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Cannes sets the pace The buzz generated at the world’s premier film festival goes a long way in giving a new movie both prestige and longevity
The Palme d'Or may be one of most coveted prizes in world cinema, but it certainly isn't the only reward that titles playing in the glitzy and glamour-filled Cannes Film Festival are after. When a film in Competition or Un Certain Regard generates buzz on the palm-shaded promenade around which all the Cannes action occurs, it provides it a headstart, the spin-offs from which last the entire year and beyond. New discoveries are made, already formidable reputations are further strengthened and some films gather enough critical steam on its premiere here to be talked of as likely Oscar contenders and as festival favourites for the next few months. The 67th Cannes Film Festival had no dearth of such titles, with Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Winter Sleep, an intense and impeccably crafted three-and-a-quarter-hour-long drama set in a small Cappadocia village, leading the way. It would be surprising — and unfair — if Bilge’s masterful film isn’t one of the most heard of foreign-language films in the run-up to the Academy Awards season early next year.
Ceylan is a Cannes regular and his films are always well-received here. Winter Sleep is in a league of its own. It is the slow-burning story of an ageing ex-actor, his much younger wife and his recently divorced sister that plays out in a hotel owned by the family as issues long suppressed bubble to the forth in surprising ways, changing the trio’s world for good. Brit veterans Mike Leigh and Ken Loach did no harm to their standing with Mr. Turner and Jimmy’s Hall, respectively. Both films are biographies but each is as distinct from each other as the two personalities that they showcase. Leigh’s accomplished film is an account of the last couple of decades of the eventful life of eccentric British marine painter J.M.W. Turner, whose pursuit of perfection was often at the expense of his own and his well-wishers’ emotional needs.
What stands out in Mr. Turner is Timothy Spall’s towering performance in the central role. He would certainly be in the mix when nominations are made for the Best Actor Oscar of 2014. Loach’s Jimmy’s Hall, enlivened by a clutch of great actors, is a lively ode to the derring-do of Irish communist activist Jimmy Gralton, who was deported to New York in the 1930s for taking in both the Catholic Church and the country’s rulers. Gralton, played by Barry Ward, spearheads the building of a dance hall where people of his spirited rural community could enjoy the freedom to question the established order and counter received wisdom, besides sing, dance and dream.
Although its protagonist loses the battle in the end, Jimmy's Hall is a cheerful and warm-hearted homage to men and women who dared to follow their hearts against all odds. If it were indeed Loach’s last fiction film as the 77-year-old director has publicly announced, it would be a befitting swan song. Another ‘final’ film that caught the eye in Cannes this year was 81-year-old John Boorman’s Queen and Country, a worthy follow-up to his Hope and Glory. The film screened in the parallel Directors Fortnight deals with the two years of mandatory conscription that the British filmmaker had to serve as an 18-year-old lad. The American presence in Cannes Competition was somewhat thin this year but the two films that made the cut — veteran character actor Tommy Lee Jones’s second directorial outing The Homesman, a unique take on the Old West, and Bennett Miller’s well-acted wrestling drama Foxcatcher. In the latter, comic actor Steve Carrell is cast against type as self-obsessed tycoon and sports enthusiast John du Pont, who throws his weight behind wrestler Mark Schultz’s bid to win gold in the 1988 Seoul Olympics. The Homesman, a revisionist Western, which features the director in the male lead, highlights the sorry plight of women in a time and space where societal norms were crushingly loaded against them. Hilary Swank weighs in with a striking performance as a gutsy spinster who offers to transport three mentally unhinged women from the Nebraska Territories to a church in Iowa. Among the other feted films in Cannes this year: Japanese director Naomi Kawase’s evocative Still the Water, Belgian siblings Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s marvelously taut Two Days, One Night and Kornel Mundruczo’s Hungarian film White God, which was part of Un Certain Regard. Two Days, One Night, notable for the Dardenne brothers’ minimalist style, is buoyed by a steady pivotal performance by Marion Cotillard as a depressive woman, who is in danger of losing her job if her co-workers do not sacrifice their bonuses. Egged on by her husband, she goes from door to door appealing to her colleagues to help her keep her job. This slice-of-Belgian-life drama is universal in its appeal. Expect the film to be in the news all year round until the Oscars are upon us. Kawase’s contemplative Still the Water is unlikely to go that far because, true to form, the director does not inform the film with any crowd-pleasing ingredients but it has the makings of a work that will be enthusiastically embraced by arthouse and festival audience. Kawase focuses squarely on the rituals of existence on the subtropical Japanese island of Amami, where the discovery of a body floating in the sea sets off a chain of events that alters the life of a teenage boy and his girlfriend. In a community in which nature and everyday life are inextricably intertwined, growing up is challenging and eventually rewarding.
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