PLANET MORE THAN PRICELESS
If nothing else, last night’s fest-closer in Vancouver–the ritzy French farce Priceless, with Amelie’s Audrey Tautou as a Cote d’Azur golddigger whose latest “catch” turns out to tend bar–served to prep the well-dressed crowd for an aptly swank afterparty at the Sheraton Wall Center. Maybe it even warned a few wealthy spouses with roving eyes not to mistake one of the Sheraton’s expert cocktail-mixers for the next Mr. Moneybags.
But for this decidedly non-bourgie reviewer, Priceless wasn’t worth a Canadian nickel past the first half-hour; indeed, the sight of Tautou and Gad Elmaleh’s hardly suave martini man squirming in bed sent the sleepy critic straight back to the hotel, where clean sheets and a DVD of the VIFF’s, um, Young People Fucking awaited.
Likewise more valuable than Priceless was the $25,000 cash-prize award–announced before the screening–to The Planet, one of nearly a dozen films in the fest’s “Climate for Change” series, sponsored by the pro-Earth activists at Kyoto Planet. Not a Nobel Prize, perhaps, but a little green won’t hurt The Planet–nor its three heretofore unknown Swedish directors (Michael Stenberg, Johan Soderberg, and Linus Torell).
