And so to some odds and ends, rounding off coverage of the strongest Cannes since the 60th, surpassing even the festival of two years ago, which featured Inglorious Basterds, The White Ribbon, Enter The Void and Antichrist. This year felt more driven by the movies themselves than the artists behind them, which is perhaps why two of the critics' choices felt overshadowed by arguably more populist entries such as Drive and The Skin I Live In. The first was the Dardennebrothers' The Kid With A Bike (pictured), their bid to make it a triple in the Palme D'Or-win stakes. Personally, it's my favourite of their films so far, largely due to the performance of 12-year-old Thomas Doret as Cyril, a little boy who has been parcelled off to a children's home by his deadbeat dad (Dardennes regular Jeremie Reiner). Looking for his father, Cyril meets a local hairdresser, Samantha (Cécile De France), who offers to ta...
Take a look at that picture. Just look at it. How can any film starring Sean Penn looking like THAT possibly be any good? Now imagine that he'll be playing that role with an effete, whiney, baby voice, and that he isn't simply playing a faded rock star – his character becomes A NAZI HUNTER. I must admit that my hopes weren't high for Paolo Sorrentino's This Must Be The Place, in which Penn plays Cheyenne, a retired rocker who lives in wealthy seclusion in Dublin with his wife Jane (Frances McDormand). Cheyenne was an emo superstar in the 80s, but gave it all up after his miserabilist lyrics caused the suicide of two teenage boys. Sustained by his royalties, he lives like a ghost; his best friend is a teen goth named Mary (Eve Hewson) whose brother has disappeared, and the highlight of his week is their trip to the shopping mall, where he trundles round with his trusty trolley.
The Artist, to my mind, should have won the Palme D'Or, partly because it would have given the film a big push in all the places that are impervious to the charms of this French-made (but US-set) film's biggest champion, Harvey Weinstein. Weinstein introduced a small market screening I attended in Cannes and revealed that his brother was less than impressed when he reported back that he'd seen a great film that was in black and white and silent – and that he'd bought it (if I remember rightly, Bob made some suggestions about checking into a mental asylum). Once they saw it, though, everyone at the Weinstein Company fell in love with Michel Hazanavicius' enchanting film, and when the final credits rolled it was easy to see why. The Artist surely stands to be the left-field hit of the year, a film with so much personality and charm that 100 minutes – daunting on paper – simply fly by.
This is because Hazanavicius' film isn't simply a faithful homage...
As you probably can tell from the sudden infrequency of this year's Cannes updates, the 64th festival didn't fizzle out after the world premiere of Terrence Malick's Tree Of Life – in fact, it actually got much, much busier. Screening the same day as Almodovar's almost perfectly bonkers The Skin I Live In, Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive roared across the screen and left audiences breathless. If you're familiar with Refn's Pusher trilogy you'll know a fair bit about his visceral style and fondness for extreme violence, but Drive isn't quite in that vein. Conceived as an homage to such LA noirs as Michael Mann's Thief (1981) – check out the title art – and William Friedkin's To Live And Die In LA (1985), Drive is actually more reminiscent of his two most obscure films – Bleeder (1999), which is Refn's only halfway romantic movie before this one, and Fear X (2003), a psychological thriller using music and mood to reflect its troubled hero's paranoid s...
After yesterday's disappointment with Melancholia, I'm very, very glad to report that Pedro Almodovar's latest is one of his strongest in years. Called The Skin I Live In, it stars Antonio Banderas – who last worked with the Spanish legend on Tie Me Up Tie Me Down (1990) – as a plastic surgeon with, shall we say, a very dark secret. It's hard to know what to reveal and what not to reveal, since this is a film that's packed with plot and detail. Perhaps it's simply safe to say that when we first meet Banderas's character, the inscrutable Robert Ledgard, he is an ambitious and perhaps even ruthless scientist, who is pushing for the use of “transgenesis” – a form of genetic engineering – and in particular a new, synthetic skin that will be tougher than the human kind and impervious to mosquito bites. Robert lives in a remote home-slash-clinic with his housekeeper Marilia (Marisa Paredes) and the beautifu...
Cannes Videblogisode #4 "Aha. Sam informs me that he had to cross the line as his original shooting angle would have ended up" Chris Hewitt Read comment
