Beauty in Trouble

Beauty in Trouble

English lobby poster Ana Geislerova

BEAUTY IN TROUBLE is a smart, funny film by Jan Hrebejk (Divided We Fall), set after Prague’s 2002 floods—a good way to start any new beginnings story. Star Ana Geislerova, playing a mother and wife, must choose between her hapless, Czech auto mechanic dolt of a husband with a chiseling, brutish mentality linked to the old socialist past, and an older, wealthier émigré Czech with a manse in Tuscany and a whiff of the new capitalist European Union. Boiled down, the observations festoon a situation comedy plot, with the wealthy guy’s Volvo conveniently showing up in the husband’s chop shop. The collision of characters lets Hrebek sharpen the contrast between the old and new Czecho-no-Slovakias, the country that was and the life that could be, still just out of reach. The sixth collaboration between Hrebejk and writer Petr Jarchovsky, Beauty in Trouble takes its title from a Robert Graves poem and it’s soundtrack from Once’s busker-songwriter Glen Hansard, including the haunting “Falling Slowly” number, which Hansard gave to Hrebejk when he was in Prague and turned up the young woman who would become his Once co-star, Marketa Irglova. Think of Beauty in Trouble as Once, told twice, this time from the girl’s point of view that feels like the real deal. Guaranteed to bring smiles on a summer night —HARLAN JACOBSON. TALKCINEMA.COM

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Harlan reports from Cannes

Cannes looks to the EU for winners '08

The Class Gomorra Robert de Niro and Barry Levinson, press conference for the closing film 'What Just Happened?' © AFP

A two-hour French film set in a lycee, or junior high school, The Class (Entre Les Murs), won the Palme d’Or here Sunday night. It is the first French film to win Cannes’ top prize since the late Maurice Pialat won for Under Satan’s Sun in 1987. Cantet’s previous films Human Resources and Time Out departed from the formula obsessive family and lover stories of French cinema to skillfully dissect the labor and business sectors. In The Class, the 47 year-old Cantet uses a cross-section of immigrant and French kids to sketch out the accident French education has become and the corrosive future facing the nation. Robert DeNiro presented Cantet with the prize. DeNiro stars in the closing night film What Just Happened by Barry Levinson, which ironically is both about the sad state of Hollywood fimmaking as it still searches for a US distributor. And that’s about as close as Americans got to the top prizes, except for Sean Penn, who headed the 61st jury, which he termed unanimous in its pick of Cantet’s The Class. But something more is at work than simply the top prize returning to the home team. It’s that the rest of the key Palmes were spread around almost entirely to European Union member states, and Turkey, making Cannes a more purely European festival this year than in recent memory. Clint Eastwood, got a career consolation prize, minted newly by the jury as a nod to veterans prize of sorts, the Prize of the 61st festival. Critics in Cannes gave Eastwood’s The Changeling perhaps the best prize, two thumbs up for its melodramatic story starring Angelina Jolie, as a mother at war with the LAPD in 1928, which assures favorab le notices when Universal releases the film November 7 in the USA. The other career honoree was Catherine Deneuve for her appearance in Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale, a talky comedy in which she plays the cancer-stricken and drolly candid matriarch of a family that gathers for Christmas and pushes each other’s buttons with a vengeance. “I want to keep making films as long as there are such fine and sensitive filmmakers as Arnaud Desplechins,” Deneuve said. The Grand Prize runner-up prize went to the Italian film, Gomorra, by 40 year-old Matteo Garrone, a neo-realistic street level look at modern gangsters in Naples with none of the romance of the American mafia genre. Another Italian film, Il Divo, by Paolo Sorrentino, about the astonishing political career and corruption of Giulio Andreotti, a seven-time prime minister, won the grand jury prize Full Story...

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DAY TEN, Pre-Palmes Report Friday, May 23

Official poster of the festival. Benicio Del Toro as Che.

Cannes practically attacked itself this year. The films all but denounced the glamour of the red carpet steps the filmmakers walked up to take their bows. With the awarding of the Golden Palms set for Sunday night, there’s no shortage of bets that any jury led by Sean Penn is going to try to start the revolution in films, if not the planet, right here on the Cote d’Azur. Nothing was as ironic as the intermission in the screening Wednesday night of Steven Soderbergh’s four hour homage to Che Guevara, the icon of the Cuban Communist revolution that has endured for nearly 50 years, when the festival thoughtfully handed out sandwiches, water and KitKat bars in goodie bags bearing the “CHE” logo from the film to tide over the tummies of the beleaguered press. As Che, does Benicio Del Toro run his ragtag army of rebels through the jungles of the Sierra Maestra, not to mention Bolivia, subsisting on nada for months? No reason to suffer on the Riviera--have a sandwich jambon, cheri. But Cannes was out to send a message this year about not turning a blind eye--as in something the world can no longer afford to do. It was all right there in David Lynch’s 61st festival poster art of a glam platinum blonde with heart-shaped lips beneath a black strip placed strategically over her eyes. The blonde’s face and hair are all one color—neon red against a black background--to drive home Cannes’ unifying theme: the culture’s obsession with blind glamour has reached the red alert stage. Scrambling for films right up to the last minute, Cannes tied it up in a semiotic theme bow for all to see. The festival began May 12 with Fernando Meirelles’ Blindness, a futurist film about the world suddenly going blind and civilization collapsing, adapted from Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago’s 1995 book. Meirelles and stars Julianne Moore and Danny Glover sat below Lynch’s blind blonde poster during the press conference, underlining the theme. One wonders what came first: Lynch’s poster or Cannes picking Blindness to open the festival, so perfectly did the film articulate the selection rubric. Day after day, the festival put forth a set of films that weren’t just a dark vision. They were a wakeup call to recognize people struggling to be seen and heard, and Cannes implicitly patted itself on the back for showing the assembled media and film pros the serious stuff. Only problem is that the serious stuff didn’t much sell itself—either to the news media or the capitalist buyers. Full Story...

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SPECIAL!

Harlan's May 23rd Podcast from Cannes

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DAY SEVEN, Mad Diva Day Tuesday, May 20

Angelina Jolie, Photocall of the film The Exchange © AFP Gwyneth Paltrow, Climbing of the Steps of the film Two Lovers © AFP Clint Eastwood and Angelina Jolie, Photocall of the film The Exchange © AFP

It was Mad Diva day, as both La Gwyneth and Angelina descended on Cannes, back to back, to push their new films about women driven to the brink. Here last year for A Mighty Heart, Jolie stars in Clint Eastwood’s The Changeling—the title of which may be in flux— about a single mom in LA in 1928 whose nine year-old son was abducted by a serial killer. Based on an actual case, the film recalls how the LAPD returned the wrong kid—he’s three inches shorter and circumcised—wee facts the cops, who were badly in need of a public relations victory, deemed irrelevant and proceeded to have Angelina’s mom character locked up in a state mental ward. Paltrow by contrast, stars in James Gray’s Two Lovers as a far weaker female. She’s a flighty, blonde legal assistant cooped up by her married lover, a smooth Manhattan lawyer essayed by Elias Koteas, in a Brighton Beach love nest, where she captivates Joaquin Phoenix, a 30-something Jewish neighbor who lives at home, works in his parents dry cleaner and starts the action rolling by throwing himself into the bay to try drowning on for size. Two Lovers is contemporary, but only vaguely. The Brooklyn emotional terrain its characters inhabit is classic early Philip Roth territory: Should Dry Cleaner Boy marry the solid Jewish girl, played by Vinessa Shaw (3:10 to Yuma), whose parents are looking for two mergers for the price of one—dry cleaners and marrying off their daughter? Or should he run off for some free love to San Francisco (noch—where else) with the upstairs, shiksa nutcase Paltrow? It feels like a 50’s story, but the outside world is moving at a gigabyte pace. For his part, Phoenix handled having to answer questions about his Jewish dilemma of the heart with straight method acting techniques by going into an acute gastroenteritis attack on the eve of his trip to Cannes and heading for a hospital instead. Gray imitated Phoenix sounding stricken by rebellious kishkes (Jewish for intestines) and agonizing on the phone to the effect that Oy, it hurts! Full Story...

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SPECIAL!

Harlan questions Speilberg - from the Indiana Jones press conference

Why in this film, as in so many of his other adventure films, is there a concern about reuniting nuclear families, as if the real fantasy is to repair the damage of divorce and family fracture?

Spielberg replied, "Like so many children from divorce, it impacted me. It created ET.... that was all about divorce first and a visitor from the stars second."

Spielberg went further, adding his films are also about father-son reconciliation.

"I've been very public about that. I have a great relationship with my 91 year-old father now. It took awhile for us to come back together. "That's why I came up with the idea of bringing Sean Connery into the Last Crusade, to work out unresolved issues between father and son."

"And now that you've all seen the movie, I can say for the first time, we have another father-son story," Spielberg said, nodding over at the very most junior member of the cast, Shia Leboeuf, who grinned.

"It's very gratifying--and satisfying--to me that I haven't been busted by the media too hard for dwelling on this very personal subject that does keep popping up through my movies," Spielberg said.

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DAY FIVE Sunday, May 18

George Lucas, Harrison Ford and Steven Spielberg, Photocall of the film Indiana Jones © AFP Harrison Ford © AFP Film team, Climbing Steps of Indiana Jones © AFP

It’s Indiana Jones Day, and time to watch grown up film professionals trample each other to death to get into a film we all stomped on the way out for being a bore. Hardly worth dying for on the way in—few films are—but the world premiere of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull called out the animal in the human heart. Here’s the news, brought to you by a survivor who doesn’t remember the face of the little old lady he pole-axed to be one of the last five people to make it past the beige-suited gendarmes at the gates: Harrison Ford can’t jump worth spit. Memo to agent: No more billy goat stuff! Watching Ford, who’s fit for his age, clamber up storage boxes in a military warehouse in the opening scene, while eluding an elite KGB unit led by Cate Blanchett, is a design flaw. The conceit of the Indy series is that places keep secrets better than people. Hence, only an archaeologist can save us (such is democracy’s utter surrender to Georges Santayana’s dictum about amnesiacs and/or illiterates--which covers just about most of us--being doomed to repeat history). So Ford and whippersnapper Shia LeBoeuf, who rides into the film on a Harley duded up like Brando in The Wild Ones, head up the American team, and Blanchett the Ruskies, all in search of a crystal skull left by space aliens who were big into mind control. Very mid-50’s Soviet! Oh yes, along the way to Machu Pichu, Karen Allen shows back up in the series—which allows Indy to dismiss his entire dating career as having all had the same flaw, with a line about them not being her—and well, you get the picture. It’s amazing what a good what can do for a guy. And so, while Soviets can only shoot Kalashnikovs and miss, Americans can think under their hats and on their feet. Case in point: Wandering into a fake town on a nuclear bomb testing grounds, Indy realizes the blast is coming in 15 second and rips out the shelves of the kitchen Kelvinator—let’s not forget the insert shot here that says “Lead Lined”—and climbs inside just in the nuke of time!!! Now I ask you, people, is there any doubt who would win the Cold War?!?!?!?! Full Story...

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DAY TWO Thursday, May 15 Ari Folman, Photocall of the film Waltz with Bashir © AFP Rodrigo Santoro, Elli Medeiros,Pablo Trapero, Martina Gusman Photocall of the film: Leonera © AFP Directors Fortnight Jerzy Skolimowski The films certainly have followed the blindness theme by underscoring what or whom the world chooses not to see. Ari Folman’s Waltz With Bashir, is Israeli film about a man who reconstructs his participation it the Sabra and Shatila massacres during the 1982 Israeli war in Lebanon known as Arik’s War, for Ariel Sharon. It maybe the first time an Israeli film has looked so frankly at its behavior, per Edna Fainaru, an Israeii friend and critic. And it does draws an ironic parallel to the Holocaust, a trope that Palestinians and Israel’s critics say that makes Israelis crazy. That Folman conducts his conversations with old army buddies in animation rather than on camera, and dubs two of them because they did not want their voices to be heard, gives one a sense of how hot button Folman’s open discussion of Israeli atrocities could become in Israel. Palestinians are the people, then, that Israelis can’t or don’t want to see, and one would have to say vice versa here except Folman’s topic is the psychology of forgetting what is inconvenient to remember, and however things work out, Israel to be the fully human society it professes to be must remember not just what was done to it but what it did to innocents, as well. Lion’s Den, by Pablo Trapero, is an Argentine prison drama that focuses on the mother’s ward of a prison, which also houses their kids. The cellblock is chockablock with strollers and toys. That makes for a new angle on a pretty standard prison drama: Babies Behind Bars. The focus here is on women—not the Caged Heat variety—but an assortment of mostly poor mothers and one middle class mom, Julia (Martina Gusman), who lands in jail for killing her lover in the apartment they shared with his boyfriend. Much of the melodrama takes place as Julia awaits trial, and the film behaves the way all these films do—as a quasi-muckraking tour of the poor—with the idea that the starchy upper-classes might open their eyes a little about who’s in jail and why, just the way Tramp showed Lady the political injustices of the dog pound. Boris, the Russian hound, was no Communist, after all; he was a dog like the rest of us with the wrong pedigree. Full Story...

DAY ONE Wednesday, May 14

The Official Jury on the red steps opening day. © AFP Photocall of the opening film: Blindness by Fernando Meirelles. © AFP Gael Garcia Bernal and Julianne Moore. Photocall of the opening film: Blindness by Fernando Meirelles. © AFP

The 61st Cannes Film Festival opened Wednesday night with Blindness, directed by Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles (The Constant Gardener) from a 1995 novel by Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago, who won the Nobel Prize for literature a few years later in 1998. The film is a just around the corner future dystopia, in the manner of The Children of Men. A Japanese man at the wheel of his car in an indistinct urban metropolis suddenly goes blind resulting in a sea of impatient horns behind him. As part of the interchangeable one worldiness of the aesthetic at work here, he is simply designated in the cast simply as “First Blind Man,” played by Yusuke Iseya as simply one of the upper middle-class global professionals who will very soon be battling for the soul of civilization with the service class. Which is what happens in this movie. Rounding out the wedding cake cuteness of the Japanese couple, “His wife, “ played by Yoshino Kimura, gets him to a specialist, “The Doctor,” played by Mark Ruffalo, as if he were what happened to Marcus Welby two generations later—no more State Medical School but very likely Yale, etc. He’s calm, personable, a little oblivious to his marriage to “The Doctor’s Wife,” played by Julianne Moore, who also starred in the recent and much better The Children of Men and who acknowledged with a certain rehearsed cleverness at the press conference following the film, “I like the Apocalypse.” In Blindness, the apocalypse is simply eliminating one of the underpinnings, sight, of the smoothly functioning Starbucks world so that, one by one, people go blind, not just ordinary blackout blind but milky white blind, which the script notes is not the absence of color but the flooding of it. As the occasional official narrator Danny Glover (“Man with Eye Patch”) notes, this can happen to the haves in the world who see everything but never really ever see anything at all happening to the suddenly or longterm have-nots. Full Story...

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SPECIAL!

Harlan's WFUV Podcast from Cannes

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