and-white canvas across its sometimes hypnotic, sometimes tedious runtime.”

Wendy Ide praises Eldorado in the London Times- “This off-beat tragicomic road movie from Belgium is one of the sleeper hits of the festival. Screening in the Director’s Fortnight sidebar, it’s a far cry from the dour, grey perception of Belgian cinema fostered by the work of people like the Dardenne brothers…The landscapes and soundtrack choices evoke American road movies of a bygone era; the sensibility is definitely European.”

Abel Ferrara’s Chelsea on the Rocks, according to Dennis Lim in the Los Angeles Times- “Abel Ferrara's new film, "Chelsea on the Rocks," represents a kind of homecoming for the Bronx-born director and longtime chronicler of the New York City underbelly. Ferrara, best known for urban tales of damnation such as "Bad Lieutenant" and "King of New York," moved to Italy several years ago, fleeing a city transformed by the Rudolph W. Giuliani regime and the Sept. 11 attacks, not to mention a cultural and economic climate that had grown more hostile to maverick filmmakers.”

Finally, here’s a link to Karina Longworth’s live-blogging of Quentin Tarantino’s Film Lecture at Cannes. I’ve seen how fast that dude talks, and my fingers are hurting just thinking about it. Bang-up job, Karina.

Cannes 2008: Late-Breaking News!

Paul Clark — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 23:19:00 GMT

One week ago today, the Cannes Film Festival powers that be unveiled this year's selection of films in Competition. But while there was plenty on that list to get excited about, it seems they weren't finished, as today they announced three more selections in the official Competition lineup.

True to form, one of the latecomers was a French entry, and it proved to be a pretty interesting choice: Entre les murs, the latest film by celebrated filmmaker Laurent Cantet, whose previous works included the 2000 film Time Out. Another American film was added today as well- Two Lovers, the latest from We Own the Night's James Gray, a Cannes favorite. Two Lovers, starring Joaquin Phoenix and Gwyneth Paltrow, is said to be a romance, making it something of a change of pace for Gray, who has to date specialized in crime stories.

But the big news today was the announcement of this year's opening-night film, Fernando Meirelles' Blindness. The film, which stars Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo, will screen in competition, with its pedigree the hope is that it improves on the dicey precedent set by recent Cannes openers such as Fanfan la Tulipe and The Da Vinci Code.

Added out of competition was the opener of the festival's Un Certain Regard sidebar, Hunger, directed by Steve McQueen (no, not that one). Finally, the closing film of the festival was officially announced as being Barry Levinson's What Just Happened?. Sadly, this star-studded film (the cast includes Robert DeNiro, Bruce Willis, and Robin Wright Penn) is a Hollywood satire, not a big-screen adaptation of the long-forgotten sitcom Wha'Happened?. So all you Mike LaFontaine fans in the audience will be sorely disappointed.

But wait, there's more! Two more names were added to the Official Competition Jury (also announced last week), which brings the jury up to nine members. The additions were French actress Jeanne Balibar (who worked with fellow jury member Sergio Castellitto in Va Savoir)...

... and Iranian writer/director Marjane Satrapi, who directed last year's Jury Prize-winner Persepolis and collaborated with jury prez Sean Penn on the English-language version of the film.

The Cannes Film Festival will be held from May 14 through the 25th.

Movies We Missed: Les Revenants [They Came Back] (2004, Robin Campillo)

Paul Clark — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 20:00:00 GMT

I know what you're thinking. You looked at the title of this piece, saw the French title and thought, "there goes Paul again, recommending another French movie. Who wants to bet that this one's existential and deliberately paced, and full of observations and death and social class?" And the thing is, you'd more or less be right. But Les Revenants has something most of those movies don't have:

Zombies. Do I have your attention now?

Why I missed it: Actually, most people missed this movie. After playing at numerous festivals during 2004 and 2005 (including Cannes, Venice and Toronto), it never received a proper theatrical release on our shores. Eventually, it was unceremoniously released on DVD, and I wasn't even aware of its existence until my friend Jason, an unapologetic zombie movie nut, recommended it to me. Well Jason, when you're right, you right. And this time, you were right.

Why I should have known: Les Revenants was Robin Campillo's first effort as a director, but his other work was familiar to me, having co-written and edited numerous films by the talented filmmaker Laurent Cantet. Of particular note is his work on Time Out, which wouldn't seem to be similar to Les Revenants but showed Campillo skilled at mining existential unease, a skill that would serve him well in his directorial debut.

Why I ended up kicking myself: While Les Revenants is a movie about zombies, it's like no zombie movie I've ever seen. Even the zombies themselves are different, neither the lumbering flesh-eaters of classic zombie fare nor the running snarling beasties of more modern genre incarnations. In many ways, it's difficult to tell the "returnees" (as the film calls them from the humans who never died. Even the film's opening shot of thousands of returnees walking out of a cemetery looks like it could just as easily be showing mourners departing a funeral. Aside from a body temperature difference of roughly five degrees and some slowness in their mental processes, the returnees walk and talk like any other human. They fit in fairly well in society, with many of them returning to the workforce.

One of the subtexts of the zombie-movie genre is the idea that the zombies were once our loved ones, and Campillo's film makes this idea explicit. Some of the most fascinating scenes in the film show the different ways in which the living deal with the return of their dearly departed. Some of them are overcome with emotion, such as the parents whose child has returned to them, but others are more conflicted, like Rachel, played by Géraldine Palihas. Rachel's husband Mathieu died several years previously in a car accident, and it's fairly clear she's had a hard time getting over his death. After Mathieu returns, Rachel ignores the fact as long as he can until he finds her and works his way back into her life.

However, it becomes clear that the returnees aren't the same people they once were. Those of working age are given jobs, but while Mathieu returns to his former engineering firm, he can't function at his former level and is put to work in a factory. The returnees' difficulties with communication make a number of people uneasy, and by and large they're treated as second-class citizens. In addition, the returnees are a restless bunch, wandering in the daytime and leaving their houses by night to attend mysterious meetings. What could they be planning?

Campillo sort of answers that question in the final third of the film, although the returnees plans and motivations aren't particularly clear (escape? Sabotage? Recruitment?). Much more fascinating is the way the film's relationships play out near the end. The parents of the returned child disagree on how to treat him- while the father dotes on his son, his wife is growing increasingly freaked out by his behavior. And Rachel, who had been reluctant to welcome Mathieu back into her life, becomes increasingly devoted to him, often to the detriment of her own well-being.

Despite the zombie storyline, Les Revenants is not a gorefest. There are no violent deaths in the film, much less the bloody disembowelments we've grown to expect from the genre. Campillo's film is subtler than that, depending more on the subtle existential dread that comes from finding that someone you love isn't quite the way he used to be. With Les Revenants, Campillo has announced himself as a filmmaker to watch.