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Two
ends of the Mumbai movie spectrum meet in debutant director Kanu Behl’s
Titli, the sole Indian entry in the official selection of the
upcoming 67th Cannes Film Festival (May 14 to 25).
The film, which will compete for the Camera d’Or prize, has been produced by Yash Raj Films and Dibakar Banerjee Pictures. Much is expected of Titli because it has the commercial drive of Bollywood’s biggest banner and the creative derring-do of an outfit that thrives on pushing the industry’s cinematic boundaries. Titli, set in the Delhi underworld, is the story of the youngest member of a violent carjacking gang who wants to break away from the ‘family’ business. It has been described as "a raw, intense, rooted yet universal Indian narrative" about roots, relationships and responsibility. Behl assisted Dibakar Banerjee on the making of Oye Lucky Lucky Oye and co-scripted Love Sex Aur Dhoka with the director. Titli is one of 19 titles in the sidebar Un Certain Regard section, which includes Hollywood star Ryan Gosling’s directorial debut, Lost River, and French actor-director Mathieu Amalric’s The Blue Room. The section also has The Salt of the Earth, a documentary about legendary Brazilian photographer Sebastiao Salgado co-directed by celebrated German filmmaker Wim Wenders. Among the 18 films in the official Competition of the festival are several hotly anticipated new titles from some of the world’s most admired directors. The line-up includes 83-year-old Jean-Luc Godard’s 3D film, Goodbye to Language. It will be competing against two strong titles from the UK — Ken Loach’s Jimmy’s Hall and Mike Leigh’s Mr Turner, a biopic on 19th century British painter JMW Turner. Loach’s film, which is a record of the life of an Irish communist leader who was deported from the country at the turn of the 20th century as punishment for his activism, will be of particular sentimental interest. The 77-year-old director has announced that Jimmy’s Hall will be his last film. Godard, who is obviously no stranger to the Cannes Competition, has never won the festival’s top prize. He has had an uneasy relationship with the festival. Could this be a last hurrah for a filmmaker who has never much cared for mass approbation? If he does win the Palme d’Or, he will become the oldest ever director to do so. The Competition has
three other formidable French films — Olivier Assayas’s Sils
Maria, Bertrand Bonello’s YSL biopic Saint Laurent and
Michel Hazanivicius’ The Search.
The opening film of this year’s festival is also French — Olivier Dahan’s Grace of Monaco, starring Nicole Kidman as Hollywood sweetheart-turned-royal Grace Kelly. Competition watchers will have their eyes on several other Palme d’Or contenders, notably David Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars, Atom Egoyan’s The Captive, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Winter’s Sleep, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s Two Days, One Night, Hollywood actor Tommy Lee Jones’ second film as director, The Homesman, and Moneyball director Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher. Quebecois director Xavier Dolan will be competing with Mommy, about a widow raising a troubled teenager with the aid of a mysterious neighbour. The filmmaker is only 25 years old but he is already a Cannes veteran — his first three films have all been screened in the festival. Mommy is, however, Dolan’s first film in official Competition in Cannes. If Dolan wins the big prize, he will become the second youngest director to do so after Louis Malle, who was 24 when he won the trophy for The Silent World in 1956. South America, usually a strong presence in the Cannes Competition, has only one film in the race this year — relatively unknown Argentine director Damian Szifron’s Wild Tales. The Competition has two films by female directors this year: Alice Rohrwacher’s Le Meraviglie (loosely translated as The Marvel) and Japanese filmmaker Naomi Kawase’s Futatsume no Mado (Still the Water), a romance about two teenagers isolated on a remote island. This is a clear improvement on the past two years. Last year Cannes had only one woman-helmed film in Competition — Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi’s A Castle in Italy. The year before, it had none. Significantly, the president of the Cannes jury this year is Jane Campion, the only woman director to have ever taken home the Palme d’Or. She won for The Piano in 1993. Female representation in Un Certain Regard is markedly more robust, with as many as six names on the distaff side. The opening film of the section, Party Girl, has been co-directed by two women — Marie Amachoukeli and Claire Burger — along with a man, Samuel Theis. Four other titles in the line-up boost the tally of women — French actress-director Asia Argento’s Incompresa, Pascale Ferran’s Bird People, Austrian filmmaker Jessica Hausner’s Amour Fou and South Korean July Jung’s A Girl at My Door. That apart, the omnibus Bridges of Sarajevo, an anthology of 14 shorts made by European directors to commemorate the outbreak of World War 1, has films by five women — Teresa Villaverde, Isild le Besco, Ursula Meier, Angela Schanelec and Aida Begic. The festival hosts a Special Screening of the film. The festival will also see special screenings of Stephanie Valloatto’s Cartoonists — Foot Soldiers of Democracy and Los Angeles filmmaker Polsky Gabe’s Red Army, an exploration of the Russian ice hockey scene in the Cold War years. Red Army has been executive produced by Werner Herzog and Jerry Weintraub. Besides the Un Certain Regard section, the Indian focus will be on the parallel 53rd Cannes Critics Week, where Mumbai-based animation filmmaker Gitanjali Rao will be in competition with the 18-minute True Love Story. The last time Rao was in
the Critics Week — with Painted Rainbow in 2006 — she was
among the awards. This time around, she competes with nine other short
films from around the world, which will be judged by a five-member
jury led by French filmmaker Mia Hansen-Love.
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