Bérénice Bejo, who opened the 65th Cannes Film Festival, hosted the closing ceremonies, on the stage of the Grand Lumière Theater, along with Audrey Tautou and Adrien Brody. The big prize went to Michael Haneke‘s Amour (Love), a meditation on old age and loss that was an odd’s-on favorite going into the end of the week. Grand Prix, essentially 2nd place, went to Matteo Garrone‘s Reality causing some strong reactions, positively and negatively in the theater. That film was received variously by critics and some startlingly claimed that the jury president, Nanni Moretti, a fellow Italian, had more to do with Garrone receiving the accolade, than the film itself.

FEATURES:
Palme d’Or: Amour (Love) by Michael Haneke

Grand Prix: Reality by Matteo Garrone

Jury Prize: The Angels’ Share by Ken Loach

Award for Best Director: Carlos Reygadas for Post Tenebras Lux

Award for Best Actor: Mads Mikkelsen in The Hunt

Award for Best Actress: Tie: Cristina Flutur & Cosmina Stratan in Beyond The Hills

Award for Best Screenplay: Cristian Mungiu UNGIU for Beyond The Hills

CAMERA D’OR: Beasts of the Southern Wild by Benh Zeitlin presented in Un Certain Regard Selection

SHORT FILMS

Palme d’Or: Sessiz-Be Deng (Silent) by L. Rezan YESILBAS

It’s only fair for me to say that Despues de Lucia by Michel Franco, which I did not see, must be one extremely good film. Why? Because it beat Brandon Cronenberg revolting, well-made Antiviral and Benh Zeitlin‘s phenomenal Beasts of the Southern Wild in for the Un Certain Regard prize. Other awards from the jury headed by Tim Roth:

Special Jury Prize: Le Grand Soir by Gustave de Kervern and Benoit Delepine
Best Actress: Emile Dequenne, A perdre la raison, and Suzanne Clement for Laurence Anyways
Special Distinction of the Jury: Djeca (aka: Children of Sarajevo) by Aida Begic

Writer/director Lee Daniels‘s follow-up to the powerful Academy Award darling Precious is The Paperboy. Lee will not have to worry about breaking out his tux for that event this year.

Zac Efron is the title character, Jack James, the younger brother of Ward James, played by Matthew McConaughey. Ward is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist from Miami and Jack’s opposite. While Ward is cool and successful, Jack’s nearly unemployed and listless, except for a route where he delivers his father’s newspapers. But when Ward returns to town to investigate a case of a man who he believes is on death row unjustly, Jack gets intimately involved.

Hillary Van Wetter, played with sulking sneers by John Cusack, is a nasty sort and you can imagine him doing much worth than taking a machete to a lawman, as he’s been convicted of doing. Even so, Charlotte Bliss (Nicole Kidman) is infatuated with the convict after a long, supposedly steamy pen-pal correspondence with Van Wetter (whose name still sounds like a soon-to-be-announced sequel to the Van Wilder series). In the meanwhile Jack becomes infatuated with Charlotte.

With the James brothers in tow Charlotte pays a call on her inmate obsession. As Ward James tries to coax crucial facts about the night of the killing from the panting Van Wetter, Charlotte and the chained man perform a kind of mimed sex act. It leaves Charlotte with torn panty hose, Van Wetter with a wet spot and us with just one of several unbelievable moments in this Tennessee Williams wannabe.

There’s also a visit to Van Wetter’s in-bred swamp clan, presided over by his alligator-gutting uncle. There’s a scene at the beach where Jack (who seems to believe that underwear is appropriate garb just about anywhere) swims into some jellyfish, causing Charlotte to have to urinate on him. There’s a scene where Ward is found in a compromising position in a hotel with some other men. There’s a laundry room sex scene that unites Charlotte and Van Wetter that makes one wonder if Charlotte will ever be able to use the dryer again.

One could suppose that this was all meant to over dramatize for comedic effect. But a sub-plot about race relations between Jack and Anita, the maid who raised him, shows Daniels grasping about for footholds. It’s out of character with the rest of the sex swamp of a film. Imagine if Wild Things had had a serious subtext about rape. And Daniels adds just one more extra to Paperboy. He has Anita, played by Macy Gray, serve as the narrator. Even though Gray tones it down, he might as well have employed Fran Drescher or Sandra Bernhard.

Killing Them Softly wowed most but not all critics in its debut Tuesday. Directed by Andrew Dominik the film compares small-time hoods who need to clean up after a messy robbery to corporate malfeasance, the banking scandal, the housing bubble and the 2008 U.S. Presidential elections.

Dominik directed The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward, Robert Ford and he’s once again exploring the nature of violence in a criminal community, though the tone is entirely different. In Killing two simpletons are commissioned to knock off a mob-protected poker game. The guy who runs the game, Markie (Ray Liotta) had actually arranged to have his own game robbed earlier and later admitted it. The guys figure that, if it ever happens again, that Markie will be suspect #1 on the mob’s list while they get away free. The actors who play the dumb crooks are worth mentioning.

One is played by Scoot McNairy. He was excellent in Monsters in 2010 and he brings his talents yet again. His Frankie is a sniveling wretch who only dimly grasps the numerous ways this job could go wrong. McNairy’s vulnerable performance reminded me of John Cazale; it’s that good.

The other thug, a drug-addled, confrontational sort is Russell, played by Ben Mendelsohn. Mendelsohn isn’t given as much to do here as he was in Animal Kingdom but he still provides a believable performance as a lowlife so low the others remark on it.

The heist works well enough, as Frankie and Russell get away clean with the loot. The inevitable consequences, however, are devastating. The guys in charge send in Jackie Cogan (Brad Pitt) to get to the bottom of the crime, mete out some vengeance and get the games going again. Cogan is friends with Squirrel, the guy who commissioned Russell and Frankie, so he brings in a formerly great hitman, played by James Gandolfini. He, however, has become a paranoid reprobate and so Cogan’s forced to confront whether he can even employe him.

Dominik heavy-handedly overlays the final months of the last U.S. Presidential elections, juxtaposing the promises and bureaucracy of politics, particularly amidst the economic meltdown, with the work-a-day world of these criminals. They all just want to get a system they helped pull down back up and running again, collateral damage included.

The cinematography by Greig Fraser is superb. New Orleans, the real-life shoot for this unnamed city, serves as a sad backdrop with its rotting buildings and open-sore lots to this ramshackle way of doing business.

The violence at times is Chopper extreme though there is one sequence where one of the targets is killed in a stylistic, almost soothing way (Dominik himself referred to it as a lullaby).

Director Walter Salles, the Brazilian who made The Motorcycle Diaries burns up some more gas with On the Road.

It’s taken over 50 years for Jack Kerouac’s Beat Generation bible of the same name to make it to the screen, with the last 30 being the most active. Salles’ offering, however, is a mixed bag. As it attempts to portray the youthful exuberance and philosophical naivete of this famed group of writers and artists, that included Kerouac, Alan Ginsberg and Williams S. Burroughs, it fails to make their actions seem contemporary or their reaction to their taboo transgressions believable.

Garrett Hedlund plays the fictional rogue Dean Moriarity, the muse to Sal Paradise (played by Sam Riley), a writer who wants to experience life. He gets a good dose of it when he heads “West” with Dean and Marylou, Dean’s lover. It’s a very good performance by Hedlund and brave one by Kristen Stewart as Marylou. Stewart has a number of nude and/or sexually explicit scenes that, while they aren’t gratuitous, don’t necessarily make you understand her character any better. Along the way they encounter Carlo Marx (Tom Sturridge), who was Kerouac’s fictionalized version of Alan Ginsberg and Old Bull Lee (Viggo Mortenson), representing William S. Burroughs.

It’s hard to pinpoint where the story meanders too far. Kerouac’s story took a circuitous route that was part of the point, but, by the time we’ve watched Moriarity get paid to have sex with a traveling salesman (Steve Buscemi, which does provide for an undeniably memorable scene) the story seems to have gotten away from Salles.

Not sure what to tell you about Holy Motors. I was standing in line with some fellow critics, trying to decide whether to attend the film screening or the press conference for On the Road (you frequently have to make such lousy choices at film festivals, often with intuition as your only guide), when I mentioned to one of our group that I saw from Twitter he had loved it. The other two in our group looked at him as if he were admitting to some bizarre sexual peccadillo on his “About” page. The film was one of my Ten to Watch for here because of the director Leos Carax, who made The Lovers on the Bridge. Here’s the trailer.

Whether it’s because I’m an American or live in Internet time–or a little of both–I can get frustrated walking behind the loping tourists and slower inhabitants of Cannes on La Croisette, the main walkway on the beach in town. You can’t get around them and they are in no hurry, even though you may be. The same parallel can exist for some of the more paced features here at the festival. I feel like an impatient boob but, come on!

The new Alain Resnais film is You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet is a good example. In a Ten Little Indians device twelve French actors are summoned to the estate of a playwright who has recently passed. The playwright had given his butler strict instructions to assemble the performers, who, in the past had had roles in his play Eurydice. When they all arrive and are seated in a spacious, stage-like room they are asked to screen and to judge a proposal from a scrappy acting troupe who want to perform Eurydice themselves. As the students onscreen produce the play the actors who are screening their performance slip back into their old, familiar roles as well, echoing the lines at first but then saying them before the students on the screen. They then begin to act as if they’re not reinterpreting the play right there in their seats but reliving it. The drama moves the actors/characters to different rooms and scenes. The acts of the play are not hard to follow but it doesn’t seem to amount to anything. The dialogue is very French with declarative statements about love and death and the meaninglessness of it all. It’s also very long and an unsuccessful experiment. Fortunately, in the cast they have the always watchable Lambert Wilson (known for outrageous French villains in lots of movies, including The Matrix Revolutions), Anne Cosigny (from The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, pictured), and Mathieu Amalric (Diving Bell, and an outrageous French villain in Quantum of Solace).

I sadly had to leave Abbas Kiarostami‘s Like Someone in Love to attend a meeting. Others have claimed that this was the film that drove their impatience over the edge, though some put that on Cristian Mungui‘s Beyond the Hills. At nearly three hours many claim it’s as great as his previous work, 4 Months, 3 Weeks, & 2 Days, but they do so with a rather weary sigh.

Talked with William Hurt on the street with his daughter and they looked almost exactly like this. He is scary smart and inordinately articulate. Ironically we discussed how the Internet is possibly affecting short-term, residential memory…and maybe even our collective patience. Guess I’ll try to slow down.

When it rains in Cannes, which it started to today in earnest, it rains with wild French abandon. Vendors appear on the street corners selling cheaply-made umbrellas that begin to come apart almost immediately. And the red carpet, once the stars have entered the Palais, becomes a ghost town. The Michael Haneke film, Amour, was tonight’s big red carpet debut. The downpour was rather fitting as the film is itself a deluge of grief and loss. Two octogenarians face the inevitable, cruel loss of faculties and hope when one of them has a series of strokes. A devastating sad, and measured film it lingers long after in the memory. That the married couple are played by Jean-Louis Trintignant (the man in A Man and a Woman, The Conformist, etc) and Emmanuelle Riv, the impossibly gorgeous and morose star of Hiroshima Mon Amour, makes the film only more poignant.

Highlights from Cannes of the last two days:

I ran into Oscar-winner, Asghar Farhadi in the street. Mr. Farhadi has acute recollection skills because, though I should know him, there’s very little reason for him to know or remember me. We’d met briefly at the Spirit Awards, introduced by a mutual friend, his publicist on A Separation. “Keith,” he said, extending his hand without looking at my badge. I was and still am shocked. I congratulated on his recent awards and the start of his new film in Paris.

Ran into Matteo Garrone, director of the in-competition title Reality and 2008′s Gamorrah. He told me he was exhausted as yesterday had been his big debut day, which includes getting grilled by the international press and walking the red carpet. He seemed in good spirits though, which he should having made a lyrical comedy/tragedy about our current culture and its obsession with, and deep misunderstanding of, fame. I was feeling as if I was the only one speaking up for the film until I heard from the very smart Sharon Waxman (founder of The Wrap) that she too liked the film quite a bit.

I met Shia La Beouf last night and, I have to say, I now have to alter my opinion of him. First off, he was courteous, as he grabbed a stool I was moving towards and apologized and offered it to me. He had a small glass of champagne and we turned toward the rest of the restaurant where we were at. He told he had just had an excellent night because outside, he’d just met Jackie Chan. Chan was having a dinner with about 50 of his protege/students that he was helping to become actors, honoring some of the ways he’d done so but also in respect to those who had helped him. La Beouf was pretty impressed with that. Those students, as they filed out of the bar, asked him to take photos with them and he gratefully granted each request (perhaps because of his lesson learned from Chan).

I’m very glad I hadn’t seen La Beouf’s film, Lawless, because I saw it today and didn’t much care for it. Last night, luckily, I could claim ignorance. “I liked you very much in A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints,” I said. “That’s the other one I’m proud of,” he said, which made me like him even a little bit more. La Beouf’s first film that he can really remember, by the way, was Beastmaster. We chuckled over the beefcake turn of Marc Singer and the hotness of Tanya Roberts. Then he went out for a smoke. Well, it wasn’t raining.

This good looking chap is Douglas Booth. He’s playng Romeo in an upcoming adaptation of the Shakespeare drama, with Hailee Steinfeld as Juliet. Booth, Ed Westwick, and producer Julian Fellowes held a party celebrating the wrap of the film, which has a February launch date for next year.

It will do better than a good number of Cannes films which often get distribution but not a lot of eyeballs.

One Cannes film that many will see is the most commercial film here, Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted. The film with the least aspirations of the three so far, M3:EMW, is a colorful, noisy carnival that frankly left me cold and bored. The main stars were in Cannes to promote it, however, including Ben Stiller, Chris Rock, David Schwimmer, Jada Pinkett Smith, Martin Short (he plays a seal) and Jessica Chastain, who plays a love interest for Stiller’s lion, Alex.

One of the most promising filmmakers here, Brandon Cronenberg, brings an inordinately disgusting, off-putting and damn well-made film, Antiviral, to the Camera d’Or competition (essentially the best new filmmaker category). In Antiviral the cult of celebrity has grown to the level that people willingly pay to be infected with the viruses of superstars (no this never really works but, what the heck). Caleb Landry Jones is memorable as Syd March, a purveyor of the celebrity illnesses. When he’s given the opportunity to pick up a blood sample of his favorite celebrity, Hannah Geist (Sarah Gadon) to get her most recent ailment he injects himself with a small amount on the side. Unbeknownst to either of them she’s the target of an viral assassination attempt and, when she dies, he has to find a cure. Brandon is the son of David Cronenberg and he’s picked up the family business quite nicely. The New Flesh is Dead! Long Live the New Flesh!

This year we’ve moved most of our updates over to our Twitter feed IMDbKeith but I’ll keep some updates in our blog.

You can accuse the Cannes Film Festival of many things but wallowing in nostalgia is not one of them. . Given it’s the 65th Anniversary of the festival they have more than reason to boast but, instead of what could have been two weeks of retrospectives the amazing “general delegate,” essentially the director of the festival, Thierry Fremaux has once again pushed the boundaries of the expected.

The films, as was the case last year, have divided critics. Many cherished Wes Anderson‘s opening night film, Moonrise Kingdom while a strong minority found it precious and twee (two words used in many, many reviews of the film). In talking to Anderson and the filmmakers what surprised me was that the strongest accusation about him, that he’s just being hipster and ironic, is not the case at all and that he’s in earnest and extremely sincere.

Raves (and raspberries) also came from Jacques Audiard‘s Rust and Bone with many citing Marion Cotiard‘s performance as a front-runner for Best Performance – Female.

Reality, by director Matteo Garrone (Gamorrah), is an homage to early Fellini and a biting satire of celebrity culture and greed. Cinematography by Marco Onaroto is sumptuous and Alexandre Desplat score is one of his best. The movie is a bit on the nose but 9 of 10 stars.

Terrence Malick’s much loved and much despised film, The Tree of Life, starring Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain, with what is essentially a cameo by Sean Penn, won the Palme d’Or the Cannes Jury announced today. The notoriously reclusive director was not on hand to receive the prize.

Kirsten Dunst took the top prize forMelancholia, Jean Dujardin for The Artist, in the acting categories.

Le Gamin Au Vielo (aka: The Kid With a Bike), by the Dardenne brothers tied with Once Upon a Time in Anatolia by Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s for the Grand Prix, while actress/director Maïwenn‘s Polisse took home the Prix du Jury.

Here’s the winners from the press release

FEATURE FILMS

Palme d’Or:

The Tree of Life by Terrence Malick

Grand Prix:

Bir Zamanlar Anadolu’da (Once Upon A Time In Anatolia) by Nuri Bilge Ceylan

Le Gamin Au Vielo (aka: The Kid With a Bike) byJean-Pierre Dardenne & Luc Dardenne

Award for the Best Director:

Nicolas Winding Refn for Drive

Jury Prize

Polisse by Maïwenn

Best Performance for an Actor

Jean Dujardin in The Artist by Michel Hazanavicius

Best Performance for an Actress

Kirsten Dunst in Melancholia, by Lars von Trier

Award for the Best Screenplay

Joseph Cedar for Hearat Shulayim (aka: Footnote)

SHORT FILMS IN COMPETTION

Palme d’Or

Cross-Country by Marina Vroda

Jury Prize

Badpakje 46 (aka Swimsuit 46) by Wannes Destoop

Camera d’Or

Las acacias by Pablo Giorgelli

UN CERTAIN REGARD

PRIZE OF UN CERTAIN REGARD Ex-æquo

Arirang, by KIM ki-duk

Halt auf Freier Strecke (Stopped on Track) by director Andreas Dresen

SPECIAL JURY PRIZE

Elena by Andrei Zvyagintsev

DIRECTING PRIZE

Mohammad Rasoulof for Bé omid é didar (Au revoir)

CINEFONDATION

First Cinéfondation Prize

Der Brief (The Letter) by Doroteya Droumeva

Second Cinéfondation Prize
Drari by Kamal Lazraq
La Fémis, France

Third Cinéfondation Prize
Ya-Gan-bi-Hang (Fly by Night) by Son Tae-gyum
Chung-Ang University, South Korea

I made it through about twenty minutes of Arirang, by director KIM ki-duk, before I had to run to another appointment (I was in the back, on the aisle, to minimize disruption) so I can’t really speak to the choice of it sharing the prize of Un Certain Regard, with Halt auf Freier Strecke (Stopped on Track) by director Andreas Dresen. The reviews of Arirang, such as the one found in Variety, however, seemed to confirm my rising suspicion in the over quarter-of-an-hour that the film was a long bit of navel-gazing mixed in with liberal amounts of self-pity. Half Alf Freir Strecke deals with a man facing a terminal illness.

But Un Certain Regard  has always been the artier, more aesthete category at Cannes, which is saying something.

Arirang was written, directed and stars KIM ki-duk. From what I watched and have subsequently read, it consists almost solely of watching the director go about a very hermetic existence. We watch him eat, we watch him sleep. We watch a cat he has meow with the most wretched “meow” in recorded history. We watch KIM’s sleep get interrupted by someone knocking at the door. We watch him answer the door. We watch him look around as his porch is empty. We watch him go back to bed only to be interrupted by more knocking and by a still mysteriously empty porch. It goes on like this.

The directing prize went to Mohammad Rasoulof for Bé omid é didar (Au revoir). The film, according to the Cannes guide, is about a young female lawyer whose journalist husband has gone into hiding. Thus, when she discovers that she’s pregnant she faces a minefield of choices.

A special jury prize went to Elena by Andrei Zvyagintsev (the guy who did The Return).

The jury was a pretty eclectic bunch as it is. It comprised Serbian director/actor Emir Kusturica (jury president), actress Elodie Bouchez, Guardian critic Peter Bradshaw, Tribeca Chief Creative office Geoffrey Gilmore and Daniela Michel, director of the Morelia Festival in Mexico.

Personally, I would have gone with Miss Bala, which, though overly long, is an assured feature by director Gerardo Naranjo. It concerns a beauty contestant who, by being in the wrong place at the wrong time, gets involved with a Tijuana drug lord.

In my Cannes: 101 post I said of Lars Von Trier: “I find many of his films to be, at once, strikingly beautiful and assured, yet intellectually simplistic and misanthropic on their best days Melancholia’s trailer makes it look like it may actually be watchable.” I had included “fascistic” in that string of adjectives but I removed it because I thought it inflammatory. Dammit.

Von Trier’s logorrhoea at the press conference for Melancholia, where he pronounced himself a “Nazi” exposed him and his thought processes for what films like Dogville suggested, an autocrat with delusions of godhood with a moral compass that allowed for the worst of ideologies to become dogma (pun intended). One might also just say “a director” but Von Trier’s verbal vomiting, which he now excuses as a joke–and some of it certainly was meant to be merely outrageous– most certainly revealed his inner workings as he proceeded down the rabbit hole of his mind. He started out referring to himself as a “Nazi” but it was in the context of equating it with being of German descent (questionable anyway). He went on:

Of Hitler: “I think I understand the man. He’s not what I would call a good guy, but I understand much about him, and I sympathize with him a little. But come on – I’m not for the Second World War.  And I’m not against Jews – (Jewish filmmaker) Susanne Biers, no not even Susanne Bier  - that was also a joke.”

Of Israel: “I’m very much for Jews. No, not too much for Jews because the Israelis are a pain in the ass.”

After this last bit he began to look for an out: “How do I get out of this sentence?” he asked.

The moderator attempted to help him by interrupting him: “By asking another question. Here’s your salvation.”

But Von Trier had committed himself, shifting to other Nazis he admired, like Albert Speer. “He was also maybe one of God’s best children.” I’ll be charitable and say that it sounds like he inadvertently dropped a “not” from the context. The director went on: “But (laughing) he had some talent that was possible for him to use when…(dropping all pretense)..Okay, I’m a Nazi.”

This caused the festival, in a move that was very dramatic and very French to declare von Trier a “persona non grata.”

“The Festival de Cannes provides artists from around the world with an exceptional forum to present their works and defend freedom of expression and creation. The Festival’s Board of Directors, which held an extraordinary meeting this Thursday 19 May 2011, profoundly regrets that this forum has been used by Lars Von Trier to express comments that are unacceptable, intolerable, and contrary to the ideals of humanity and generosity that preside over the very existence of the Festival.

“The Board of Directors firmly condemns these comments and declares Lars Von Trier a persona non grata at the Festival de Cannes, with effect immediately.”

I must say that I won’t look forward to the day when the festival rescinds this declaration. I give it five years.

Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life premiered at Cannes Monday morning and it immediately became controversial.As the film ended several boors in the audience booed the film. There was also some who applauded the film loudly. Side conversations in the halls outside included people snickering to one another, like delinquents leaving the office of the vice-principal who has warned them about their life choices.

Those snickering critics were wrong.The Tree of  Life is not only one of the most beautiful films I’ve ever seen, it may be one of the most audacious and Malick’s greatest. It is deeply religious in the best sense of the word, running the gamut from the creation of the universe (yes, there are dinosaurs), to the clean, innocent start of life, to the onset of wisdom and rebellion, to the eventual acceptance of the evanescent nature of life. Of course, there’s inherent risk with tackling subjects of that breadth and scope.

The plot follows a father (Brad Pitt), a mother (Jessica Chastain), as they raise their three sons in Waco, Texas. We later see the oldest son (Sean Penn) as a very conflicted adult.

It starts, however, with the quote from God in the book of Job after Job demands that God explain to him why he–a good man–is being punished with all sorts of calamities. God’s rejoinder, essentially a rebuke, is to ask Job just where was he when he was busy creating the whole universe.

Then Malick, with shocking cheek, decides to show us just how that all came about.

It’s a bit ironic that, it’s actually Malick creating the universe, raising the hoary head of director-as-deity/auteur and actually contradicting his point of a god-centered versus human-centered world, but he’s a benevolent deity at least.  Malick views life with reverence and it’s suffused through every frame of Tree. The accompanying score by Alexandre Desplat is sumptuous and nearly gothic (reminding me at points of 2001: A Space Odyssey). The cinematography by Emmanuel Lubezki is painterly; each frame is rich in texture and depth.

Pitt’s performance, of a stern, fallible, loving father, is another notch in his belt proving him one of the greats of our time. Penn, well, Penn doesn’t get to do much. Chastain also fulfills her role in the film, that of the never-judging earth mother. She’s already big and she’s going to get bigger.

Malick didn’t show up to Cannes and was roundly chided for it; people prayed he’d show up. People wanted answers. But Malick wisely realized that, much like real life, he couldn’t give simple, satisfactory answers to The Tree of Life and so, just like God, he let the work speak for itself.

Saturday was hit with a downpour just before the red carpet premiere of Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. The rain let up but the movie was water-logged regardless.  Neither Depp nor a few imaginative moments could buoy this bloated, leaden, and meandering film. The swash is definitely out of the buckle.

With Robert De Niro heading the jury a likely frontrunner for the Palme d’Or may be Le Gamin Au Vielo (The Kid on a Bike), the new film from Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. Cécile De France stars as a woman who decides to take very determined, very emotionally crushed child into her life. De Niro seems to have a soft spot for films where the protagonists has a lot of daddy issues and this one certainly does. Add also that The Dardennes have won the Palme before with The Child in 2005 and Rosetta in 1999.

The Artist, directed by Michel Hazanavicius (the guy who did OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies and its sequel) is a nearly entirely silent film that has a number of clever conceits and has become the talk of the town. With A Star Is Born storyline (hot actor’s career falls while his protege/lover’s rises) and two very likeable leads, Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo (both from OSS as well) the film has become the unexpected talk of the festival. The Weinstein Company acquired the property and are very excited about it.

Miss Bala, which is in the Un Certain Regard category, starts out well but becomes an overly long muddle; it’s one  of those films where, when you watch a scene where a truck is heading out into the desert at night, it’s shot from the top of the cab where the beams are and it goes on for over a minute. It concerns a beauty contestant who, by being in the wrong place at the wrong time, gets involved in with a Tijuana drug lord. I hate it when that happens.
by Keith Simanton

Sleeping Beauty, with Emily Browning as a girl who becomes a high-priced prostitute, has polarized the audiences here. Most people that have positive remarks give them with qualifications. Those who dislike it, however, are quick to give their rationale.

Polisse is a surprisingly effective drama about the emotional wreckage visited upon the members of a child protective services unit in Paris. The film is directed by actress Maiwenn (she will likely soon be referred to as “one-time actress” because she’ll henceforth be known as a director) with compassion and humor (yes, humor, believe it or not) though it’s overly long. Let’s hope Harvey Weinstein can get involved and pare this thing down.

So too has director Lynn Ramsey’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, about two parents (John C. Reilly and Tilda Swinton) reviewing their rearing of their son who goes on a shooting rampage. Though everyone cites Swinton’s performance as remarkable many describe the film as very rough go with almost zero box office potential.

by Keith Simanton

An overview of the festival for the uninitiated:

The Jury that will choose the Palme d’Or will be headed by Robert De Niro (last year’s Jury President was Tim Burton).  This year’s other jurists include Uma Thurman, Jude Law, and directors Olivier Assayas and Johnny To. Lesser known names include Norwegian film critic Linn Ullman, Chinese film producer Shi Nansun, and Chadian director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun (his film, A Screaming Man, was in competition last year).

The Movies:

The Opening Night Film is Midnight in Paris by Woody Allen, starring Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Michael Sheen, and Marion Cotillard. Parisians love Woody but they might be mightily conflicted by this film as Carla Bruni, the wife of embattled French President Nicholas Sarkozy, co-stars.

The films in competition for the Palme d’Or include:

The Tree of Life, the much-awaited new work by Terrence Malick, which stars Brad Pitt, Sean Penn and the very likely soon-to-be-known Jessica Chastain

Pedro Almodovar‘s new film, The Skin I Live In, starring Antonio Banderas, Elena Anaya (who has been a perennially compelling, seductive, and unreasonably overlooked actress) and Marisa Paredes. It concerns a plastic surgeon who attempts to save his wife’s life by creating new skin for her. It’s a reunion of sorts since Almodovar last had Banderas in a film in 1990, in Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!

The Kid with the Bike (“La Gamin au Velo”) by Jean-Pierre Dardenne Luc Dardenne stars Cecile de France (Hereafter) as a woman who adopts a boy looking for the father who abandoned him.

L’apollonide is from Bertrand Bonello (The Pornographers) and centers on prostitutes at the turn of the 19th century. If it’s anything like Pornographers it will likely have a lot of sex but be anything but erotic.

Along the same lines, Sleeping Beauty stars Emily Browning and is about a girl who offers herself up to the life of an escort and whose specialty becomes somnambulism (which likely says more about her clients than about her). It’s the first feature from director Julia Leigh.

Possibly more titillating will be The Source, from director Radu Mihaileanu. He’s been nearly effective with past efforts such as Train of Life (about Jews who take an ingenious route to avoid the concentration camp) and The Concert (about a conductor who organizes a performance of former musicians). This time out, however, he’s basing his work on Aristophanes’ play Lysistrata wherein women go on a sex strike to force their men to engage in peace talks.

Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai is from the brilliant, twisted mind of Takashi Miike (Audition, 13 Assassins). It’s in 3-D, for heaven’s sake.

This Must Be the Place is from Paolo Sorrentino (Il Divo) and stars Sean Penn as a musician looking for his father’s executioner.

Then, of course, there is Lars Von Trier‘s Melancholia. Though I find many of his films to be, at once, strikingly beautiful and assured, yet intellectually simplistic and misanthropic on their best days Melancholia’s trailer makes it look like it may actually be watchable. It stars Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsborg (who gives the film the stamp of quality for the international critics) as two sisters who confront their own issues at the end of the world.

by Keith Simanton

Cannes’ official poster this year is an indication of a festival that is more prepared and more thoughtful than last year.

Everything in 2010 seemed like it was last minute. The schedule wasn’t available until a week beforehand, films, like Ken Loach’s Route Irish, were added to the program like late schoolchildren running for the bus, and then there was last year’s poster.

Now I’m as much a fan of Juliette Binoche as the next Francophile but this poster was lifeless and uninspiring. It was as if the festival staff were getting ready to leave Paris for their time in Cannes and someone slapped their head. “Mon Dieu! We forgot to make a poster!” In walked Juliette Binoche, who was picking up her pass for the event and, viola, problem solved. Binoche even looks slightly bored.

This year’s poster is sexy, elegant and sleek; what one would expect of the most glamorous festival in the world. The image of a 26-year-old Faye Dunaway, particularly her luscious legs, shining out from the impenetrable black, was taken by photographer and filmmaker Jerry Schatzberg in 1967, shortly before she became a star in 1969 with Bonnie and Clyde. Schatzberg is the nearly forgotten director of such classics as The Panic in Needle Park, Scarecrow and Street Smart (where Morgan Freeman threw off “Easy Reader” to become an actor’s actor) and his first feature film,1970’s Puzzle of a Downfall Child (which starred Dunaway), has been re-mastered and will be screened during the festival.

I don’t know if this signals a trend or a theme in the Cannes posters but having one iconic actress anchor the poster each year seems like a truly grand idea.

Keith Simanton

The full list of jurists for all categories of Cannes have been released, and there are certainly some high-profile Hollywood names amongst those chosen to head to the Croisette this year for some intensive film-watching. Robert De Niro will preside over the Jury of the Competition, where he will be joined by stars Uma Thurman, Jude Law, and an impressive selection of international film luminaries.

See the full list of jurists and learn more about them at the official Cannes site.

The 2011 Cannes Film Festival runs from May 11-22, with festival winners announced and awarded May 22.

UPDATE!

There’s a series of steps near the Palais which have incribed upon them the past Palme d’Or winners. They going to have to use a smaller font to get the 2010 winner to fit as the Palme was awarded to Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives by Apichatpong Weerasethaku. The film hadn’t premiered by the time that most people had left mid-week and didn’t have the kind of nudge-nudge buzz from insiders that indicates that it’s a work of quality that has to be sought out. I had seen a trailer for it and must admit was captivated by the excerpted visuals. The Cannes jury, however, led by Tim Burton, chose the Thai production as the best of the fest. Javier Bardem was an early favorite for Best actor for Biutiful, though he had to share it with Elio Germano from La Nostra Vita. Juliette Binoche won Best Actress for Copie Conforme, the new film by Abbas Kiarostami.

The Grand Prix went to Les Hommes et des Dieux by Xavier Beauvois (it also picked up the Ecumenical Prize on Saturday). Non-Franco eyebrows have to be raised, however, after Mathieu Amalric picked up Best Director for Tournee (“On Tour”), a film derided by most. The strong French showing just doesn’t track with the films they showed.  Here are the winners:

Feature films

Palme d’Or

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Lung Boonmee Raluek Chat) by Apichatpong Weerasethaku.
Grand Prix
Les Hommes et des Dieux (Of Gods and Men) by Xavier Beauvois

Award for Best Director
Mathieu Amalric for Tournee (On Tour)

Award for Best Screenplay
Lee Chang-dong for Poetry

Award for Best Actress
Juliet Binoche in Copie Conforme (Certified Copy)  directed by Abbas Kiarostami

Award for Best Actor

Javier Bardem in Biutiful directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu
Elio Germano in La nostra vita (Our Life)  directed by Daniele Luchetti
Jury Prize
Un homme qui crie (A screaming man) directed by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun

Short Films
Palme d’Or – Short Film
Chienne d’histoire (Barking Island) directed by Serge Avedikian

Jury Prize – Short Film
Micky Bader(Bathing Mickey) directed by Frida Kempff

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The Palme d’Or isn’t given out until Sunday but awards are starting to come in from Cannes. The Un Certain Regard award, created in 1998, was chaired this year by director Clair Denis and this year’s winner is Hahaha by Hong Sangsoo. The film beat out such competition as the Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams film Blue Valentine and the new film by Jean-Luc Godard. The biggest surprise, however, came from the International Federation of Film Critics who awarded theirFIPRESCI prize to Tournee (“On Tour”) by Mathieu Amalric, a film that opened the first day of Cannes and was largely derided in most quarters as inconsequential fluff.

Un Certain Regard:  Hahaha by Hong Sangsoo

Cinefoundation Awards:
1st Prize: Taulukauppiatt (“The Painting Sellers”) by Juho Kuosmanen
2nd Prize: Coucou-Les-Nuages (“Anywhere Out of the World”) by Vincent Cardona
3rd Prize (tie): Hinkerort Zorasune (“The Fifth Column”) by Vatche Boulghourjian
3rd Prize (tie): Ja Vec Jesam Sve Ono Sto Zelim da Imam (“I Already Own Everything I Want to Have”) by Dane Komljen

The Cinefoundation prize is awarded solely to student filmmakers. The head of the jury this year was director Atom Egoyan.

Cannes Ecumenical Prize:

Les Hommes et des Dieux by Xavier Beauvois

Special mentions to Another Year by Mike Leigh and  Poetry by Lee Chang-dong

FIPRESCI (International Federation of Film Critics)
Tournee (“On Tour”) by Mathieu Amalric