Thursday May 17th 2012
Watching films at Cannes’s 2300-seat Grand Théâtre Lumière can be a surreal experience, especially when the film in question is unlikely to play anywhere bigger than the Curzon Soho back in the UK. Each morning at 8:30am, the day’s highest profile competition film is screened for the world’s press. Today saw the unveiling of Rust and Bone, the new one from A Prophet director Jacques Audiard.
Starring Marion Cotillard and Matthias Schoenaerts, and partially shot in Cannes itself, the film tells the story of a recently-unemployed street fighter (!) who forms a friendship with a killer whale trainer (!!) after she suffers a horrific accident at a marine park display gone awry (!!!). It’s about as wild as it sounds, if strangely unaffecting, and features some of Audiard’s most bizarre musical cues yet — how many other directors would dare include Katy Perry’s ‘Firework’, The B-52′s ‘Love Shack’ AND John Cooper Clark’s ‘Chickentown’ on the soundtrack to their sombre French melodrama?
Audiard’s film proved a hit with the critics, and Marion Cotillard emerged as a firm favourite for the Best Actress award — with any luck those pesky topless shots should disappear from the film’s first page of Google results any day now.
Of course, even the most outlandish moments in Rust and Bone would seem hopelessly pedestrian alongside Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie, the film debut of anti-comedians Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim. The market screening I attended started out with an audience of about fifteen people — by the time the credits rolled, there were three of us. Hitting the mark just as often as it misses it entirely, B$M is an unapologetically fan-only experience that might have found more success as a series of YouTube clips than a fully-fledged 
94-minute movie. Still, I doubt I’ll see any other movies this week co-starring a Johnny Depp impersonator.
Safely back at the flat, I’m now considering making one of these ‘croissants précuits’ before heading out for tonight’s Competition entry: Austrian sex tourism drama Paradise: Love, the first part in a proposed trilogy from Import/Export director Ulrich Seidl. The weekend looms, so here’s hoping this particular Austrian sex tourism drama is fully equipped to get the party started.
Wednesday May 16th 2012
The Cannes Film Festival, like Comic-Con, SXSW and certain parts of East London, is one of those things that’s utterly fascinating to everyone who’s there and completely uninteresting to everyone who isn’t. Knowing this makes covering the festival quite hard — after a bit of trial and error last year, I quickly realised that the vast majority of people who read this blog aren’t interested in a nine-month-early review of the new Nuri Bilge Ceylan movie — so this year, in an attempt to keep things vaguely interesting, I’m going to be doing daily ‘diaries’ instead.
Today began like much of last year’s festival, in a 10am queue in the blazing Cote d’Azur heat. Once again granted the lowest-of-the-low press badge, I stood patiently in the familiar ‘presse jaune’ line and listened to those around me have the same stock conversation about the inefficiency of the queueing system over and over again for 90 minutes. The faintly underwhelming Dictator PR stunt happening just down the road served as a brief distraction, but most of my time was spent fuming at the audacious cunts intent on manoeuvring their way past me in the queue. Finally, with less than two minutes to spare, we were granted entry to the very first press screening Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom, the festival’s eagerly-awaited opening film.
My seat to the extreme right of the auditorium wasn’t the ideal vantage point for such a meticulously symmetrical film (see diagram above) but nonetheless I’m happy to report that Moonrise Kingdom is an absolute smash. It’s a gloriously overemotional tale of two pre-teen lovers (newcomers Kara Hayward and Jared Gilman, both awesome) full of lime-soaked scenery and pleasingly stilted 1960s telephone conversations. Wears a little thin at the end but not enough that you’ll care.
Next up was Robert B. Weide’s Woody Allen: A Documentary, which charts the life and career of the septuagenarian director in appropriately fawning fashion. It’s notable for a number of candid interviews with the man himself, as well as lots of footage of him walking around Brooklyn looking bemused in a fishing hat:
It was to be followed by a screening of Roman Polanski: A Film Memoir, but figuring I’d had my fill of ageing auteurs with alarming sexual histories, I decided to head back to the flat. On the way home I received THE MOST CANNES TEXT OF ALL TIME:
Tomorrow promises new ones from A Prophet writer-director Jacques Audiard and Uncle Boonme funster Apichatpong Weerasethakul, so be sure to check back for more captivating tales from the Croisette. If you’re lucky, I might even show you the ridonkulous Spring Breakers poster I spotted out on the beachfront yesterday.
Tuesday May 15th 2012
I wouldn’t recommend the ‘version longue’ however.
