Teka Thomas
@ Tattoo
Q:How do you keep your life clean?
A:"Low alcohol intake. I never smoke and I've never done drugs."
AMONG THE MANY SURPRISES in Romanian director Cristian Mungiu's devastating feature "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days," which deservedly won the Palme d'Or at last year's Cannes Film Festival, is the fact that its emotional focus isn't Gabita (Laura Vasiliu), the desperate girl seeking an abortion in the waning days of communist rule, but the resourceful Otilia (Anamaria Marinca), who shepherds her weak-minded friend through a scenario so nightmarish it must be a screenwriter's exaggeration.
Mungiu, who wrote the screenplay as the first of a planned "Tales of the Golden Age" series (note the irony), counters that such things happened and much worse, and a kind of historical amnesia is creeping over Romanian youth born after the 1989 revolution. In his brutal yet artful way, Mungiu is out to remind them — and the world — what life was like under the Soviets.
ONE WOULD THINK the last thing Cannes needs is more star power, but after looking at the sweaty backs of critics' heads for seven hours a day, the sight of some scrubbed, upright, nice-smelling (if one can get that close) pretty people would be as welcome as an elusive breath of fresh air.
During his very first Cannes, my Award Winning Film Critic Companion had a classic sighting: Paris Hilton, posing skankily for a circle of photographers. Of course, she couldn't make it this year. (Paris confinee!, one headline screamed. "It's like Camus," muttered a friend. "The senseless cruelty of an absurd universe — that's hot.") We did see Leonardo DiCaprio coming out of a press conference for his universally loathed/ignored "The 11th Hour," and he's the very last thing I expected him to be: tall. I mean, he's not going to dunk more baskets than Tim Robbins, but dude's a six-footer. Catherine Deneuve, whom I'd seen before, is tiny, with the requisite movie-star big head — Leo's is almost football-shaped. She was at the screening of "Persepolis," but French screen legend Danielle Darrieux, who voices the main character's grandmother, was not, helas.
On our last full day, we hung around the exit of a press conference for Chang-Dong Lee's "Secret Sunshine" in order to get a glimpse of South Korean movie star Kang-ho Song, whose work is a current obsession. He's tall, too, and was rocking carelessly spiky hair, and he smiled and waved vaguely into the crowd near me. Good enough. We walked away beaming. "We actually saw him!"
I'M JUST GOING to come right out and say this: Gus Van Sant is beginning to freak me out.
"Mala Noche" was a small masterpiece, and it augured good things for the then-young director 22 years ago. But Van Sant, pictured at right, is no longer the age of his gringo hero from that 1985 film, lusting after a careless, cruel Mexican kid. As the director ages, the objects of camera's desire grow ever younger. Even creepier, they are cast to look like angelic hustlers out of some '50s dime novel — helpless, mouth-breathing, inarticulate, dewy, vulnerable, uneducated, abandoned to the fake toughness of the street and the real tenderness of the first helping hand they meet. The fact that he makes arty movies about suchlike teens — "Elephant," "Kids," "My Own Private Idaho," to some extent the torpid "Last Days" — does nothing to disguise the fetishization of these downy dears and their appealing, skin-crawling, inescapable youth.
Critics and fans continue to talk about his movies as mere movies, and there was a good deal of excitement here over the screening of "Paranoid Park" because Gus is beloved for his arty outings and not the mainstream bores he churns out in between. "Paranoid Park" is adapted from a young-adult novel and is about Alex, an aimless skater boi who accidentally kills a man and uses his slacker wiles to get away with it. Van Sant put out a casting call via MySpace (aieee!). And, validating the critics in general and the director's vision specifically, it's pretty great.
Continue Reading "Cannes Do: With Apologies to Foghorn Leghorn" »
Express' Arion Berger sends in her latest dispatch from the Cannes Flim Festival. See all of her reports from Cannes here.
FOUR DAYS IN and right on schedule. I hit the Cannes Wall after about half an hour of walking out on Ulrich Seidl's "Import Export." I would have stayed, even though the film-converging stories about a German slacker-thug and a rather dim Ukranian girl (that's Ekateryna Rak, at left) who switch countries in search of jobs, flotsam in a chaotic economic ocean — is no good. But Seidl is known for his "bold carnality," and that at least means nudity, vicious attack dogs, vicious attacks and clean, symmetric compositions. With naked people.
So over steack-frites, the undertow begins to tug. Walking, waiting, sitting, spending — and for what? The exhilaration of the revelatory films I was fortunate enough to see early on has begun to ebb. Everything since has been fine, just fine. Well-made, well-meaning and worthy. After hearing raves about Li Yang's "Blind Shaft" (a bunch of Chinese miners knock each other off for the insurance money; it's a comedy), we approach his latest, "Blind Mountain," with great expectations. Li can consider my awareness about the plight of women kidnapped and sold as brides to bachelors in backward villages raised — "Blind Mountain" ("Mang Shan") is like "The Wicker Man" with pigs and dried corn instead of nature and sex. But I came to see Christopher Lee in a dress, dancing down to the shore (or, you know, the equivalent), and I get a well-made public-service announcement with some of the best sound editing in the universe. It's fine, really.
Continue Reading "Cannes Do: Bold Carnality Is Not Enough" »
The Cannes Film Festival is still in its early days, and the sun is already getting to Express' Arion Berger. For dispatches from last week, click here and here.
THINGS DRIVE ME CRAZY at Cannes: The lack of coffee in the press room; the fact that unless you are waiting in the broiling sun for a movie, watching a movie or flopped, limp with sun, on your bed, there's nothing to do here but spend money. A few Euros here and there — a couple of newspapers, a sandwich, infinite coffees — go quickly. I am fed up with the impatience of the crowd as well, irked that the scheduling (necessarily, but whatever) precludes on seeing all the movies they want, but most of all — why beat around the bush? — I hate Asia Argento's guts.
I'm a fan of her father's, noted Italian horror impresario Dario Argento, and I'm sure she's a very nice girl (she's pictured at right). Actually, I am not sure of that at all. She co-stars with Michael Madsen, the '00s answer to Mickey Rourke, in Olivier Assayas' "Boarding Gate," and I could not take her for more than 20 minutes. Her head hanging down, slurring every line like a zonked Juliette Lewis, mistakenly confident in her sexual allure, she's the most irritating actress I've ever had the joy in walking out on. The movie drew mixed reviews, but I have no opinion. Between Assayas' women problems (he made "Clean," with then-wife Maggie Cheung; they divorced some time during the shoot; this year, she's on the competition jury, and I hope she shuts him out) and That Woman, there was nothing to stay for.
Thanks to her I missed Barbet Schroeder's interesting-sounding "L'Avocat de la Terreur," a documentary about the lawyer Jacques Verges, who has made a career out of defending terrorists without regard to country, regime or morality. We did make it to "Savage Grace," Tom Kalin's well-made but extremely unhealthy film about unstable mid-century society adventuress Barbara Baekeland (Julianne Moore, who seems to do nothing but wear glamorous '50s costumes and play the secretly nutso wife), who married into the clan of the Bakelite plastics-manufacturing fortune and was stabbed to death by her own son. Kalin's is best known for 1992's "Swoon," an eros-and-thanatos take on the Leopold and Loeb murder; "Savage Grace" is similar, but with more drink, incest, meltdowns and really enviable peignors.
Continue Reading "Cannes Do: Young Scum, Drink Free Tonight" »
Express' Arion Berger on the action on the screen and promotional zaniness on the street at the Cannes Film Festival.
BECAUSE OF THE SURFEIT OF CHOICE, the festivals within (and without) the festival, the publicity stunts and press conferences, the luck of the draw, the motif of the festival, every day of it, every year, is You Never Know. You never know: what you're missing, whether you'll be disappointed in what you do choose, whether you are where it's happening or if it is happening elsewhere, what exactly is happening, whether it will be worth it when you get there. Very often you never know who that sleazy-looking girl is in shorts and heels posing tartily for photographers. And what is up with the disco trucks?
That's the Croisette, pictured above, for you — a moving carnival about which no one bothers to pretend to be jaded. The foot traffic stops and gawks at the disco trucks with their cheesy fire effects and leatherclad gyrators. We spill out of a Directors' Fortnight Screening — these are not held in the Palais proper — and the foot traffic is so thick it spills a row or two of walkers into the street. Just as I think how I ought to post that information, a yellow Peugeot honks at a pedestrian in a glittery Dolce & Gabbana belt walking in the center of the lane. The man doesn't move aside and the car does not slow down. 
When he's hit, cars and people come to a halt and gather round, multilingually aghast and helpful, with cries of "Ambulance!"
I wonder if anyone was so sanguine the night before, when Jerry Seinfeld slipped off his ropes during a publicity stunt for his animated comedy "Bee Season"? (Wearing a bee suit, he slid down a rope from the top of a hotel to the end of a pier. Twice.)
Continue Reading "Cannes Do: Civilization and Its Disco Trucks" »
Express' Arion Berger is in southern France and sends her first dispatch from the Cannes Film Festival.
IT'S THE 60TH ANNIVERSARY of the Cannes Film Festival, and they have decided that it's not enough to be French this year. Oh no, they are going to be French-Canadian.
The poster for the festival proper, for example, is an ode to jazz-hands mime-love starring the likes of a grinning Danny Glover, Alejandro Inarritu, Gael Garcia Bernal and other formerly dignified people in mid-leap, all bursting out of some bouquet-like formation with vast and discomfiting enthusiasm, like the opening of "Cats" during which the audience is harassed by people in body-tards. Which would be fine, except for the bags we're given with all our schedules and press kits is also a product of the finest, most scampish minds of Montreal: It's shiny black vinyl with multicolored Day-Glo names of great directors (Theo Angelopoulos? Did you have to go there?) emblazoned on it. Fun pastime — Fun pastime — run together last and first names to come up with the lost greats of cinema: Kiarostami Henri! Camus Claude! Tienosuke Kinugasa! May you all get the retrospectives you deserve.
We got in early in the morning after a night of no sleep (well, it's our night now) and hit the Croisette first thing. There's nothing more disorienting than the Croisette, pictured above, on the first day one arrives at the festival. Added to that, various horrible things have happened: The press balcony at the Palais has gotten rid of their superfine coffee and chocolate machines and replaced them with austere watercoolers, they have laid out lovely tables and chairs for the press to relax upon, but pasted up Interdit de Fumer signs all over. (Everyone smokes anyway, especially the Italians, who seem to be in abundance this year.)
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