It’s not always fun at the Cannes Film Festival, as Sailesh Ram reports…
People, it’s not as glamorous as it looks. Honest. Ok, I have my tongue very firmly in my cheek.Well, at least my tongue is not sticking out of my mouth, but then if you’d seen what I have… (in Cannes).Sorry. It is a gathering of the beautiful people and some of us are just born gatecrashers!
Of course, it is (glamorous), that’s the allure of Cannes.
It’s a mix of business and pleasure like no other (don’t take my word for it, I am too busy with one and not the other)…which? I can’t ever tell.Mention it anywhere and most eyes will light up at the thought of swish parties, hedonistic excess and movie stars at the touch of your fingertips.
(Somehow these all seem connected too J and no, I didn’t go to those parties. Strange. Maybe next year…?).
For all that overdose in fantasy and speculative projection, you can blame films such as The Great Gatsby or Behind The Candlebra, the penultimate film I saw in Cannes, on Tuesday (May 21).
About the US piano showman, Liberace, who wasn’t a movie star – but certainly enjoyed the rich trappings of one – it was something of a fruity gay romp with Hollywood stars, Michael Douglas (as Liberace) and Matt Damon (Scott Thorson), enjoyably camping it up under the reliable direction of Steve Soderbergh.Films like this are fine and part of the Hollywood factory that has to display its wares in Cannes.
However, for the aficionado, it has to be about the films (not this star or that one), that’s why most of us who love the medium go – in search of something, new, fresh, exciting; a construction (of the human imagination) that ultimately says something about our own journey in this life.
Omar, a film by the Palestinian director, Hany Abu-Assad, has no stars as far I know, but was simply, scintillating.
It would be no shock if it won the Un Certain Regard competition, in which it features. This section is designed to spotlight emerging directors of power and talent with a nod of encouragement to work that may, in future, feature in competition for the Palme D’Or, the ultimate Cannes accolade.
This year India was the special country of focus, in recognition of a 100 years of the country’s cinema.
But you would hardly have noticed at a wider level in Cannes – apart from some advertising and a couple of showy shindigs, and one midnight screening for Monsoon Shootoutin the Grand Lumiere (in the big theatre with the red carpet), India was just another country looking to push its industry into the global limelight.
Make great films and the rest will follow easily enough.
If you don’t believe that, note this – there’s a filmmaker from Chad, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, whose film Grigris appears in the competition section, the most prestigious at Cannes and up against better known names and films such as Roman Polanski (Venus in Fur) and Ethan and Joel Cohen (Inside Llewyn Davis).
It’s being touted as a possible Palme D’Or recipient. Premiered in Cannes on Wednesday (May 22), it received a 10-minute standing ovation at its conclusion.
Make great films and the rest will follow easily enough.
Winning Cannes’ top prize would be some coup for Chad and Saleh-Haroun, and from all accounts, it is richly deserved for his tale about a disabled man who wants to be a dancer and the strikingly beautiful prostitute who helps him.
For most, the Cannes experience is a mixture of feeling seduced and abandoned at one level, if not exactly of the physical variety, then some affliction of the senses.
It’s a wonderful melting pot of sights, sounds and sensations as the beautiful people from almost all over the world descend on this relatively small but pretty Riviera town.
That all brings me neatly to a film which is partly about this occurrence in Cannes and called precisely this – Seduced and Abandoned.
It should have added, in Cannes.
It charts the experiences of actor Alec Baldwin and writer-director James Toback in Cannes last year trying to pitch Last Tango in Tikrit.
No, that is not a misprint. Tikrit, Iraq.
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Baldwin would play the Brando figure to Neve Campbell as Jeanne and they would meet in the desert and conduct an intense relationship amidst the chaos of war. The film has no script and the pair hawk it around Cannes merely as a concept.
It is something of a documentary, though the two preferred to call it, a ‘hybrid’, when they introduced it personally in Cannes on Sunday (May 19).
It’s great fun, contains some brilliant interviews with among others, actors Ryan Gosling, Jessica Chastain and Bernice Bejo and legendary directors Bernardo Bertolucci, who made the original Last Tango in Paris (1972), Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather) and Polanksi, and gives real insight into the whole business of raising money to make movies and its separation from art.
As the director of one of the greatest films ever made, Citizen Kane, Orson Wells said: “It’s no way to live.”
But try telling that to the people who go to the Cannes Film Festival every year – yes…there are compensations!
