Ducking Rain and Competition at Cannes

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/17/movies/at-cannes-film-festival-ducking-rain-and-competition.html

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CANNES, France — For many, the Cannes Film Festival summons up shimmering images of beautiful men and women drifting up a red carpet as photographers shout their names. “Leo!” “Carey!” “Leo!” “Carey!”

That would be Mr. DiCaprio and Ms. Mulligan to the rest of us, but here the stars are delivered to the patient — the several thousand media worker bees, but also the fans camped out for hours near the red carpet — like exotic flowers that are tantalizingly in reach yet also inaccessible. “That’s Leo’s hand,” I heard a woman say of a photograph she had just taken after the Wednesday news conference for “The Great Gatsby,” holding her digital relic with the veneration of the devout.

Several hours later the film had its festival premiere under a gray, moody sky that threatened rain and delivered a near monsoon. The weather was dramatic, the premiere anticlimactic. “Gatsby” had not only already opened in the United States the week before, of course, but it also opened in France on Wednesday. Cinemagoers at Le Grand Rex in Paris could have been settling into their seats around the same time that Mr. DiCaprio was filing out of the news conference. By showing the movie at Cannes after it was out in the United States, Warner Brothers, which releases big movies with the shock and awe of major military campaigns, had ensured that “Gatsby” would open stateside without the box-office-threatening taint of a potentially negative festival reception.

For Cannes and Warner Brothers, it was a mutually beneficial arrangement: the festival would kick off with globally known stars who would earn it maximum exposure — some 4,000 journalists swarm this jamboree annually — while the studio could exploit that exposure for the movie’s international rollout. What did it matter if the American reviews weren’t ecstatic? As Mr. DiCaprio reminded journalists, perhaps a touch defensively, the movie is “doing quite well at the box office.”

And then there was the woman who told the film’s director, Baz Luhrmann, at the American premiere that she had “come all the way from Vermont to see what you’ve done with my grandfather’s book,” Mr. Luhrmann recalled. She also said, “I think Scott would be proud of this film.” Welcome to the Baz Age.

Now in its 66th year, Cannes has long enjoyed a special relationship with American studios. One of the Hollywood films in competition in 1946, the festival’s first year (the war delayed its original 1939 start date), was the Warners title “Rhapsody in Blue,” which played alongside other studio films like “Gaslight” and “Gilda” and European entries like “Rome Open City” and “Beauty and the Beast.” More recently, American studios have shown big releases like “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” (2008) out of competition, which lessens the possible humiliation of losing to a modest film like “The Class,” which won the Palme d’Or that year.

“People are more frightened of competition” than need be, the producer Scott Rudin said. “It’s the place you want to be.” Being in competition here means that you have supreme confidence in your film and are telling “the community,” as he put it, that you think it’s so important, so good, it can withstand the long march toward the Academy Awards.

Mr. Rudin, who was speaking by phone on Thursday from his New York office, has had other films in competition (he couldn’t remember how many), and was last here in 2007 with “No Country for Old Men,” from Ethan and Joel Coen. “We came out winning nothing,” Mr. Rudin said, “but it didn’t matter” because the movie “ended up going the whole way” — by taking the Oscar for best picture.

Mr. Rudin and the Brothers Coen are back this year with “Inside Llewyn Davis,” one of five American titles in the main competition, although, given the realities of international co-productions, such national labels can be fuzzy. One hotly anticipated contender, “The Immigrant,” for instance, was made with French money; was directed by an American who’s a favorite of the festival, James Gray; and has American and French stars: Joaquin Phoenix, Jeremy Renner and Marion Cotillard.

The competition jury is characteristically cosmopolitan and led by Steven Spielberg, who will weigh the merits of 20 features with other jurors culled from around the film world: the performers Nicole Kidman, Vidya Balan, Christoph Waltz and Daniel Auteuil, and the directors Ang Lee, Lynne Ramsay, Naomi Kawase and Cristian Mungiu.

The long-haul strategy that Mr. Rudin raised worked well for Michael Haneke’s “Amour,” which won the Palme last year and went on to receive a surprising five Academy Award nominations. It won just one Oscar, for best foreign-language film, but it’s clear that its Cannes laurels and the bedrock of strong reviews at the festival helped establish its bona fides with Academy members.

The same holds true of “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” the little movie that could and which, after first wowing audiences at the Sundance Film Festival, went on to the far larger platform that is Cannes. (It received four Oscar nominations, though came away with no wins.) Cannes is more than a warm-up act for the Oscars, but that these movies played here too only adds to the festival’s luster.

Certainly, after two days of dreary movies and weather, Cannes could use some brightening. As one wit said in the festival headquarters, you know it’s bad when the best movie so far is “The Great Gatsby.” There’s a perception that the organizers front-load the event with lesser titles, perhaps to keep attendees from leaving early from what always ends up feeling like a very long 12 days. (The festival closes on May 26.) The problem is that when the movies are as weak as those that had played by Thursday afternoon, the mood can soon sour. Jet-lagged festivalgoers become (more) irritable, and the booing begins. And when the first film in competition also includes a scene of someone lighting a man’s crotch on fire, well, let’s just say it can make the critics a tad cranky.

This particular and thoroughly unnecessary set piece takes place in the Mexican movie “Heli,” one of those exploitation films that sells its violent goods with art cinema pretension. Directed by Amat Escalante (“Sangre”), it turns on the title character, a young factory worker, who lives with his family some five hours from Mexico City. An unfortunate, ill-advised act — without thinking, he destroys someone else’s drug cache — leads to spiraling, horrific violence. Mr. Escalante presents this with great calculation and numerous art film clichés, including long shots of cars driving across dusty landscapes to nowhere and an adorable white puppy that, as soon as it appears, is doomed as one of those symbolically sacrificed innocents of cinema, yet without discernible point or politics.

Presumably Mr. Escalante is trying to say something meaningful about the ghastly war on drugs in his country, yet “Heli” manages only to offer up one gory reminder after another of how easily filmmakers can lose control of screen violence. In this regard, the artfully arranged opening shot — a close-up of a military boot resting on the bloodied face of a man whose head is next to a corpse’s feet — is characteristically visually arresting and empty. Just as bad is Mr. Escalante’s representation of his indigent characters as scarcely more articulate or animated than a cow Heli observes. Somehow, the animal has become trapped in a deep watering hole, which, given the rain outside the theater and dankness inside, made it feel like a Cannes-specific metaphor.

The bad news continued on Thursday with the staggeringly obtuse “Young & Beautiful,” from the reliably unreliable French director François Ozon. The young, beautiful Marine Vacth, one of those gazelles who routinely drift into French films with vacant expressions and bared breasts, plays the title character. Isabelle is 16 when the movie opens and eager to lose her virginity on summer vacation. She succeeds, awkwardly, maybe unhealthily: while having sex the first time, she hallucinates that she’s watching herself. “So?” her brother later asks. “Done,” she answers flatly. Her first time isn’t just a dissociative bummer, though; it also leads her to become — mon dieu! — a prostitute, a decision that Mr. Ozon treats as an ordinary, actually banal stage in her developmental life.

Equally unpersuasive, despite being based on a true story, is “The Bling Ring,” the latest from Sofia Coppola. The opening selection for another competition section, Un Certain Regard, the movie takes its inspiration from a group of Los Angeles teenagers who in 2008 and 2009 went on veritable shopping sprees — grabbing Gucci, Chanel and Prada, and shoes, bags and jewels — in the often unlocked homes of celebrities like Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan. Based on a Vanity Fair article by Nancy Jo Sales, the movie essentially consists of scenes of the teenagers (one played by a strong, funny Emma Watson) hanging out at home or in clubs or in the trespassed celebrity digs, kind of like all those frenzied, faceless revelers wild-partying toward 1929 in “The Great Gatsby.”