What will win the Palme at Cannes?

will calum be attending again?

re yr Van Sant question & other things:

Alienated Europeans, Through a Cold Lens
By A. O. SCOTT and MANOHLA DARGIS

CANNES, France, May 21 — One of the most fertile subjects of contemporary European cinema is the desolation of contemporary European life. The extravagance and high spirits outside the Cannes screening rooms thus frequently stand in jarring contrast to the misery displayed within them, where stories of privation, disconnection and violence hold up a corrective mirror to a continent that likes to present itself to the rest of the world as prosperous, unified and at peace.

A particular theme within some of these stories is the harshness of existence in Europe’s formerly Communist nations. “Import/Export,” a disturbing and sometimes brilliant new film by the Austrian director Ulrich Seidl, is set partly in Ukraine, depicted as a place where dirty snow swirls around crumbling Soviet-era housing projects. Not that Vienna, the movie’s other main locale, looks much better. In its own way, this Western capital seems like an equally cold and brutal environment.

“Import/Export,” already one of the more controversial entries in this year’s competition, follows two principal characters, both plucked from the masses of ordinary, alienated, easily ignored Europeans. Their paths never cross, but Mr. Seidl gives their experiences a rough symmetry by subtly juxtaposing shots, scenes and situations so that they seem to rhyme.

Olga is a Ukrainian nurse who emigrates to Vienna, where she finds work as a maid and then as a hospital cleaner. Paul is a vaguely thuggish young Austrian, in debt and at loose ends, who travels with his cretinous stepfather to Ukraine to deliver candy machines and used video games. As they pull into one particularly squalid neighborhood, Paul looks through the windshield and says, “Nobody here is ever going to buy a gumball.”

The anxious chuckle that line elicits is characteristic of the film’s grim comedy. Its relentless depiction of social and individual failure, however, is hardly mitigated by moments of absurdist humor, nor by an occasional flicker of human kindness. Mr. Seidl’s long, static takes and Edward Lachman’s pitilessly illuminating cinematography make banal circumstances seem terrifying and strange. And some of the director’s methods are ethically troubling, even as they are also undeniably effective.

One hallmark of recent Austrian cinema has been the blending of documentary and fictional techniques, and here a made-up story is told using mostly nonprofessional actors (including Ekaterina Rak, who plays Olga, and Paul Hofmann, who plays Paul) and very real settings. Among these are a Ukrainian pornography “studio,” where naked women contort their bodies in front of Web cams, as their online Western clients bark instructions in German, and a geriatric hospital where patients, some in advanced states of dementia and debility, lie in their beds, muttering and moaning.

While “Import/Export” is not polemical, it makes the implicit argument that consumer capitalism, among other forces, has pushed the less privileged citizens of Europe — especially in the East — into a state of abjection. But in making this point so powerfully, Mr. Seidl walks right up to, and perhaps crosses, the boundary between exposing the degradation of human dignity and participating in it.

This is especially true in some scenes near the end, in which the film risks becoming as cruel as its chosen milieu. It was very hard to watch, but I have the feeling I will need to see it again.

Agony and Adolescence

With “Paranoid Park,” an intimate character study of an accidental killer, Gus Van Sant has returned to Cannes with one of the most moving and delicately felt films of his fascinating career. (He won the Palme d’Or in 2003 for “Elephant.”) Shot by the cinematographers Christopher Doyle and Rain Kathy Li with an acute sensitivity to color as an index of feeling and mood, the film unwinds as a series of nonlinear flashbacks, some of which repeat like the refrain of a song. Though based on Blake Nelson’s young-adult novel of the same title, Mr. Van Sant’s film — he wrote the lean screenplay, as well as directed and edited — is a work of art that exploits the plasticity of his own medium to eerie, at times rapturous effect.

The angel-faced Gabe Nevins plays Alex, a high school student who spends much of his out-of-class time skateboarding with his friends and fending off a girl who is eager to lose her virginity. One evening while visiting Paranoid Park, a swooping concrete paradise for throwaways and runaways, buzzing with the sounds of grinding wheels and excited young voices, Alex inadvertently causes the gruesome death of a security guard. Mr. Van Sant tells what happened to the teenager, still more boy than man, not a hint of down on his chin, as if he were building a mosaic. Each new fragment adds another piece to the whole, which doesn’t fully come into view until late in this precisely shaped one-hour-25-minute story.

The film’s visual beauty is so striking — in one shot Alex skateboards against a midnight-blue light, framed by glossy green shrubbery — that it takes a while to appreciate that the images are doing most of the narrative work. You see Alex writing in a notebook and hear him in intermittent voice-over, but the turmoil and confusion churning in his head, as well as the film’s persuasively argued plea for this boy’s fundamental purity, are conveyed through everyday, incidental moments and gestures. Already locked inside the agonizing near-solitude that often haunts adolescence, Alex suffers and worries and exists alone, a state of being that Mr. Van Sant conveys with enormous empathy.

“Paranoid Park” is playing in the main competition and, at press time, does not have an American distributor. Given Mr. Van Sant’s reputation, there’s a good chance that a small company will pick it up, though it’s hard to imagine anyone taking the plunge with the equally radical and austere “Silent Light,” the stunning new film from the Mexican writer and director Carlos Reygadas, which is also in competition.

Mr. Reygadas, last here with his self-conscious affront, “Battle in Heaven,” takes us into an astonishingly alien and beautiful world of Mennonites living in northern Mexico isolation. A story about grace and the fallen world, “Silent Light” owes a strong debt to the Danish master Carl Dreyer, even as it offers continued evidence of Mr. Reygadas’s own intense, individual artistry. I’ll have more to say about this film later in the week.

MANOHLA DARGIS

scott foundas on the lee chang-dong entry. I was jazzed to find out it stars do-yeon jeon, who was so good as the wife in happy end.

http://blogs.laweekly.com/foundas/let-the-sunshine-in

I was able to attend a small advance screening of one competition entry, and I am happy to report that it is nothing less than superb. The film is called Secret Sunshine and it is the fourth to be written and directed by South Korea’s Lee Chang-Dong, whose first three films — Green Fish (1997), Peppermint Candy (2000) and Oasis (2002) — pegged him as one of leading figures in his country’s recent cinematic renaissance. Those movies are too little known in America — only Oasis, which told of the unlikely romance between an ex-con and a young woman stricken with cerebral palsy, earned a U.S. theatrical release — but on Lee’s home turf, they established the director as that most unusual of cinematic hybrids: an uncompromisingly intelligent, personal filmmaker whose work is also accessible and even appealing to a sizable popular audience, no matter that it lacks bodily dismemberment, elaborate revenge schemes or the consumption of live squids.

Probably Lee’s most ambitious and fully realized film yet, Secret Sunshine is that rare movie that possesses that fullness and complexity of a great novel — one that keeps revealing new layers to us the deeper we move into it, and where it is as difficult to predict what will happen ten minutes in as it is two hours later. When the movie begins, it suggests an Asiatic Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, with a recent widow (Jeon Do-yeon) and her young son moving from Seoul to the small town of Milyang (the film’s Korean title), where the woman hopes to establish herself as a private piano tutor. En route, her car breaks down and when the local Milyang mechanic (The Host star Song Kang-ho) comes to her aid, we see the first sparks of a hesitant romance between two shy, lonely people. And so Secret Sunshine proceeds for a while, as the widow adjusts to her new surroundings and takes stock — prompted by the evangelical proselytizing of a born-again pharmacist — of her faith (or lack thereof) in some higher power. Then, abruptly and without warning, the film becomes something of a thriller, and some time after that a nearly Bressonian study in human suffering. If it is hard to imagine how one movie could possibly be all of those things (and quite a few others too), it may be even harder to conceive of the agility with which Lee guides Secret Sunshine through these switchblade reversals of comedy and despair, darkness and light. For in the end, the movie is all of a piece and impossible to imagine any other way — a secular hymn to the small triumphs and cavernous tragedies of the everyday, and to our awesome ability to cope.

To say much more would be to compromise the surprises of Lee’s film, and surprises at the movies these days are an endangered natural resource. But a few words are owed to the film’s remarkable actors, without whom Secret Sunshine might still have remained so many disparate pieces in search of a whole. Song, who is one of the biggest male stars in Korea at the moment, seems to relish playing the sort of taciturn, anti-heroic supporting role that big stars aren’t supposed to play at the peak of their careers. (Think George Clooney in Good Night and Good Luck). Jeon, meanwhile, is a revelation — to me, at least, since I haven’t seen any of her previous films (although she is said to have been excellent playing an AIDS-stricken waitress in Park Jin-pyo’s 2005 drama You Are My Sunshine). On screen in nearly every scene, she is fearless in her navigation of the movie’s turbulent emotional currents and gives the kind of un-stylized performance that hardly seems like “acting,” slowly revealing to us the extraordinary inner strength and grace of this seemingly fragile, uncertain woman, until it is as if we are beholding a saintly figure cast out of the heavens. This is the kind of performance that great directors inspire in great actors, and it sets a high standard by which all others at Cannes 2007 shall be judged.

Is Control in competition? I'd heard that it was very well-received.

Silent Light sounds promising.

Variety's Paranoid Park review made it sound pretty middling, but then I realized it was done by "bone to pick" Todd McCarthy.

I'm down for whatever Chris Doyle shoots, except when directed by people whose names start with M. Night...

Also No Country for Old Men is great all told...

S!cko, not so much. "Mature Moore" is a less funny guy walking around stating the obvious, making arguments from anecdotes and the reviews have generally baffled me so far...

Some pretty awful looking trailers for My Blueberry Nights are up on youtube.

The generally positive coverage of this year's Cannes slate has me seriously considering a trip to Toronto.

that's cool. I may not know til July if I can swing it.

Well, it's still very much in theory. That it comes off an August that already has one week-long trip and at least one wedding trip is one thing possibly standing in the way.

fap!

My job prefers me to make all weeklong trips before the 8th of the month. Which theoretically means I'll have to beg to make another TIFF.

Inside word says Persopolis has become something like a front-runner for the Palme ... ?

Well if Iran is upset about the film, that gives it helpful cache.

I've actually raed very little about any of the films in comp. The months' distance from when I'll be able to see them just dampens my enthusiasm.

Hoberman calls the Coen / Cormac McC adap "unencumbered by ideas or characters save for Javier Bardem's implacable killer."

I'm glad the Blind Shaft director has resurfaced.

it looks like "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" is the frontrunner. quite a surprise from Schnabel, by all accounts.

!Ugh, please don't let it be the Schnabel movie. It is truly awful. Frontrunner seems to be Persepolis (it seems Frears really loved it). The Tarantino has gotten very good press but seeing the jury, i doubt it will win. The James Gray and Kawase are also supposed to be very good.

schnabel is such a tool, as a guy, so i vote no, sight unseen.

They were going nuts about The Diving Bell and the Butterfly on Newsnight Review. Even though one of the people was John Harris, I found myself getting caught up in the excitement.

Well if Iran is upset about the film, that gives it helpful cache.

It's cachet, not cache! Cache is one syllable anyway! I only mention this because it's the second time I've seen it on ILX today.

it's cachet or caché

and this is the internet

and the real winner is:

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Romania, Cristian Mungiu

number of correct ilxors: 0

:-(

Wow, that's amazing. I just saw his Occident yesterday which was wonderful. I could swear I voted for this too.

friends' movie won 2 awards! :)

I didn't even know they made a Friends movie. Does Chandler die?

and this is the internet

Actually, this is the Internet.

chandler is the only one who survives.

Watch the ceremony here, if you want.

Caché means something completely different. And it's French.

Mark Kermomde guessed the winner right.

Maggie Cheung looked stunning at the ceremony.

what of the Kusturica film?

hoping best actress award means secret sunshine gets US distrib.

yeah, i can't wait to see "promise me this". i hope it includes tigers knocking over pails of milk.

also i agree that poster is awesome - who is at the top, though??