Karina

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!

Under discussion:

Synecdoche, New York  (2008)

Che  (2008)

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.

Under discussion:

The Best of Youth  (2003)

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.

Under discussion:

La vie moderne (Modern Life)  (2008)

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.

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.

Under discussion:

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull  (2008)

It’s Sunday afternoon, and I’m sitting in a big, round room at the top of the Palais called Le Club, listening to hundreds of people scream. There’s a balcony encircling Le Club which looks out on docked yachts straight ahead, and the artist’s entrance for the red carpet premieres down below. The Indiana Jones and Harrison Ford’s Public Pension Collection premiere begins shortly, and every few minutes, the paparazzi mob down below erupts into a guttural, multi-lingual wail, each one greater than the last, as another celebrity gets out of another car.

Meanwhile, a large group of notebook-clutching press types have started to gather around two flat screen monitors inside Le Club, watching simulcast coverage of the arrivals. I would be making catty comments with them if I sensed that we spoke the same language––and if they seemed just a tiny bit less star-struck. Frankly, I’m slightly appalled. At least George Lucas had the decency to wear a sports coat––Spielberg, decked out in a baseball cap, a pink shirt and what appears to be a sweater vest made out of berber, is an embarrassment. Shia LaBeouf looks embarrassed. Shia LaBeouf, by the way, is extremely attractive for a 12 year old.

I didn’t even try to get into an Indiana Jones screening today––early word suggests it’s less than spectacular (my Cannes roommate Eric Kohn live-blogged his screening via text message for indieWIRE) and I’ve been having bad luck with lines, so I figure I’ll try to catch the “day after” screening tomorrow. I’m sitting in Le Club because I was shut out of what I believe is the final screening of Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona––I showed up an hour before the scheduled start time, after walking out of Jia Zhangke’s interminable 24 City, and the screening was already full. I’ve been having much better luck getting into screenings in the market (more on the distinction between the Festival and the Marche in a post coming up later today), but this means I’ve missed out on a lot of the films at the center of the conversation. People are talking about Vicky Cristina, Tyson, Tokyo! (especially Michel Gondry’s segment), Steve McQueen’s Hunger and, to a lesser extent, Waltz with Bashir. I made it into a 10 pm screening of that last one last night, but had to walk out after about 40 minutes due to a combination of starvation and exhaustion. Based on what I saw, there are a lot of beautiful images, but Manohla Dargis’ rave (already the stuff of legend around here) seems irrationally exuberant.

But don’t cry for me––I’m seeing films in the market that no one else is seeing, and even when they’re bad (like the Darby Crash biopic What We Do Is Secret, which plays like an after school special directed by a young John Waters––if John Waters had been lobotomized and had lost his sense of humor), I at least get a kick out of going out and making discoveries. And sometimes they’re really, really good.

I found myself with an unexpected hole in my schedule on Saturday and stumbled into a market screening of a film called Everything is Fine, which premiered in the Panorama at Berlin in February, where it drew kind reviews from Screen and Variety but didn’t find U.S. distribution. It’s a beautifully made film about a teen boy and girl who come together after four of their friends commit suicide. With a strong sense of style and an especially inventive feel for sound design, first-time feature director Yves Christian Fournier manages to turn the story of the inner conflict of a 17 year-old boy into something almost resembling a thriller, with a final act catharsis that left several of us in the screening room in tears. I’ve been describing it as the French-Canadian Paranoid Park, except more satisfying emotionally and without the problematic homo-erotic subtext. I think it’s against the rules for me to write a full review of anything that’s screening for buyers outside of the Festival proper, which is a shame––Everything is Fine is, by far, the most exciting thing I’ve seen in Cannes thus far.

My trip to Cannes begins at a bar at JFK––a Chili’s Too!, to be precise––where I flip through an abandoned issue of VOGUE whilst waiting to board. It just so happens that this issue of VOGUE exists to promote the Sex and the City movie––which, not so long ago, was rumored to be premiering at Cannes, before its gala debut was inexplicably bumped up a few days and over the English Channel (for coverage, Google “‘Sarah Jessica Parker’, ‘crazy hat’”).

This issue of VOGUE is the ultimate work of movie marketing synergy. It’s not just that Sarah Jessica Parker is on the cover, it’s not just that there are pages and pages of ridiculous photos inside, most of a couture-clad Parker canoodling with on-screen love interest Chris Noth, both ostensibly in character (more on that later). The story and the pics were literally baked into the movie itself, with the actual author of the story and the actual photoshoot’s actual director playing themselves in a VOGUE shoot scene in the film. Meta, right? Not really––it seems to be a matter of pure economics, and rather than be cynical about, sitting in that Chili’s Too! I decided to embrace it.

The VOGUE spread restores a bit of the legitimate, grown-up class that has seemed to be lacking from the SATC campaign all along (see: the Houlihans thing, the Fergie thing).  Cannes likely would have been able to accomplish the same thing; the VOGUE spread is probably cheaper, and it has the affect of reaching an audience of comparable demographics as those who would be exposed to as Cannes coverage, without ever having to make the actual quality of the actual film an issue (the story actually reads as if author Plum Sykes didn’t see the film before press time; even if she had, she seems unlikely to be convinced that the movie itself is more important than the photoshoot within it). New Line just fired hundreds of people. Such frugality on their part is almost respectable.

Also, the VOGUE pictorial accomplishes what I previously assumed was impossible: it makes Sex and the City seem kind of sexy.

It’s not every photo––I think we could all do without the shot of Parker gazing out a window whilst dressed in a matronly, cardboard-stiff marshmallow puff, or the narratively improbable centerfold of Noth trailing after Parker, unable to catch up due to the five or six pieces of Louis Vuitton luggage on his back. But there are three or four shots in the piece that are amazing. Each spins on that magic combination of commodity fetishism and “pure” romance that the show traffics in, but these still images somehow do it better than a decade’s worth of labored voice-over introspection and finely-tuned multi-layered drag jokes could manage.

Maybe it’s because the photos use the consumer fantasy as support for the romantic fantasy, which seems to be the opposite of what the SAtC brand is usually up to. In one photo, Parker and Noth are shot from way above, sprawled out on the famous red-carpetted steps of the Metropolitan Opera. They’ve thrown down their programs and opera glasses and have collapsed on the floor, embracing and laughing, the train of Parker’s gown tripling the amount of space her body takes up on the floor. In another, the image that seems least characteristic of what the brand has previously told us about their characters, Noth sits in a chair and points a video camera at Parker who, dressed in Marchesa, is writhing at his feet.

Yes, these images take place in luxurious locations; yes, Parker is unfailingly dressed in something impractically amazing; and yes, in the one image, Noth’s video camera seems unrealistically professional for recreational bedroom use. But over and over again, the couture is on the floor––expensive tastes have been literally thrown down in the name of passion.

On the show, this relationship their relationship was a protracted negotiation, always more about class rules than apparent emotion. In these photos, it’s a fever. The value of luxury items is trumped by by the value of what I think we’re supposed to assume is wanton middle-aged honeymoon sex, and I find it hard to see a problem in that. I just wish I could have confidence that the attitude invoked by the photos was, like the photoshoot itself, baked into the movie. The outlook on that, based on early reviews, does not look so good.

Enough of all that. I’m typing this from the airport in Paris, where I await my connecting flight to Paris. If all goes according to plan, I’ll arrive in time for a late-night screening of James Toback’s documentary on Mike Tyson, which Anne Thompson says is “too revelatory, too dramatic, too juicy not to be widely viewed.” Then, tomorrow: Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Three Monkeys, and Arnaud Desplechin’s Un Conte de Noel, which stars Catherine Deneuve and Mathieu Amalric.