Though the 64th Cannes Film Festival is only a few days old, participants have already been treated to heaping doses of intense subject matter. It didn’t begin that way, though: The festival opened with an out-of-competition screening of Woody Allen’s incredibly light but warmly received comedy “Midnight in Paris,” starring Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Michael Sheen, Adrian Brody, and French first lady Carla Bruni.
The film is Allen’s homage to the City of Light, telling the story of a frustrated writer (Wilson) with a romantic yearning for 1920s Paris who wanders the streets only to get transported to a Paris populated with the likes of Salvador Dalí, Man Ray, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso and Gertrude Stein (played wonderfully by Kathy Bates).
Speaking after the screening, Allen said, “I learned about Paris the same way all Americans do, from the movies. I wanted to show the city emotionally, the way I felt about it. It didn’t matter to me how real it was. I wanted it to be Paris through my eyes.”
But aside from Allen’s witty, harmless piffle, Cannes-goers have had little to laugh at so far. First-time director Julia Leigh’s “Sleeping Beauty” was the first film screened in competition, and it sparked a heated debate among the press corps, with no clear consensus or buzz. It’s a brutally frank portrayal of a college student (Emily Browning) who willfully becomes a highly paid, drug-induced “Sleeping Beauty” for the fetishistic gratification of wealthy men. At times half-baked, the deft film manages a clever and punishing look at one woman’s complete abandonment of her physicality.
Leigh was among one of four women directors showing her film in competition at Cannes — a historic number for a festival known to be dominated by male directors. The last time a film directed by a woman won the Palme d’Or was “The Piano,” directed by Jane Campion (who helped shepherd Leigh’s film and is credited as a “mentor”). And should one of the four — Leigh, Ramsay, Maïwenn Le Besco, and Naomi Kawase — win the best director award, it would be the first time a woman won since Russian director Yuliya Solntseva in 1961.
On the heels of Leigh’s film was one from another female director, Cannes regular Lynne Ramsay, who debuted “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” a searing and brutally frank story based on Lionel Shriver’s novel. A nihilistically violent teen (Ezra Miller) torments his parents (Tilda Swinton and John C. Reilly), eventually wreaking havoc on the lives of everyone around him. While the story itself isn’t particularly original, Ramsay, whose previous films “Morvern Cellar” and “Ratcatcher” have shown in Cannes, exhibits her directing bona fides by piecing the narrative together much like a tapestry: as each section unfolds, the story becomes more complex and gut-wrenching.
Hewing close to the theme of death, Gus Van Sant’s nearly unwatchable “Restless” premiered yesterday as the opening film of the sidebar competition, Un Certain Regard. The film tells the tale of a young cancer patient (Mia Wasikowska) who befriends a joyless, funeral-going teen (Henry Hopper, son of the late Dennis) in the last three months of her life.
Early as it is, the real heavy hitters invited to this year’s Cannes Film Festival have yet to screen their films: directors Lars von Trier, Pedro Almodóvar, and the elephant in the room, Terrence Malick, whose “Tree of Life” debuts on Monday; the film that was shot years ago, and it’s become one of the most anticipated films in Cannes history.