Cannes--In the never ending search that all film festivals go through to find an opening night film that will make nice with an audience that is dressed up to party, it’s probably fitting that Cannes this year opened Wednesday night with Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris. It’s Woody’s umpteenth return to Cannes— he was here last year with You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, and before that with Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Cassandra’s Dream, Match Point, Hollywood Ending, and on and on. They could’ve bought him an apartment, already, across from the red carpet.
Midnight In Paris
Midnight In Paris might better have been called Window to Paris, if that title hadn’t been taken by a 1994 Russian film about a down on his luck musician who fell through an attic window that went straight from a cinderblock Russia into Paris, city of light, where his luxe improves. Dramatically.
In Woody’s version, Owen Wilson plays Gil, an aspiring writer on vacation with an expense account wife and her gauche parents. One midnight after his wife has gone off with one of Allen’s stock characters, an intellectual windbag, Gil steps into a cab that’s a portal to Paris in the L’age d’or, the Golden Age, of the 20s.
Et voila, Gil, given Wilson’s laid back California golly-gee style, becomes best buds with F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda, Hemingway speaking in five word sentences about men and war, Picasso, Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates) and Salvador Dali (Adrien Brody) mixing it up about art, Cole Porter tinkling the ivories, Luis Bunuel and Man Ray looking for direction, plus the old guard of Gauguin, Lautrec and Degas still hanging out at the Folies Bergere. It’s as if Woody got tired of pussyfooting around with throwing in one or two real life characters into his script, and went for the entire 20th Century pantheon of greats and near greats that torture would be artists everywhere.
Allen said he cast Wilson and Rachel MacAdams despite their having played comic lovers in The Wedding Crashers in 2005, and rounded the film out with French actresses Marion Cottilard and Lea Seydoux and France’s First Lady, actress Carla Bruni Sarkozy, who dropped in for a day of shooting to play a museum guide circling Rodin’s The Thinker.
"I learned about Paris from the movies,” Woody said at a press conference upstairs in the Palais de Festival, after the press screening Wednesday. “I didn’t go there till I was an adult in 1965. When I was a young man, my friends and I were very influenced by foreign cinema, not just French movies, but Swedish, Italian, Japanese. We really got into it and saw films as art. We all fancied ourselves as artists and not commercial filmmakers."
"I'm a completely lucky filmmaker. Everything I needed came my way," Allen mused. "I have some talent but it doesn't go as far as being an artist. If you think Bunuel is an artist, then it's as clear as a bell I'm not an artist."
Drive
In that sense, his film serves its opening night mandate to entertain, while underlining the thread that links a lot of the films set for the next 10 days until it closes Saturday night the 22nd with The Beloved (Les Bien Ames), a last century European romantic comedy with Catherine Deneuve and Ludivine Sagnier.
Woody's film venerates Paris perdu, lost Paris, the romantic Paris of grand postcard monuments and past heroes of the European painting scene and American letters and music. It’s all about appreciating the modern masters, dropping in on artists and legends when they were at the top of their game.
Along the way, if you don’t count the hundreds of films in its market, the official Cannes selection includes some 50 films from 30 plus countries, with many of the films coming from established hands.
The Skin I Live In
That includes past Cannes veterans and Palme D'Or winners Pedro Almodovar’s The Skin I Live In with Antonio Banderas and Marisa Paredes, The Belgian Dardennes Brothers’ Boy With A Bike, Italian director Nanni Moretti’s Habemus Papam (We Have A Pope) with French acting great Michel Piccoli, Danish bad boy Lars Von Trier with Melancholia with Kirsten Dunst, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Charlotte Rampling, young Dane Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive with Ryan Gosling paired up this time with Carey Mulligan the it-girl from An Education, the last minute addition of jailed Iranian filmmakers Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rasoulof’s Acts of Resistance, plus Gus Van Sant’s Restless and the latest Pirates of the Caribbean—not that anyone needs Cannes for that.
Habemus Papam
Here's an oddity: by the time Jodi Foster's The Beaver makes its debut as a special screening next Tuesday, it will have already tanked at the US box office.
Starring Mel Gibson as a depressed toy executive booted out of the house by his wife, played by Foster, only to return with a beaver puppet on his arm who does the talking for him, the film opened in 22 theatres around the country and did about a wooden nickel’s worth of business. IndieWire, the online trade site, speculated that the public wasn’t ready to get up close and personal with Mel Gibson just yet, not since Apocalypto or the Passion of Christ antagonized various segments of his audience, and yelling at his wife "You are nothing, I made you, etc" pretty much put him in the Time Out corner with the rest.
The Beaver aside, the lineup this year may be "the most exciting one in years, because it contains so many of the hottest filmmakers in the world over the last 10 years who have films in the festival," according to Darryl McDonald, artistic director of the Palm Springs Film Festival that every January shows all the foreign language films nominated for Best Foreign Language Oscar, many of which get their start in Cannes. "Almodovar, Von Trier, the Dardennes and let’s not forget Terence Malick," says McDonald.
It's a coup of sorts that Cannes landed US director Terence Malick's Tree of Life, which will have its press screening Monday, May 16, the long awaited the 67-year-old director’s fifth film, this one with Brad Pitt and Sean Penn in a 1950s rural set story. Only it was supposed to be here last year, until Malick decided that it needed another year to bake.
Tree of Life
"That's no surprise given Malick's production history—20 years between Days of Heaven (78) and The Thin Red Line (98) and seven years to The New World (05)—that this one has taken six" McDonald says. "Malick is a mood and a feeling that sails right through you like no one else. The question is will this be a Terence Malick with heft, like Days of Heaven or The Thin Red Line, or will it be one that ends with a whimper like The New World?"
For those who can't wait for an answer, there's always Unlawful Killing, a film that didn't make it into any of the official sections of the festival, about the death of Princess Diana. Directed by English Actor Keith Allen, it's a doc produced in part by former Harrod's magnate Mohammed Fayed, father of Princess Di's lover, Dodi Fayed, also killed with her in that tunnel on a midnight in that other Paris, the one that's not in Woody's opening night movie.
Unlawful Killing, which is banned in Britain in part because it includes photos of Princess Diana's dying moments, is showing in the Cannes Market, where the real rug cutting takes place over international distribution. On Friday, the 13th.
