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Cannes Market Watch: Able Danger

Karina — Thu, 22 May 2008 15:01:36 GMT

At this point in the festival, it’s hard for me to make room in my schedule for films screening purely in the market when there’s competition stuff to see at the same time (although I did see Olivier Assayas’ Summer Hours today, and that was totally worth it––more later). And so on Thursday morning, I’ll be watching Philippe Garrel’s Frontier of Dawn during the sole screening of Able Danger, a neo-noir “spoof” of 9/11 conspiracy theorists. We turn, once again, to the official Marche du Film guide for a synopsis:

Even in Brooklyn, they don’t know exactly what happened on 9/11. But that the truth is not what we were told is obvious in this spoof. Satirical conspiracy thriller disguised as a film noir, full of attractive fast-talking babes, spectacled activists and fetishistic neo-Nazis. Thomas Flynn runs a left wing (’radical’) café/bookstore and is the writer of a conspiracy exposé about 9/11. He suddenly finds himself the focus of attention of a beautiful Eastern European femme fatale (played by the unique Elina Lowensöhn), who is fleeing the architects of a worldwide cover-up of 9/11. Thomas does everything he can to find out what really happened and soon has to cycle like a maniac when the first dead bodies start raining down around him.

The film stars Adam Nee, who co-wrote, co-directed and starred in The Last Romantic, which premiered at SXSW in 2006. Able Danger premiered earlier this year at Rotterdam, where Twitch published a not entirely coherent guest review declaring it “the best left wing inspired movie” at the festival. Variety was, um, somewhat less kind, with the words “sophomoric” and “dud” making it into the first sentence of Jay Weissberg’s review. Of course, there’s a trailer, complete with ominous Lou Dobbs soundbites and a hipster getting tazed in the back of a taxi. It doesn’t feel very “spoofy”––it fact, it feels like it takes itself really, really seriously. But maybe I’m just not used to seeing 9/11 cover-up fictions rendered in anything artsier than standard YouTube language.

If you’re in New York and curious, you can see for yourself––Able Danger is opening the Brooklyn International Film Festival next Friday.

Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth

Cannes: Quentin Tarantino Film Lecture Live Blogged

Karina — Thu, 22 May 2008 15:01:35 GMT

Quentin Tarantino gave a two-hour chat about his films today in Cannes. I typed as fast as I could. Please excuse any typos that I didn’t catch.

2:30 pm: One of the things that’s been slightly blown out of proportion is that I gained in my film knowledge at Video Archives. No — i was HIRED at Video Archives Because I was a film expert.

Influences starting out: Brian DePalma, Martin Scorsese, Sergio Leone, Howard Hawks. Brian DePalma was like my rock star. I spent a year and a half going over theTV Guide looking for movies by Hawks. They played 80% of his sound films on LA TV.

I would recommend that anyone who wants to direct join an acting class. That should be your first stop. If you do a scene with a class member, you then direct the scene. Everything I learned about writing, too, I learned by acting. I use acting adjectives when I write. Because the whole idea of acting is to get lost. It also taught me about the camera. I took a class in camera technique for actors with James Best, from Shock Corridor. Well, in teaching me acting for the camera, he started teaching me about the frame. So then when I watched the movies I loved, like Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath, with a little more knowledge of camera, I could see what those guys were doing. And once you start doing that, it’s only a short step until you’re composing shots of your own.

2:46: I did this kind of silly comedy called My Best Friends Birthday. I borrowed a 16mm camera from an exploitation filmmaker, funded by Video Archives. Cut to the next 3 years, we’re working on it on the weekends. At the equipment houses, we’d rent stuff on Friday and it would be a one day rental until Monday, and we’d just shoot shoot shoot, all weekend! I gotta tell you, I think trying to make a feature yourself, with nothing, is the best film school you can have. More than going to classes and begging to use their crappy equipment…if you took the money for film school and said, “I’ll take that money and make feature,” that will be your film school. If you’re me, you’ll throw it away, but you’ll have made a feature. If you’re Robert Rodriguez, you’ll be a star!

[On attending the Sundance Workshop before Reservoir Dogs] I go to Sundance, Reservoir Dogs is already set to go, we’ll be leaving Sundance and going into production. I liked long takes, I was a huge Godard fan. So I do one of the scenes from the movie, the one where Mr Pink is like, “Is taht a fucking set up, or what?!?” I set it all up in long takes. They tell me at Sundance, we want you to get out of this whatever YOU want out of it.” So I do. John Amiel, Monte Hellmann were there…and they hated my scene. Stephen Goldblatt, the cinematographer, said, “Not only is this horrible, but what’s really frightening is, you’re going into production. If you do this, they will fire your ass.” They have a meeting with me, and they just start talking about how I can’t do what I did. Like, “We ALL liked Godard, but enough!”

So I get my ass reamed, and take a long solitary walk. And I go, you know what? I liked my scene. It’ wasn’t like they were mad at me for experimenting, it was like they thought I didn’t know any better. So after dealing with all that, they leave. The next group of resource directors come in, and it’s Terry Gilliam, Volker Schlorndorf )sp?) and Stanley Donen. And Terry comes in and goes, “Ahhh! Your scene, just great!” And never in my life have I experienced black to white, just like that. And Wolker comes in and was like, “Oh, our little genius!” And I took another walk, and I was like, “you know what? That’s going to be my career. People are either gonna really like it or really hate it, and that’s the way it’s fucking gonna be.”

They show the first scene from Reservoir Dogs.

DePalma always used 360s to emphasize love. I don’t use it for that reason. But as time has gone on, I’ve had a million directors come to me afterwards, whenever they put a bunch of people around a table, they want to circle the camera aroudn it, and they say, “We can’t do it — it’s Reservoir Dogs! You’ve taken it from us!”

There were 360s before, but they weren’t so close. Here you actually lose the film for 10 seconds or so, you go to black on someone’s back and come out on Buscemi’s face on the other side of the table. You do that enough times and it all comes out okay. But that was also a case where being in the scene was crucial for me to understand what’s going on. If I had just been in the crew, I never would have known the vibe in that circle. And I knew I could never break that circle. And I was not getting up once we started. And I could monitor how everyone was doing. I could gauge the equilibrium. If I wanted to end the day w/a couple of close-ups, I knew who to go to, who had it going on

I did 2 weeks rehearsal on RD, and it was te best thing I ever did, because it’s an acting movie. I said, “If we do a 2 week rehearsal, this is going to save us so much time.” And it actually was. But one of the things that was so great about that rehearsal: we became the dogs. For the entire 2 weeks, I was worried abut being fired, for the simple fact that I had never been good at anything before. EVERYTHING had been a big build up to a letdown, so I thought it was too good to be true. “oh man… do they let people like me make movies?” But after the rehearsal period, I knew that I couldn’t get fired, because the other actors wouldn’t have let it happen, because we were the dogs.

3:06: When I started writing, when I was in acting school, I would do scenes from movies I saw. I didn’t have access to scripts, but I’ve always had a really good memory. So I’d see a movie, and I’d remember the dialogue, so I’d write it down, and anything I couldn’t remember, I started filling in. And I started filling it in more, and more, and more…and eventually a kid in my class said, “Hey QT, you’re a pretty good writer.” See, I had done a scene from Marty, and had added a monologue. I added a monologue to Paddy Chayefsky. And they guy got a copy of the real play and was like, “Where’s that monologue? It’s as good as anything Paddy Chayevsky wrote.”

3:12: [difference between Reservoir Dogs opening scene, credits, second scene, where Tim Roth is bleeding in the back of the car] You know they had breakfast, you know that something drastic has happened between the two. And now you’re just playing catch-up.

I wanted to show that as much fun as the guys are in their suits and the cool things they say, the violence is very real. Bullets aren’t movie bullets. It’s real. If you’re shot in the stomach, your gastric juices are released, it’s an incredibly painful experience, it’s a slow death and it’s painful all the way. So I was going to try to dramatize that. So we were like, “How do you do that?” And we just went for it.

If I had any inspiration for that scene, at the time I was into that moment in Casualties of War, when the black soldier gets shot and Sean Penn is trying to him in the helicopter. There’s a tremendous amount of tenderness there. I even stole a line––Sean Penn says, “Look at my eyes, I’m gonna hypnotize you.” I stole that.

Show “Royale with Cheese” scene from Pulp Fiction. You can hear Quentin laughing at Sam Jackson.

There are 3 things that I tend to do a lot. One is that I make things funny that aren’t funny. But another is that I do these big huge scenes. I tend to go someplace and you’re there for 20 minutes and they’re little movies onto themselves. Usually there’s tension and it’s growing, and usually it explodes. I’m a big fan of setpieces.

I had never been anywhere. I was broke through almost all my tow, I didn’t make this until I was 29. I never had been anywhere. So when we finished RD and we showed it to Sudnace, I go, “I’m going to Europe! And I’m not going for 2 fucking weeks, I’m going for the whole summer!” When Cannes happened in May, I just took the train from Amsterdam. That was my European time, of just living, writing Pulp Fiction, going grocery shopping and all that stuff. But naturally being an American, I kept putting everything under a pop cultre microscope, and the things that were funny were the things that were different. So Vincent did that, too.

This is where my computer battery died. I continued to take notes by hand, but obviously this guy talks too fast to really keep up that way.The one memorable moment that I was able to get down pretty much verbatim: the moderator asked him why he likes to use pop music in his movies instead of original score. And Quentin said…

I just don’t trust any composer to really do it. Who the **** is this guy coming in here, putting his shit over my movie? What if I don’t like it? And if I was in a situation like that, chances are, I WOULDN’T like it. **** that!

Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth

Cannes Diary: Returning Auteurs

Karina — Thu, 22 May 2008 12:01:25 GMT

Two films, two days, two revered European filmmakers presenting work that, in one way or another, reps a return. Olivier Assayas’ Summer Hours screened in the market without the Cannes Film Festival’s official kiss on the cheek, but even without that critical imprimatur, it’s nonetheless one the finest features I’ve seen this year, a return to classicism of a sort for Assayas (in the press notes, he admits that he sought to return to the stylistic concerns and working method of his Late August, Early September era) and the kind of thoughtful French film designed for adults for which there seems to longer be a U.S. market (IFC bought it anyway). Of Time and the City, Terrence Davies’ first film in eight years after the commercially unsuccessful artistic triumph of The House of Mirth, is a plain return to work. Both movies are about memory, about place, and a taking stock of the relationship between the two that happens in mid-life.

France, the film tracks a year in the lives of the family attached to the house on that land, as well as their various states of attachment to the objects insiThe title of the Assayas film is less evocative of its milieu than of its driving metaphor and climactic mood. Beginning and ending with two very different parties in and around the same sprawling estate in Ile dede. Tonal changes match the seasons. When we first meet Helene Berthier, her adult children and teenage grandchildren have come from all corners of the globe to celebrate her 75th birthday. Helene is in a maudlin, morbid mood, even though she looks and acts as though she’s in the early September of her years (excuse the totally intended Assayas pun) rather than at the end of her biological calendar. This is why it’s such a shock when, a few months later, Helene suddenly dies. The film shifts into a chilly fall/winter zone as siblings Frederick, Adrienne and Jeremie bicker over what to do with the house and the many museum-worth paintings and antiques inside. That process forces Frederick in particular to confront what it means to assign memories to things, as his siblings, both of whom have long left France and have started new lives in far-flung corners of the world, seek to cavalierly sell or donate most of their mothers things. Ultimately, the once-dire situation lightens. Spring quickly gives way to summer’s sluggish glow as Frederick’s teenage daughter finds at the estate a fleeting moment of muggy, melancholic idyll.

Summer Hours was initially motivated by a project sponsored by the Musee d’Orsay, which is one thing the film has in common with Hou Hsiao-Hsien.’s The Flight of the Red Balloon. It’s not the only thing. Both are, in their own ways, contemplations of a French family dealing with the past floating away; in both, both comfort and anxiety come from the fact that past and purpose live on in classic works of French art.

And, of course, both films co-star Juliette Binoche. She’s really getting better with age, no? Here, as in Balloon, she’s blonde, and it’s an amazing look for her, mostly because it’s … off. Crazy, wrong. Hot. In Assayas’ film, she’s a little less frazzled than in Hsien’s––playing a famous designer who has essentially renounced her cultural and familiaal heritage in order to enjoy art stardom in the historically oblivious global theme park that is contemporary New York, Binoche almost swaggers. She isn’t given much to do beyond that swagger, beyond standing in for an indifference to the past, but there are few international stars right now who do nothing better.

A hop across the Channel and downgrade in aesthetic scale brings us to Of Tme and the City, which works themes similar to those driving Summer Hours, but with a more directly personal bent. Commissioned by the city of Liverpool in honor of their selection as Europe’s Cultural Capital for 2008, City combines yellowed 16 mm film with crisp, purple-infused HD to demonstrate his hometown’s evolution. Davies sets these images to carefully selected opera swells and vocal melancholy courtesy of Peggy Lee; as the film’s narrator, he sets the tone for the endeavor as a whole by contrasting personal reflections with quotes from James Joyce, TS Eliot, and other cultural giants.

Davies’ reflections on the city itself are less illuminating than the personal confessions the city inspires. In the best of the recurring threads, he connects his alternate guilt and pride over his lack of belief in God to the bastardization of religious imagery in modern nightclubs, in mid-century Christmas films. He admits that he fears the wrath of God, but he pronounces it in extreme air quotes––”roth of gawwwd.” “We had hoped for paradise,” Davies laments in consideration of the world around him. “We got the anus mundi.”

More than anything, it feels like a city symphony film, an update on The Man With the Movie Camera, After Irony. Davies takes Dziga Vertov as a template, and then takes into account history both personal and social, transmitting both with the dryest of British wit. As far as recent place-based diary film materpieces go, it’s not quite My Winnipeg, but there’s some lovely stuff here.

Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth

Cannes: Che Aftermath

Karina — Thu, 22 May 2008 11:00:37 GMT

I didn’t see Che. Last night was the first night since I’ve been here that I had an opportunity to go to bed at a reasonable hour and, after a week of dozing off in screenings on three hours of fitful sleep, I took it. Regrets? Reading the recaps and reviews, I have a few. I mean, if Anne Thompson is right, the Cannes cut will, like the Cannes cut of Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales, never again see the light of day. Comparing Che to that film and others which were brought to Cannes straight out of the oven and half-raw, she blogs:

The good news: there is plenty of fine material here to be edited into one releasable long dramatic feature…One thing is likely: it will not be released as it was seen here. And it will not sell overnight–unless a distrib promises to help Soderbergh to find his movie. It seems that Peter Rice of Fox Searchlight, Daniel Battsek of Miramax and James Schamus of Focus knew that they didn’t need to see the movie before they left town.

David Poland has no love for any blogger or journalist who “felt compelled to offer their opinions way too early,” thus increasing the chances that “Soderbergh cuts the film under Cannes pressure - even though there is no consistent correlation between Cannes response and US release success.” But David was in L.A. He didn’t have the experience of being placated with a perfunctory sack lunch in between Che chunks; he didn’t wait for an after party shuttle that never arrived. He’s suggesting from afar that critics actually take a day to sort out how the external factors surrounding the screening made the feel from what they think about what was on the screen.

It’s a nice thought, and maybe in a perfect world or another time, but at Cannes in 2008, where no one’s buying anything but IFC and the stuff they’ve bought would be unreleasable for a different studio (I love Summer Hours, Un Conte de Noel and The Pleasure of Being Robbed, but these are not highly commercial films), 100,000 people have spent the better part of two weeks waiting for a breakthrough. They didn’t get it, and unless Synecdoche, New York turns out a lot better than early word would suggest, they’re not going to get it. People are tired, and just submitting to the Che experience was apparently quite an ordeal. This is an emotional situation, and the reaction came loud and it came quickly. Maybe that’s not how it should be. But it is what it is.

In related news, Benicio Del Toro and Steven Soderbergh are about to do a photo call and press conference. I’ll post what I can before I have to run off to wait in line for the Quentin Tarantino presentation.

Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth

Cannes: Nerves on the CHE Red Carpet

Karina — Wed, 21 May 2008 17:01:23 GMT

I’m watching the red carpet arrivals for the Che premiere right now via the Festivals closed circuit TV station. “Steven Soderbergh looks somewhat worried,” says the English translator. No shit. The director, wife Jules Asner and Che star Benicio Del Toro not only looked like they were walking into a hanging, but they couldn’t contain their apprehension when asked totally innocuous questions by the official red carpet interviewer. Examples:

Red Carpet Guy: “Steven, why did you want to make a movie about Che?”

Soderbergh: “I didn’t want to do it. They made me do it.”

Red Carpet Guy: “How did you become Che?”

Benicio Del Toro: “I don’t think I did it. But we tried.”

Soderbergh: [looking around] “It’ll be an interesting evening, one way or an other.”
Red Carpet Guy: “Are you nervous?”
Soderbergh: “Yeah!”

Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth

Cannes Diary: Che and the Quest For Relevance

Karina — Wed, 21 May 2008 15:00:53 GMT

It’s Che day. Steven Soderbergh’s Guevara epic has its world premiere this evening at 6:30, and as of this 9am writing, ticket-less gawkers are already lining up outside the Palais, some with Cuban cigars, all with signs declaring their need tickets. From a press and industry perspective, people are definitely talking about the film, but everyone seems less interested in what’s going to be on screen tonight than in how it’ll eventually be seen.

Che is screening here for the press and the public as a single, four-hour film, but it’s playing in the market for buyers as two separate pieces, The Argentine and The Guerilla. This leaves open a number of possibilities: a) the film(s) could be released franchise style, ala Kill Bill; b) the two films could be picked up by different distributors (unlikely, but not impossible); and c) one half of Che could be seen theatrically whilst the other does not. Rumor has it that the second half of the story is currently in better shape than the first; it remains to be seen what would be lost if half of Che was demoted to straight-to-DVD.

And then there’s the competition. The competing film so far most popular with critics is probably Arnaud Desplechin’s Un Conte De Noel, a messy masterpiece of a family drama that––we think––has absolutely no shot of impressing a jury under Sean Penn’s mandate to give the Palme D’Or to a filmmaker “very aware of the times in which he lives.” If we’re to take that pullquote to mean that Penn intends to select a film with Something to Say about the horrors of war, than Waltz with Bashir is the only competition feature to screen thus far that really applies, and buzz on that one seems to be petering out as the fest moves along. There’s certainly room for Che to make an impression, especially on a jury with more than one prominent Hollywood name, who may be inclined to hail one of their own; again, as of this writing, it’s too early to say whether or not the film will deserve it.

One film that *doesn’t* deserve plaudits, but which may be able to ride the wave of relevancy to release nonetheless, is Born in 68, an 173 minute French prestige film screening in the Marche. Laetitia Casta stars as a young libertine who becomes involved with two student wannabe revolutionaries in Paris in May 1968. The three move to a farm and start a commune and have babies and make a lot of expository statements about whether or not they’re Doing Anything For The Cause. After the first hour, the film moves through years at a laughable pace (watch Baye’s hair become progressively grayer so that she doesn’t have to act!), and eventually tracks the children born on the commune through the 80s and 90s.

There’s potentially a thread of interesting critique going on here: the 60s counter culture was in theory about changing the world, but in practice, it was really about sex, drugs and theory; future generations picked up the mantle, but left the theory behind, dispensing with the charade that a youthful interest in politics is anything but excuse to party. Casta’s son celebrates the fall of the Berlin Wall by hooking up at a gay bar to the sound of “99 Luftbaloons,” but is this any worse than his mom, responding to the riots of ‘68 by abandoning Paris in order to make babies, goat cheese, and have stony orgies? Interesting stuff, but unfortunately, the film doesn’t really take it up, preferring instead to indulge in the soap opera aspects of the story (although, I must admit: when said gay character announced in the late 80s that he was waiting for the results of some blood tests, I walked out). Hell, who am I to complain––at least it makes for a lot of nudity.

Born in 68 isn’t terribly made––it’s actually shot rather beautifully, although the script could use some work––but it is offensively milquetoast. It’s basically the French The Best of Youth, which was in turn the Italian Forrest Gump. I guess we’re looking at a new genre: the Overlong Ensemble Piece Condensing 40 Years of a Single Country’s History As Seen By Innocents With A Knack For Showing Up At The Right Place At The Right Time. The fact that only one of these movies is blatantly about a person with mental deficiencies is only a technicality.

Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth

Cannes: Two Lovers

Karina — Wed, 21 May 2008 13:01:23 GMT

I don’t entirely buy James Grey’s Two Lovers, and typing this having just walked out of the far superior Un Conte De Noel, I feel strange even praising it. I freely admit that even as certain elements are effectively thrilling in their depiction of tortured passion, it’s all put to the service of a narrative that is occasionally offensive in its total lack of surprise. But, but, but: after dozing on and off for the film’s first twenty or thirty minutes, I awoke to see Joaquin Phoenix breakdancing his way into the arms of Gwyneth Paltrow, and for whatever reason, from that point on I was sort of into it. About an hour later I became totally sucked in, when that moment of dance floor silliness met its dissonant counterpoint with a second, far more desperate scene of Phoenix dancing his way into Paltrow’s arms. It’ll be too little too late for some, but in its final third, Two Lovers becomes an extremely strong parable about the madness of romantic love, and maybe even its impossibility.

That scene…it looks like a classic romantic high, until you realize that there’s almost no color on the screen beyond the white-gold wisps of Paltrow’s windblown hair dusting the frame. It hits you that the characters think that what they’re doing is going to save them both when in fact (and maybe this is where the generic story arc becomes a bonus), we know it’s only going to make everything worse. It’s bleak. It’s beautiful.

Two Lovers is implicitly concerned (and this should be familiar to most New Yorkers) with the way romantic relationships give us an opportunity to slide back and forth across class lines. Both Paltrow and Phoenix play adults who allow older men to pay their rent. For Paltrow, it’s a stock slimeball married guy who keeps her, a well-bred bad girl, stashed in an apartment in The Old Neighborhood––part easy alibi (his mama lives nearby), part obvious fetishistic class regression/emotional slumming (his mama lives near by). In Phoenix’s case, the older man is his father, an Israeli-born dry cleaner who wants to ensure his own comfortable retirement by making sure his wannabe photographer son hooks up with the daughter of a business partner. Too bad Phoenix is constantly running off to answer text messages from Paltrow, whose bought-and-paid-for pad is visible from Phoenix’s childhood window.

Leonard begins relationships with both women simultaneously, and much of the film is devoted to the ways in which he immerses himself in the pleasures offered by one to ameliorate the disappointments of the other. The dry cleaner’s daughter (Vinessa Shaw) says she wants to “take care” of Phoenix, but she probably shouldn’t––at worst creepily unstable and at best just something of a bore, he’s a 30 year-old boy who has moved back in with the ‘rents after a failed engagement and at least one suicide attempt. In turn, Paltrow (more impressive than she has been in years cast against type as a roiling ball of need) exploits Leonard’s proximity (emotional, physical) as a salve for the constant pain wrought by her married boyfriend’s distance.

The film’s tone can be fatally contradictory, and it’s hard to say whether Grey thinks that his obviously troubled protagonist’s ability to seduce two gorgeous women (and, most problematically, that he stuns both ladies into a state of love via swift administration of his dick) makes for comedy or tragedy. It doesn’t help that Phoenix himself, starting at the moment of seduction and carrying through to the end of each scene, seems like he’s playing a completely different person. A comment on the transformative nature of sexual attraction, or inconsistent filmmaking?

I can’t decide, but ultimately, I didn’t mind. In the film’s second to last shot, Phoenix locks a single, tortured eye on the camera from behind the embrace of the woman who he’s just, by default, given a diamond ring. It’s a single shot that undercuts any possibility that this apparent traditional romantic happy ending is in fact what it seems. It would be difficult to look at that image and still believe that anyone in this movie has actually been in “real” love since they stepped on screen, to not feel a cynical, momentary jolt that romantic love itself is never really more than a collision of circumstance and impulse, a way of taking care of a need via the most readily available means. It’s nothing we haven’t seen before, but that’s not to say it doesn’t bear repeating.

Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth

Cannes: La Vie Moderne

Karina — Tue, 20 May 2008 15:01:46 GMT

La Vie Moderne, playing here on the Un Certain Regard sidebar, is the third documentary portrait of a group of rural French dairy farmers that Raymond Depardon has made this decade, and as such, comparisons between Depardon’s overall project and Michael Apted’s 7 Up series are not unapt. But where Apted’s seven films across forty years have come to define a changing Britain through the personal evolutions of a single generation, Depardon paints a portrait of a region and a way of life that seems on the verge of almost certain collapse due to nothing more than the natural passage of time and collision of generations. Taking on the triple role of interviewer, cameraman and narrator, the filmmaker’s affection for and rapport with his subjects is obvious, his tenacious patience a welcome contrast to the aggression employed by so many self-referential documentarians.

Depardon’s style of inquiry certainly requires more of an investment from his audience than fans of contemporary crowd-pleaser non-fiction might be used to, but it’s an investment that pays off. Where coarser filmmakers approach their subjects with laser-guided precision, essentially turning each question rhetorical, Depardon simply sets up a camera and has a conversation. In long, often unbroken takes, he slowly, gently chips away at his subject’s defenses until, apparently without realizing, they begin to unpack their own statements and reveal their true meanings

The film is structured as a year-long roadtrip. Through footage shot on a camera mounted to Depardon’s dashboard, the filmmaker takes several minutes in between each location to envelop us into the terrain ahead of his destination, as Depardon goes from farm to farm and family to family, catching up (and catching us up) on what went on whilst he was away. It’s a documentary in which no event is actually directly documented; each subject simply sits down in front of Depardon’s camera and explains their version of events past and present, and a few months or years later, Depardon comes back to repeat the process and track how things have changed. More than anything else, this is a movie about the passage of time.

The over all mood is somber, resigned. A once-dominant culture has become a sub-culture, and from there it’s petering out completely as patriarchy and matriarchs die. The younger farming families send their kids to boarding school and encourage the children who stay home to avoid the family business. Without family connections, those who wish to become farmers find it impossible. This is partially due to lack of demand, but there’s also the question of authenticity and legitimacy.The young mother from Lyon who wants to build a goat cheese business seems like a carpetbagger compared to the lifers caught on Depardon’s camera, who have never lived elsewhere and never contemplated an alternate career.

There’s not a superfluous moment in the film, but most of the Moderne’s core ideas come across most beautifully in the narrative thread about the Privat family, who have appeared in each of Depardon’s farmer films. Brothers Marcel and Raymond are in their 80s, and though both still tend to their goat and sheep daily. When the film begins, nephew Alain has just married a woman he met via personal ad, and has moved his new wife and stepdaughter into a separate house on the Privat farm. Alain’s uncles never married, and they bristle at the introduction of an independently-minded woman an her young daughter into this “family of bachelors.” Within a long, funny and seemingly unedited single-camera interview, Depardon gently breaks down the Privats’ polite defenses. “I don’t like being pushed around,” Marcel finally complains. The threat posed by Alain’s wife to Marcel and Raymond’s solitude and autonomy is a neat metaphor for the anxieties that run spoken and unspoken throughout the entire film, about the encroachment of technology on tradition and the passage of time.

Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth

Cannes Market Watch: Sex and Breakfast

Karina — Tue, 20 May 2008 14:01:13 GMT

In what will hopefully end up as my stupidest move at the Cannes market this year, on Monday I went to a buyers screening of a film called Sex and Breakfast. The suspiciously unspecific description in the Marche guide: “Two couples uncover what it takes to achieve a long-term romance while maintaining a healthy and satisfying sexual relationship.” Just from those two scraps of information, we can immediately deduce that this film is one of two things: A) so-bad-its-good Euro softcore, or B), not-quite-bad-enough to be so-bad-it’s-good throat clearing from a first-time American indie filmmaker who hasn’t yet figured out that working one’s personal sexual fantasies out on celluloid really only befits aged masters (and most of the time even then, it’s questionable.)

Since I knew that Sex and Breakfast was in English, I knew from the start that it almost definitely fell into the “B” camp. So why waste my time? Three words: Starring Macaulay Culkin.

The basic thrust of the story (ah, puns): Culkin can’t make his sexpot girlfriend come, so she suggests they go to a sex therapist who specializes in proscribing polygamy. Meanwhile, in some alternate universe section of Los Angeles where everyone not only takes cabs, but hails them on the street, Eliza Dushku gets upset when her hunky boyfriend with an identifiable foreign accent admits that he masturbates, and they go to the slut shrink, too. Dr. Orgy (a woman of maybe 70, which might be a Dr. Ruth reference, or might just be to make sure we know that sexual experimentation is a bad idea from the get go, because it’s associated with the idea of old ladies fucking) eventually hooks the two couples up, of course, but she takes almost the entire film to do it. This leaves a lot of time for long dialogue scenes, in which Culkin gets to say things like “What’s important? Pussy, and lots of it!” and Dushku attempts to repair her boyfriend’s ego by saying things like, “Shut up, I love your penis!” The couples do finally get around to Doing It, but it’s the most boring sex scene of all time, all above-the-shoulders shots of one swapped couple kissing intercut with the meaningful stares of the other couple from across the room.

The trailer, embedded above, makes a lot of promises (Dushku-on-Girl Resembling Jessica Alba action! Post-coital grown-up Culkin!) on which the film itself can’t really deliver. The lesbian plotline is, actually substantial, but never consumated. Culkin, who still doesn’t look old enough to be having sex, is actually appropriately cast as the boyfriend without balls; pity about his inability to deliver a believable line reading. And the real kiss of death: there’s isn’t even any nudity. I’m all for shameless schlock––see my continued show of love for the life achievements of Lloyd Kaufmann–but there’s nothing worse than a film that sells itself as cheap and dirty but ultimately turns out to have earnest things to say about relationships. The only thing shameful about Sex and Breakfast is its unwillingness to get really shameful.

Sex and Breakfast is already available on DVD in the States––in fact, the entire thing has been uploaded to YouTube––but I didn’t know that until after the screening. I’d tell you that if I had known, I wouldn’t have gone to the screening, but I don’t know who I’d be kidding. The YouTube clips aren’t embeddable, but if you want to skip directly to the ludicrously unsatisfying sex scene, go here.

Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth

Cannes Diary: Karaoke

Karina — Mon, 19 May 2008 18:01:12 GMT

My first couple of nights in Cannes, I was in screenings until almost midnight, and then I’d go to meet the people I’m staying with at the Grand Hotel, where we’d have drinks and then eventually share a long cab ride back to our place. The Grand is, apparently, Where Everyone Goes, which has it’s charms, but it also inevitably results in 30 minute waits amongst a partially-tuxedoed mob around the bar in order to have the privilege of paying 10 Euros (about $17, I think) for a single cocktail. Apparently, it wasn’t always like this. “Where’s the Cannes dive bar?” I wondered aloud to a group of veterans. The answer: “The Grand WAS the dive bar.” Whoops.

So when I heard that Alamo Drafthouse and Fantastic Fest founder Tim League was planning on throwing a renegade karaoke party in Cannes last night, I really, really wanted to see him pull it off. But it seemed impossible. So what if he had brought his portable karaoke system all the way from Austin? Where was he going to find a bar––in Cannes, during Cannes––that would be amenable and available to a bunch of scrappy Americans looking to scratch a drunken irony itch? And with the exchange rate being what it is, how would any of us be able to afford the amount of alcohol necessary to fuel such an endeavor?

But he pulled it off.

It was a triumph of collaboration. Instead of a bar, Tim set up shop in a falafel place called Twins, which agreed to stay open until 2 and sell wine and cans of beer for 2 Euros. He borrowed a microphone from Salon.com’s Andrew O’Hehir––the same tiny, directional mic that Andrew uses to record podcasts. I don’t remember where they said they got the P.A., but I think I remember someone saying it had to be returned to someone at the Finish Film Society at the end of the night. And filmmaker and sometime Spout blogger Michael Lerman sent out emails to spread the word.

The crowd spilled out of the tiny Twins and filled the cobblestone street, blending with the throngs pouring out of the Petit Mejestic at the end of the block. Eventually, someone from that hotel came around and huffily stacked their tables and chairs adjacent to Twins. No one left just because they couldn’t sit down. Brit Withey of the Denver Film Society shot an iPhone video of me performing “Love is a Battlefield,” which I sincerely hope never sees the light of day. Lloyd Kaufman showed up at one point, and Tim grabbed the microphone and begged the Troma genius to sing. I tried to stop him as he made his escape, and he promised me he was just going to an ATM and would be right back. Lloyd Kaufman lied to me.

Sometime around 1:30, just as Glenn Kenny was gearing up to sing “Mack the Knife,” the cops arrived. Something about noise complaints. They said we could have one more song, and Tim tried to get the whole crew to join in on a mass sing-a-long of “We Are the World.” No one was into it––at the end of the day, no one really ever wants to sing “We Are the World.” Of course, it didn’t matter––any party broken up by uniformed officials counts as an unqualified success.

My camera is broken, so I didn’t get any pictures of the festivities (hence the above graphic). If you’ve got any or have seen any (preferably less incriminating for Your Blogger than that iPhone video), let us know in the comments.

Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth