Angelina Jolie and Clint Eastwood meet the press at Cannes
The big films, your Indys and Woodys and Clints and kung fu cartoons, dominate international coverage of the 61st Cannes Film Festival. But for the reviewers, there's the daily joy and slog of covering the 21 films in competition for the Palme d'Or and another 40 or so in satellite showcases. Here are critical snapshots of 10 films, from six countries, which tell more about the current, tenuous state of world cinema than the star-encrusted Hollywood fare. (Speaking of which, we went to a party last night where we both spoke at length with Mr. Eastwood, and one of us schmoozed with both halves of Brangelina. Woo-hoo!)
TWO LOVERS. James Gray.
Ignored and unloved anywhere but in France, the Brooklyn-based director turns from tortured crime movies (The Yards, We Own the Night) to a story of romantic obsession: after a couple of suicide attempts, a young man (Joaquin Phoenix) falls in love with a troubled rich girl (Gwyneth Paltrow) rather than the nice girl (Vinessa Shaw) his parents want him to marry. This is one long toothache of a movie, painfully earnest, not preposterous enough to be enjoyed as camp, and a waste of some very good actors. The Paris critics called Two Lovers "sublime," which sounds even better in French. Maybe something in Gray's life-sapping films is gained in translation. —R.C.
A CHRISTMAS TALE. Arnaud Desplechin.
Abel and Junon Vuillard (Jean-Paul Roussillon and Catherine Deneuve) convene their three grown children (Anne Consigny, Mathieu Amalric, Melvil Poupaud) and their kids for the sort of holiday games you'll find in many family reunions: musical beds, generational scores-settling and the ripping off of psychic scabs. Amid all the melodrama — Junon has liver cancer and needs a bone-marrow transplant from someone of her blood — the conversation is bantering, often affectionate. In this chatty 2-1/2hr. film, Desplechin (Kings and Queen) seems to be going for the old French New Wave recipe of emotional warmth and cinematic wizardry. But the souffl doesn't quite rise. This is faux Truffaut. — R.C.
ROMAN POLANSKI: WANTED AND DESIRED. Marina Zenovich.
A hit at Sundance, and scheduled to play on HBO next month, this revealing documentary revisits the Polish director's L.A. hearing for having sex with a 13-year-old girl. (Polanski fled to Europe and has lived there since.) Though Zenovich doesn't dispute the facts, the interviews with Douglas Dalton, Polanski's lawyer, and Roger Gunson, Assistant District Attorney (described in the film as being "37, a Mormon, and the only member of the D.A.'s office who didn't have sex with an underage girl") aptly pin the blame on showboating judge, Laurence J, Rittenband. The film is a fascinating portrait of a artist whose life was stranger than any of his films, and whose sins were minor compared to those committed against him. — M.C.
THE SILENCE OF LORNA. Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne.
Already two-time Palme d'Or winners for Rosetta in 1999 and L'Enfant in 2005, the Belgian brothers are back with another underclass minimalist melodrama, this time set in the polyglot city of Liege. An Albanian girl (Arta Dobroshi) is in an arranged marriage with a drug addict to get her ID; the scheme of the criminals who control her is to kill off the junkie so Lorna can be sold into marriage with a rich Russian who also needs an ID. The film is an improvement on the formulaic L'Enfantand boasts an impressively naturalistic performance by Dobroshi, who could win the Best Actress award. — M.C.
CLOUD 9. Andreas Dresen.
In the '70s, no Cannes festival was complete without some sexually explicit film to stoke outrage and fill screening rooms. Those randy days are long gone, and this year the only erotic hoo-hah was for this intimate German drama about, to get right to the point, naked old people making love — but nothing explicit, danke. Inge (Ursula Werner), a plain hefty woman in her early 60s, is more or less happily married to 70-something Werner (Horst Rehberg), whose idea of excitement is to listen to recordings of model-train sound effects. No wonder she goes for the slightly sprightlier Karl (Horst Westphal), who's 76 but young at heart, or at least early middle-aged. They have a quick tryst in his apartment, which begins a love affair that lets them both act like teenagers. The movie moves at Werner's pace, but its eye for character is clear and its heart strong. — R.C.
SALT OF THE SEA. Annemarie Jacir.
Soraya (Suheir Hammad), a young Palestinian woman born in Lebanon and brought up in Brooklyn, goes to Jaffa to claim money her grandfather lost in the "catastrophe" (the founding of the Israeli state). There she meets handsome young Emad (Saleh Bakri, the young stud from The Band's Visit) and gets embroiled with him in a crime that might be described as the reassignment of property. The politics are plausible, the lead actors charming enough, and it's nice to see Palestine by sunset. But in its making, this is an all-too-familiar melodrama. Ordinary is the last word one would think to apply to a film from such a volcanic land, but it's the one that fits here. — R.C.
THREE MONKEYS. Nuri Bilge Ceylan.
The Turkish director's 2006 romance Climates was so popular worldwide that it was at the center of a funny short film the Coen brothers contributed to last year's celebration of the 6oth Cannes Festival. So there were high hopes for Ceylan's new effort: the story of a politician, involved in a hit-and-run accident, who convinces his driver to take the rap, then has an affair with the driver's wife while the man is in prison. If you think this sounds like some crackling crime yarn from James M. Cain or Patricia Highsmith, don't get your hopes up. This is a lazy study of a dysfunctional family, and we've seen enough of those. But it's still a provocative premise that could be made into a compelling thriller. Perhaps by the Coens. — M.C.
LION'S DEN. Pablo Trapero.
Julia (Martina Gusman) wakes up, severely bruised, with two men asleep in her apartment. Only later does she realize that the first man (her lover) is dead, the second (his lover) alive but seriously wounded. Yet another intriguing plot set-up that goes nowhere, for this film quickly devolves into a prison drama as Julia is accused of the murder and discovers she is pregnant. Argentine law allows women prisoners to keep their children with them until the age of four. This allows Gusman (the director's wife) much latitude for scenery-chewing, which makes her another candidate for Best Actress. Her emoting is strenuous but not persuasive, in a gritty film whose heart is too soft. — M.C.
THE HEADLESS WOMAN. Lucrecia Martel.
Driving home one day, Vernica (Mara Onetto) hits something in the road and is afraid she has run over someone. Her husband tries to assure her it was just a dog she hit, but gradually her fear festers into dementia. As with Three Monkeys, the plot of this Argentine non-drama makes it sound more interesting than it is. The film is inert, visually tiring, utterly lacking in suspense; nothing changes except Onetto's hair color. Martel won some international converts for The Holy Girl in 2004, but this time the acolytes are likely to become apostates. —M.C.
SURVEILLANCE. Jennifer Lynch.
The writer-director's dad, David, devised this year's festival poster: a lipsticked woman in some unknown peril, her eyes masked by a censor's black strip. Jennifer's new feature, her first since the 1993 Boxing Helena, has some of that eerie mystery; it's an authentic, systematically annoying weirdie about the investigation of a roadside homicide. Five were brutally killed by a couple of maniacs in leatherface masks. Now the three shaken survivors are being questioned in a police station by two outside agents (Bill Pullman and Julia Ormond) who are skeptical of the variations in the stories they hear. Think Rashomon meets The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in Twin Peaks, and give lots of leeway for the gooniest improv overacting, and you may get on the warped wavelength of this semi-comic parable of social anarchy. —R.C.