French Riviera Travel News

Posts Tagged ‘Cannes Film Festival’

Move over, Michael Moore. There’s another troublemaker in town and his name is Charles Ferguson. Ferguson’s powerful and infuriating new documentary, Inside Job, opened at the Cannes Film Festival yesterday just in time to remind you of who’s financing those fancy yachts parked offshore. Crooks, that’s who!

Ferguson delves into the global financial meltdown of 2008 and patiently explains the pattern of corruption, lies and double-dealing that brought the US Treasury to its knees. Cheerfully dispensing with the “he said, she said”, “on the other hand” twaddle that passes for MSM objectivity, this filmmaker embraces advocacy journalism and the result is bracing. Deregulation of the financial markets has been a disaster, Ferguson argues, allowing investment banks to amass other people’s money and gamble it away on deviously constructed financial instruments. Although his central points are familiar to any regular reader of Paul Krugman’s columns, for example, the clever graphics and disturbing interviews with economists, government officials, and financial analysts illuminate the extent to which we live of, by and for Wall Street. Goldman Sachs wins, everybody else loses.

Far from sacrificing entertainment to the cause of instruction, the film manages to keep viewers’ attention with startling tidbits such as the interview with the owner of a high-class “escort service”. Oh yes, half of her clientele was composed of Wall Street high-rollers, paying $1000/hour for their comfort women. Stealing money from retirement funds is stressful! A guy needs to relax! But sometimes a guy needs a little chemical help to work those long hours. “It amazed me how much cocaine these guys could do and still function”, remarked a therapist specializing in the angst of Wall Streeters.

The cozy relationships between financiers, government officials and ratings agencies have been amply covered elsewhere but Inside Job also draws attention to how Wall Street has corrupted academia. The same professors cheerleading the cause of deregulation in their Ivy League classrooms were also sitting on the boards of directors of major financial institutions and pulling down huge speaking fees from industry groups. Nice work if you can get it.

Ferguson sees little change under the current administration. Obama has kept the same names as previous administrations, all deeply implicated in the crash. It’s too bad that the filmmaker couldn’t get Larry Summers, Laura Tyson, Hank Paulson and Timothy Geithner to talk on camera but I’m sure their lawyers would have advised against it. He ends by calling on us, the public, to take our country back from the scoundrels who have looted the Treasury. Let’s hope we heed his call.

It was touch and go for a while but finally my badge for the Cannes Film Festival came through and I headed to Cannes to pick it up. Just as the counter lady typed my information into the computer she frowned. Another assistant come rushing over and explained that the computers were down.  As we waited for them to reboot, I asked the woman if the storms from last week were continuing to gum up the system. No, she explained. It was the volcano that was disrupting arrivals.

It seemed a little quieter than usual but hardly DOA. Cote d’Azur tourist officials announced a banner weekend of hotel reservations partly because of the Cannes Film Festival.

After depositing my 10-ton bag in the cloakroom I went to the movies! Since I didn’t have time to research, I took the path of least resistance which led to an Agnes Varda film, the 1969 hippiegram “Lions, Love . . .and Lies” starring the luminous Viva of Warhol fame and the two guys who came up with “Hair”. Looking very much the aging hippie with her bi-coloured hair, Ms Varda was on hand to present her film.

Then it was time for Happy Hour! The Short Film Corner sponsors a 5pm Happy Hour which attracts a young crowd, mostly from the American Pavillion. With my prestigious badge, I was quickly targeted by a nervous young guy who wanted to know who I was “with”. He was “with” Sprankle Studios and had directed a short film for them. No sooner had I edged away than another young man rushed over to introduce himself and his short film. “It’s about sign-spinners.” “What?” “If you have seven minutes you can see it!” “Well, I. . .” He whipped out his Ipad which immediately piqued my interest. Before I knew it, I had headphones on and the opening credits started to roll. Human Traffic King was the catchy title and it was about, well, those people that spin signs out there in America. Who knew? Grade: A+ for hustle; A for originality and a solid B for execution.

I finished off the day with a short documentary about Catherine Destivelle, the world champion rock climber. It made me want to visit the beautifully-photographed Alps that was a setting for her exploits but stay far, far away from those horrid, steep cliffs.

The Cannes Film Festival has just announced that director Tim Burton will be Jury President for the 63rd Cannes Film Festival to be held from May 12to 23.
Upon accepting the invitation from Gilles Jacob and Thierry Frémaux, Tim Burton declared
“After spending my early life watching triple features and 48-hour horror movie marathons, I’m finally ready for this. It’s a great honour
and I look forward, with my fellow jurors,
to watching some great films from around the world. When you think of Cannes you think of world cinema. And as films have always been like dreams to me, this is a dream come true.

Read more about the Cannes Film Festival.

Poverty sucks, whether in the Australian outback of “Samson and Delilah” or in the central Harlem of “Precious”.  Seeing these two strong entries in the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Official Selection raised some interesting questions about the nature of poverty and what to do about it. Although the subject matter was bleak in both cases, each filmmaker found cause for hope without betraying the material.

Samson and Delilah are aborigines living in hot, insect-ridden isolation, suffering ‘ain’t-no-food-in-the-fridge’ poverty. Government handouts keep them from starving to death but director Warwick Thornton meticulously records the  tedium and fury of dead-end lives. White people are mostly absent from their lives, creeping in only to weasel away aboriginal paintings to sell at a huge profit. Battling violence, hunger and addiction the two teenage protagonists eventually find a measure of solace in each other.

Precious, of the eponymous film, has plenty of white people around trying to straighten out her life and plenty of burgers to fatten her up. As a Harlem teenager, pregnant with her father’s child, Precious’ main battle is with her ferocious mother. Played with demonic energy by Mo’nique, she is the mother of all welfare queens. (So this is why President Clinton insisted on ending welfare). White people are there to be massaged into continuing the welfare checks but ultimately it’s a government literacy program that saves Precious. Her white principal guides her into the program and a white social worker, played by Mariah Carey, pushes Precious to confront her horrific past.

Neither Delilah nor Precious end up alone. Delilah has the severely limited Samson and Precious has her babies. Each movies ends with a hint of the redemptive power of art; Delilah applies herself to an aboriginal painting and Precious seems determined to find her writer’s voice. It’s a woman’s world after all.

If the Cannes Film Festival has an (unofficial) theme this year it would be Woman. “The eternal feminine is at the centre of our cinema adventure” says the Official Catalog.  And so, the striking poster based on a scene from Antonioni’s L’Avventura:

And so, jury President, Isabelle Huppert. And even more significantly, a more than token representation of women directors are competing for the Palme d’Or; oldtimer Jane Campion is up against newcomers Andrea Arnold and Isabelle Coixet. See the line-up of competition films this year.

While some contemporary directors confuse actresses with porn stars and doll up prostitutes with pretension (I’m talkin’ to you, Soderbergh, and your “Girlfriend Experience”), it wasn’t always that way. Cleverer directors have found a universality in the female experience.

In 1948 directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger cast Moira Shearer as a driven but conflicted ballet dancer in “Red Shoes”. The Svengali-like director that made Shearer’s character a star dancer insists that marriage is the artistic death of all ballerinas. Yet she falls in love with the company’s conductor. Which will she choose: art or love?

“Red Shoes” stunned the audience at the Debussy Theatre, Friday night. Director Martin Scorcese introduced the film that has just undergone an extraordinary restoration, largely as a result of Mr. Scorcese’s long love affair with the film and friendship with the directors. It was all there just as Powell and Pressburger intended. The 17-minute ballet-within-a-ballet unfolded in a flood of color and movement, undoubtedly the finest ballet sequence ever to be captured on film. There were scenes filmed on the French Riviera over 60 years ago when the Basse Corniche was a dirt track!

In addition to the visual experience, the film poses the question that has bedeviled artists probably since the cave paintings of Lascaux: to what extent does the drive to create exclude a fulfilling personal life? Several years ago, Martin Scorcese gave a Master Class at Cannes and alluded to the toll his career has taken on his personal life (five marriages). One can only imagine the difficulties a woman director faces in trying to get a film project off the ground while keeping a domestic life going.

Near the end of “Red Shoes”  Moira Shearer’s character considers a return to dance against the will of her husband who seems to find marriage to a star ballerina unthinkable.  Lermontov, her company director, tries to persuade her to return saying,  “But you didn’t ask Julian [her husband] to choose between you and his career” “I would never ask him to make such a choice!” she cries. “Then why can he ask you?”

Good question.