Cannes, Movie Star
Ah, Cannes. Sun, surf, skin -- the perfect antidote to all those films in dark screening rooms. The 63rd annual cinema conclave opens tomorrow night with Ridley Scott's Robin Hood starring Russell Crowe. Another film about robber barons, Oliver Stone's Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps, starring Michael Douglas and Shia LaBeouf, likewise will screen out of competition.
Cannes, Movie Star
Carrie Rickey, Film Critic
Ah, Cannes. Sun, surf, skin -- the perfect antidote to all those films in dark screening rooms. The 63rd annual cinema conclave opens tomorrow night with Ridley Scott's Robin Hood starring Russell Crowe. Another film about robber barons, Oliver Stone's Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps, starring Michael Douglas and Shia LaBeouf, likewise will screen out of competition.
Speaking of which, only 19 (rather than the typical 22) films are in the official competition this year. Festival leadership says that there were fewer quality titles to choose from. (Might this be due to the diminishing number of foreign films being produced, a topic Flickgrrl addressed in this Sunday piece?) Still, there's a new Mike Leigh (Another Year), a freshly-minted Takeshi Kitano (The Outrage) and the latest from Alejandro Gonzalez Inarittu (Biutiful -- that's not a typo). Doug Liman's Fair Game (based on Valerie Plame's memoir and starring Naomi Watts as Herself and Sean Penn as her husband, Joseph Wilson) is the Hollywood film in competition. (Yes, this is the second Plame movie, following Rod Lurie's Nothing But the Truth).
Those of us who can't travel to the Cote d'Azur can get their Cannes on by watching one of the movies set in the fishing village repurposed as a convention center. The best among them have diamond thieves at their centers. Alfred Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief (1955), with Cary Grant as a diamond thief and Grace Kelly as the jewel, showcases Cannes before it was built up like Atlantic City. Also excellent is Brian De Palma's Femme Fatale (1991) with Rebecca Romijn as a diamond thief who steals a priceless bijou during the festival in a knockout opening scene. Frothier is Lawrence Kasdan's French Kiss (1995) with Kevin Kline as the thief and Meg Ryan as his unwitting accomplice. Mr. Bean's Holiday (2007) and Festival in Cannes (2002) are set during the festival.
Widening the net to nearby Nice and Monte Carlo, Jacques Demy's Bay of Angels (1963), Neil Jordan's The Good Thief (2003), Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le fou (1965), John Frankenheimer's Ronin (1998), Stanley Donen's Two for the Road (1967) and Prince's Under the Cherry Moon (1986) capture the flavor and luscious landscape of the region.
What am I missing? Your favorite Cannes or Riviera film? Alternatively, your favorite Cannes winner?
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels is my favorite Riviera film!— Alice215- FEMME FATALE's Cannes heist sequence is one of the most rewarding of De Palma's elaborate Rube Goldberg suspence setpieces.— Tony Dayoub
- Thanks, Alice for remembering Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. RuthH, another reader whose comment failed to register, reminded me of Otto Preminger's Bonjour, Tristesse, one of his best films.— carrierickey
- Agnes Varda's BEACHES OF AGNES is the best film set at Cannes. I love COTE D'AZUR, too, though most of it takes place at a summer house. As for Cannes winners, I love JELLYFISH and ROSETTA.— garyk
- Every movie I could think of has already been named, so I did a key word search at IMDb and found, among others: Henry Jaglom's "Festival in Cannes" (2001), Barry Levinson's "What Just Happened?" (2008), and the immortal "Emmanuelle Goes to Cannes." (This last, sadly, does not star Sylvia Krystal, but it does sport one of the pithier plot summaries at IMDb: "A beautiful young stripper dreams of becoming a famous film star." To which one can only reply, "But of course.") I also discovered a movie from 1933 called "Perfect Understanding," starring Gloria Swanson and Laurence Olivier (!!), about a newly married couple with a "modern" marriage. The movie, which appears to be largely set in Cannes, would be worth a look, I bet.— wwolfe
- Wow. When F. Scott Fitzgerald published "Tender is the Night" in the early '30s, Cannes and Antibes were relatively undeveloped villages in the shadow of Nice and Monte Carlo. I would love to see "Perfect Understanding" to know what the area looked like before the wedding-cake hotels lined the Croisette.— carrierickey
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- David Edelstein's The Projectionist
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- Flickgrrl posts 2/07 through 5/08
- Glenn Kenny's Some Came Running
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