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The 64th Cannes Film Festival opened today neither with a bang nor a whimper today but, if you can imagine it, with a sound somewhere in between. There’s a lot to look forward to here this year, but as of this afternoon, the mood on the Croisette was a little tentative.
Tellingly, a few seats were empty for the Festival’s first screening – in which Woody Allen’s opening film Midnight in Pariswas presented to the world. That’s not something I recall from attending Cannes for several years.
It’s possible that many people, despairing of Allen’s recent track record, simply stayed away. As it was, Midnight in Pariswas met with polite applause as it ended.
The unveiling of this year’s jury to the festival was a dull affair – in part, it must be said, because jury chairman Robert de Niro is not the world’s most eloquent, controversial or riveting speaker when he doesn’t have a script to work from. For all I know, de Niro might be a charismatic, Machiavellian jury chairman behind closed doors, bending his colleagues to his way of thinking, calling in favours and out-manoeuvring dissenters. But at the jury press conference, his answers to questions about his duties were dull, dull, dull – and attempts to cajole him into saying anything interesting fell on stony ground.
Out on the Croisette, Cannes seemed to stumble into the opening day. Some temporary structures along the thoroughfare were still not quite built, and crowds had not yet rolled in.
It was intriguing, too, to visit the frontage of the immensely grand Carlton Hotel, which during Cannes becomes a stately billboard advertising big upcoming Hollywood studio films. They’re there already – big posters for the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie, the next Transformers epic andCars 2. Notice the depressing connection there? Yup, they’re all sequels.
But the biggest area of the Carlton roped off to advertise a product, and the one attracting the most attention, had nothing to do with film. No, it was a stand showcasing a gorgeous red gull-winged sports car – the Mercedes SLS AMG.
Now this was real star quality. Passers-by lined up to have their pictures taken in front of it. Grown men on the Croisette were almost visibly drooling at it, in a manner normally reserved for the slender, revealingly-clad young women who parade past the Carlton all day. Nice car, one thought, and with a decent film festival attached.
Still, things are looking up. One of the things people do best at Cannes is talk about film, and hearteningly Allen’s film was inspiring a range of thoughtful reactions wherever one went.
I liked it more than my colleague Sukhdev Sandhu, and I quickly recovered from the sinking feeling I experienced in the film’s dialogue-free opening sequence, which is essentially a montage of picture-postcard-style shots of Paris. In advance, I’d told myself that Allen would surely never be so corny as to include shots of the Eiffel Tower, that wearyingly predictable device for film-makers to establish a Paris location. Well, guess which very tall edifice featured in the film’s opening shot? And it was followed by all of Paris’s usual suspects – the Louvre pyramid, the Moulin Rouge, the Arc de Triomphe, sidewalk cafes, men playing boules – and of course, the Seine.
It reminded me of a great song with terrifically smart lyrics by jazz pianist-singer Dave Frishberg, called Another Song About Paris. It starts: “Another song about Paris/Is there room for one more?” Later on, Frishberg offers a prodigious list of rhyming Paris clichés: “Though they still may be gay/On the rue de la Paix/near the Champs Elysees/In that sidewalk café/Where Maurice Chevalier/ sips his café au lait/I’m afraid that today/he’s become, ‘ow you say/More or less a cliché.”
Frishberg concludes: “So spare us another song about Paris/Because all the songs about Paris/Sound exactly the same to me.”
No surprise then, that Frishberg came to mind during Midnight in Paris. Allen may be spot-on when he fetishes his native city New York on film – but take the boy out of Manhattan and he exhibits all the safe, predictable taste of any American tourist with a college degree.
But what endeared the film to me was Allen’s treatment of the subject of nostalgia. Its hero Gil, a Hollywood screenwriter who longs to be a serious novelist, fantasises about being in Paris in the 20s, when Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald hung out with Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas were cultural arbiters, and artists like Picasso and Dali shared drinking holes with Bunuel and Man Ray.
In curious fantasy sequences, Gil visits and gets to know these luminaries. He’s a bit-player in their circle, a time-travelling Zelig.
But interestingly, Allen displays his doubts about a past imagined Golden Age. Every generation, concludes Gil, romanticises a dazzling bygone era, comparing it to the shallowness and emptiness of the present day, because: “life’s a little unsatisfying.”
Coming from Allen, whose unashamed nostalgia for the music, wit and manners of the past has permeated his entire film career, this feels like a breakthrough. Who knows? Maybe all those years of therapy have finally paid off. We’ll see what his future films bring. Anyway, it’s given the Cannes crowds something to mull over on a quietish opening day.
Tellingly, a few seats were empty for the Festival’s first screening – in which Woody Allen’s opening film Midnight in Pariswas presented to the world. That’s not something I recall from attending Cannes for several years.
It’s possible that many people, despairing of Allen’s recent track record, simply stayed away. As it was, Midnight in Pariswas met with polite applause as it ended.
The unveiling of this year’s jury to the festival was a dull affair – in part, it must be said, because jury chairman Robert de Niro is not the world’s most eloquent, controversial or riveting speaker when he doesn’t have a script to work from. For all I know, de Niro might be a charismatic, Machiavellian jury chairman behind closed doors, bending his colleagues to his way of thinking, calling in favours and out-manoeuvring dissenters. But at the jury press conference, his answers to questions about his duties were dull, dull, dull – and attempts to cajole him into saying anything interesting fell on stony ground.
Out on the Croisette, Cannes seemed to stumble into the opening day. Some temporary structures along the thoroughfare were still not quite built, and crowds had not yet rolled in.
It was intriguing, too, to visit the frontage of the immensely grand Carlton Hotel, which during Cannes becomes a stately billboard advertising big upcoming Hollywood studio films. They’re there already – big posters for the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie, the next Transformers epic andCars 2. Notice the depressing connection there? Yup, they’re all sequels.
But the biggest area of the Carlton roped off to advertise a product, and the one attracting the most attention, had nothing to do with film. No, it was a stand showcasing a gorgeous red gull-winged sports car – the Mercedes SLS AMG.
Now this was real star quality. Passers-by lined up to have their pictures taken in front of it. Grown men on the Croisette were almost visibly drooling at it, in a manner normally reserved for the slender, revealingly-clad young women who parade past the Carlton all day. Nice car, one thought, and with a decent film festival attached.
Still, things are looking up. One of the things people do best at Cannes is talk about film, and hearteningly Allen’s film was inspiring a range of thoughtful reactions wherever one went.
I liked it more than my colleague Sukhdev Sandhu, and I quickly recovered from the sinking feeling I experienced in the film’s dialogue-free opening sequence, which is essentially a montage of picture-postcard-style shots of Paris. In advance, I’d told myself that Allen would surely never be so corny as to include shots of the Eiffel Tower, that wearyingly predictable device for film-makers to establish a Paris location. Well, guess which very tall edifice featured in the film’s opening shot? And it was followed by all of Paris’s usual suspects – the Louvre pyramid, the Moulin Rouge, the Arc de Triomphe, sidewalk cafes, men playing boules – and of course, the Seine.
It reminded me of a great song with terrifically smart lyrics by jazz pianist-singer Dave Frishberg, called Another Song About Paris. It starts: “Another song about Paris/Is there room for one more?” Later on, Frishberg offers a prodigious list of rhyming Paris clichés: “Though they still may be gay/On the rue de la Paix/near the Champs Elysees/In that sidewalk café/Where Maurice Chevalier/ sips his café au lait/I’m afraid that today/he’s become, ‘ow you say/More or less a cliché.”
Frishberg concludes: “So spare us another song about Paris/Because all the songs about Paris/Sound exactly the same to me.”
No surprise then, that Frishberg came to mind during Midnight in Paris. Allen may be spot-on when he fetishes his native city New York on film – but take the boy out of Manhattan and he exhibits all the safe, predictable taste of any American tourist with a college degree.
But what endeared the film to me was Allen’s treatment of the subject of nostalgia. Its hero Gil, a Hollywood screenwriter who longs to be a serious novelist, fantasises about being in Paris in the 20s, when Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald hung out with Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas were cultural arbiters, and artists like Picasso and Dali shared drinking holes with Bunuel and Man Ray.
In curious fantasy sequences, Gil visits and gets to know these luminaries. He’s a bit-player in their circle, a time-travelling Zelig.
But interestingly, Allen displays his doubts about a past imagined Golden Age. Every generation, concludes Gil, romanticises a dazzling bygone era, comparing it to the shallowness and emptiness of the present day, because: “life’s a little unsatisfying.”
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