By Jake Howell jake.howell@utoronto.ca

Predicting Cannes

Posted Monday, May 11th, 2015 - Comments Off on Predicting Cannes
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For the last three years I’ve tried to take an educated guess at which of the usual suspects Cannes would be court for their annual Competition. In 2013 and 2014, my festival math worked out. Over the past decade, more or less 75% of the films annually vying for the Palme d’Or were by returning auteurs. To get a read on what the Festival would look like was simply a matter of rounding up a list of active Cannes veterans and seeing if their latest opus was ready for a May premiere.

But this year I was wrong. I wrote we’d have three or four newcomers. But by programming a Competition with nine (!) newcomers, the Festival dramatically switched it up, and I couldn’t be happier. It’s happened before, but take note when a Palme d’Or winner (ahem, Apitchatpong Weerasethakul) is programmed (relegated?) to sidebars like Un Certain Regard, a move which Festival director Thierry Frémaux commented on in an interview: “Je veux bien parler du film d’Apichatpong Weerasethakul avec vous, mais seulement quand vous l’aurez vu.” (Roughly translated: “I’m willing to talk about the movie with you, but only when you’ve seen it.”)

There are several ways to interpret that, but I’d like to think that this year they’re giving Palme potential to filmmakers that aren’t resting on their laurels.

Veterans are fun, but new blood is good. So let’s get acquainted!

Justin Kurzel

Australian-born Kurzel is bringing Macbeth to the Croisette, a Michael Fassbender-Marion Cotillard-led drama based on Shakespeare’s infamous “Scottish Play.” Were I cynical, I’d say Kurzel’s inclusion in the Competition is more or less based on the cast’s red carpet attendance, but it’s possible that this 113-minute adaptation could even be good (The Weinstein Company has North American distribution rights). On his own, Kurzel is mostly known to Australian audiences for his 2011 thriller debut Snowtown, a film that saw some critical success in his home country, with a micro-release by IFC in the U.S. But Cannes has had this filmmaker on their radar since his short Bluetongue premiered in 2005.

macbeth-michael-fassbender-600x399

Joachim Trier

A critical favorite for his 2011 Un Certain Regard entry Oslo, 31 August, Trier is moving up to the Competition with Louder Than Bombs, a Jesse Eisenberg/Isaballe Huppert drama that’s co-written by Trier’s regular scribe, Eskil Vogt (who recently won a major screenwriting prize in Sundance last year for the excellent Blind). The film is Trier’s English-language debut, but he’ll likely transcend the language barrier through his excellent eye. Little is known about the plot.

louderthanbombs

Valérie Donzelli

An actress as well as a director, Donzelli has a number of films on her resume, but her film Declaration of War (2011) is the most notable; the film starred herself and actor Jérémie Elkaïm, and was based on events between their personal life together. Elkaïm is back with Anaïs Demoustier (2014’s Bird People) for Donzelli’s Marguerite & Julien, a film originally penned by Oscar-nominated screenwriter Jean Gruault, which was reportedly in the hands of François Truffaut in the 1970s.

marguerite

Michel Franco

Thank God it’s not James: Mexico’s Michel Franco is back at Cannes with Chronic, a film sure to be one of the Festival’s most-buzzed Competition entries. Known for high-quality work, Franco graduated from the Director’s Fortnight (2009, Daniel & Ana) and moved on to Un Certain Regard with the devastating After Lucia in 2012, winning the sidebar’s most prestigious award. Chronic stars Tim Roth (who really should be in everything), and has an IMDb summary that reads: “A home care nurse works with terminally ill patients.”

chronic

Stéphane Brizé

Most readers won’t be familiar with Brizé—I’m not—but his work screened in the Director’s Fortnight in 1999 (Le Bleu de Villes). In terms of the mandatory French representation in the Competition, Brizé holds a coveted spot, which may speak to the strength of A Simple Man (or The Measure of a Man), which stars French actor Vincent Lindon. This seems to be a breezier entry, or perhaps something that may be lost in translation (echoes of Alain Cavalier’s Pater in 2011).

A-Simple-Man-vincent-lindon

Laszlo Nemes

Ah, a true wild card! Nemes is known for short films recorded on actual celluloid, but Son of Saul is his debut feature, a project starring unknown Hungarian actors. The film’s IMDb summary has me supremely intrigued: “In the horror of 1944 Auschwitz, a prisoner forced to burn the corpses of his own people finds moral survival upon trying to salvage from the flames the body of a boy he takes for his son.” Filmmakers rarely enter the Competition with a first feature, so I’m paying full attention here.

son-of-saul-2

Guillaume Nicloux

The man is a multi-hyphenate, acting and writing novels in addition to directing. His most recent film, The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq, may be the entry point for anyone at Tribeca last year, where Nicloux picked up the Best Screenplay award. Valley of Love, his Cannes entry, features Gérard Depardieu and Isabelle Huppert on a sort of spirit-quest in Death Valley. It opens in France in June this year, so it may not be a Palme d’Or, but it sounds intriguing just the same.

valley of love

Denis Villeneuve

As MCN’s resident Canadian, allow me to represent for a second: Denis Villeneuve, at some point, will be the True North’s first Palme d’Or winner. It may not be this year—technically, 2015’s Sicario is an American production—but of late, Villeneuve has easily topped Canada’s list of name-brand directors, one or two of which seem to be losing steam rather than gaining it. Villeneuve is working at a rate that surely can’t be feasible (when does anyone release such disparate quality titles like Enemy and Prisoners both in the same year?) but hats off to this remarkable Québécois auteur. Sicario is hot, hot, hot: Roger Deakins behind the camera, Emily Blunt in the lead, and Benicio del Toro, Josh Brolin, and Jon Bernthal supporting her in this drug lord thriller. There is a reason he was granted the shot to direct the undirectable: a sequel to Blade Runner.

sicario

Yorgos Lanthimos

I’m surprised by how many people have seen Dogtooth. Maybe it was the Oscar run in 2010; maybe it’s because of just how uniquely weird it is. Word gets out, I guess. I don’t know. But like Michel Franco, Lanthimos is an Un Certain Regard winner, and The Lobster—his English-language debut—is definitely a heavy-hitter this year. It’s a sci-fi-rom-dram (?) where being romantically alone is “a matter of life and death,” which sounds appropriately crazy. With Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz, and a handful of other names, there could be a potential third Palme d’Or for Greece in the wings. Otherwise, I’m just excited for something new and quirky.

The Lobster_0

Follow Jake Howell on Twitter: @Jake_Howell

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon