NURI BILGE CEYLAN, “ONCE UPON A TIME IN ANATOLIA”

By Brandon Harris

Over the course of one long night, a cadre of lonely men — which includes an overbearing, barely competent police chief, a handsome and thorough doctor, a cautious district attorney, several drivers, civil servants, grave diggers, and two brothers accused of homicide — drive through the hills of rural Anatolia in search of a body buried at a spot the young and frightened siblings can’t quite recall. We glimpse their sorrows, their vanities, their brief bouts of interconnectedness, but mostly we watch their boredom. Still the crime gets solved, motivations are revealed, a small but significant cover-up is enacted. Along the way, we get a rare chance to watch life as it’s actually lived, rendered with such beauty, clarity and care that one wonders why all movies aren’t so attuned to the visceral mysteries of everyday pain.

Although Nuri Bilge Ceylan forged his reputation as one of the most exciting new practitioners of “Slow Cinema” to emerge during the late ’90s, the Turkish filmmaker’s engrossing films, which have reached their apex with his masterful Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, have increasingly found their basis in the outlines (if not the rhythms) of genre filmmaking. Not that this has earned him any notoriety in our genre-obsessed American movie culture. That this incredibly gifted filmmaker, whose style leans heavily on Antonioni but seems to have a dexterity, an interest in apparitions and a socio-national identity all its own, is not more well known stateside is some sort of misdemeanor offense. Were it another era, the cinema of Ceylan would already have been hailed as essential viewing for those trying to understand the intersection between the West and Islam that is modern Turkey.

The 52-year-old Istanbul native won a trip to the 1995 Cannes Film Festival with his very first short Cocoon, but it wasn’t until his third feature, Distant, appeared at the festival in 2002 that he began to acquire an international following. That was followed by a run of films that are as impressive a body of work as anyone assembled in the aughts, including his shattering 2006 relationship … Read the rest

“SLEEPING BEAUTY” WRITER/DIRECTOR JULIA LEIGH

By Scott Macaulay

When Filmmaker chose Australian novelist Julia Leigh for our 25 New Faces list of 2008, the author of such books as The Hunter and Disquiet was teaching at Barnard while establishing herself as a screenwriter of provocative, nuanced dramas for directors like Walter Salles and production companies like Plan B. She said when I interviewed her that screenplay writing was originally a form of “diversion therapy” while working on Disquiet, but that she grew to appreciate the form. “I actually find scripts hard to read — ugly,” she said in 2008. “I got my head around the very basic conventions — by that I‘m referring to things like present tense, introducing characters in ‘All Caps,‘ minimal parentheticals… the rules of presentation. The loss of interiority — or explicitly entering into thoughts and feelings of the characters — was a challenge. I pay a lot of attention to the transitions between scenes: How will this scene ‘cut‘ against the next scene… I visualize it. So it‘s very organic: One scene leads to another. The film expands; it grows and deepens. I put myself in the shoes of the audience; [viewers] don‘t look at a film in retrospect, they don‘t anatomize overall structure. But that said, I appreciate a sense of ‘wholeness‘ in a film so that when I get to the end I realize that the ‘ending‘ was in fact there in the film all along.”

In the above quote, one can sense the director lurking beneath Leigh’s screenwriter persona. And, indeed, the original script that propelled Leigh onto our list, Sleeping Beauty, became, after a few twists and turns, her directorial debut. It’s the story of a young student who drifts into a highly specialized form of prostitution, entering each night a “sleeping chamber” and drugged somnambulance while her clients do to her what she cannot remember the next morning. (Leigh is quick to point out to me, however, that the rule of the house is “no penetration.”)

Sleeping Beauty, executive produced by Jane Campion, continued its charmed life when it became one of the rare … Read the rest

CANNES DIRECTORS DIRECTING 2010 |
By Livia Bloom

Each year, before the movies and parties and deals go down at the Cannes Film Festival, thousands of international participants go through the same steps. They complete their registration, receive the color-coded badge that designates their place in a screening hierarchy as rigid as that of a fascistl state, and pick up a mid-sized, branded satchel that holds, among reams of leaflets and ads, the official festival program. This is a slim, beautifully produced book—the 2010 edition is midnight blue—where each film in the Official Competition is given a full double-page spread. There is a portrait of the auteur behind each production in the upper right corner of each page; the directors are often posed behind cameras, or look broodingly into the distance as headphones cover their ears or encircle their necks. But this year, the mini-flipbook of directors’ photos illustrated something else: Of the 19 films in competition, four of them French, not one female director had been included.

It was an omission that clung like a burr to criticism of the competition films. With works like Catherine Breillat’s Bluebeard, Lucretia Martel’s The Headless Woman, and Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker among the most acclaimed films of 2009, and the top award at this year’s Sundance won a few short months ago by Debra Granik for Winter’s Bone, where were the women directors of Cannes 2010?

Outside of the main Competition slate, the problem persisted. Among the 19 films playing in the most prestigious non-Competition section, Certain Regard (Un Certain Régard), the only one was directed by a woman was Agnès Kocsis’s Adrienn Pál. Among the 22 films playing in the Cannes Classics section, the only one directed by a woman was Isabelle Partiot-Pieri’s Toscan (1954). Among the nine films playing outdoors for the public in the Cinéma de la Plage beach screenings (including JR’s Women are Heroes, 1983), a woman did not direct a single one.

One’s inner backseat driver (or backseat film curator) may find it tempting to point to the least successful of the selected festival films in frustration. It is simply … Read the rest

“SHIT YEAR” DIRECTOR CAM ARCHER AT CANNES |
By Scott Macaulay

It is both accurate and reductive to call Cam Archer’s Shit Year, which premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival in the Director’s Fortnight section, the story of a retiring actress grappling with the emotions produced by her move away from the Hollywood spotlight. Of course, on narrative terms, that is what it’s about. Ellen Barkin plays the actress, who has just given her final talk-show interview, moved to a cabin in the woods, and now spends her days avoiding her neighbors and flashing back to a brief affair she had with a younger actor (Luke Grimes) on the set of her last film. In an eerily composed performance, Barkin projects the steely emotional control of a woman determined not to descend into the full-blown sadness that seems just a beat away. It’s a performance that reminded me a bit of Tuesday Weld’s similarly dazed heroine in Frank Perry’s under-seen adaptation of Joan Didion’s Play it as it Lays. Both films — along with more recent work like David Lynch’s Inland Empire and Mulholland Drive — view Hollywood more as a corrosive mental state than an actual place.

But the film is also about other things that exist beyond the outlines of its plot and its often dead-on dialogue. What those other things are, however, is up to you. Freeing himself of the melodramatic conventions of the midlife crisis movie, or the Hollywood cautionary tale, Archer, shooting in beautiful black-and-white with his usual cinematographer, Aaron Platt, has captured a state that we all pass through at some point in our lives, a time in which the outside world recedes and all we are left with is what’s inside of us — and, perhaps, the company of an exotic space alien (played here by Theresa Randle) who would like to know just what it is that makes us tick.

I spoke with Archer for a few minutes at the American Pavilion in Cannes.

Filmmaker: What were the origins of Shit Year?

Archer: After making Wild Tigers I Have Known, the first [movie], I started to feel disenchanted … Read the rest

2010 CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | By Livia Bloom

“You know the kind of movie where people laugh and cry?” asked a filmmaker character in Kornél Mundruczó’s Tender Son: The Frankenstein Project (seeking American distribution). “I want you to cry.” “I am crying,” responded the would-be actor before him, his face frozen solid. The internalization of emotion, and the tiny, subtle ways it can creep into the features and postures of even the most stoic characters was explored in some of the best work at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

At first glance, the protagonist of A Screaming Man (pictured above) (Un homme qui crie, seeking distribution), by the talented Chadian director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, looks less like a man screaming than a man lounging. Champion (played by Saleh Haroun) hangs out with his teenage son in the pool of the posh hotel where they work, feeds watermelon to his wife till juice drips from her chin, and knows all his neighbors by their nicknames. At night, he does sit-ups on a plastic mat outside his home until he can do no more; then a pause; then he begins again. When this former swimming ace loses the job that defines him, emotional hurt barely registers on his placid surface. Only gradually do his actions, set against the backdrop of his country’s political strife, begin to belie the startling ferocity of his true response and the disastrous ripples of its consequences.

Although not one female director was selected for the Official Cannes Competition this year, it was a great year for female performers. Several actresses did yeoman’s work, backwards and in heels. In Lee Chan-dong’s Poetry, which won this year’s prize for Best Screenplay and has happily been acquired by Kino International, Korean actress Yoon Jung-hee carried the weight of a 139-minute opus on her thin frame. As Mija, an aging working-class maid raising her grandson in a small town, her character is at once modest and tragic, eccentric and proud. She holds her responsibilities very quietly, even when they become nearly unbearable. In Mija, these qualities are communicated in the smallest of ways; they are there in … Read the rest

@CANNES: “MYTH OF THE AMERICAN SLEEPOVER” DIRECTOR DAVID ROBERT MITCHELL

One of the discoveries of the 2010 Cannes Film Festival was a film that actually premiered at SXSW: David Robert Mitchell’s Myth of the American Sleepover. Receiving its international premiere in the Critics Week section, Myth of the American Sleepover is a dreamy, romantic, and wistful take on the amorous longings of our teenage years. It’s set during one night in which Mitchell’s various teen characters crisscross their Michigan town between several sleepovers, all-night slumber parties, and general hang outs. Without stooping to farfetched plot elements or melodramatic contrivances, the film compels our viewing by nailing just the right tone — it understands enough of adolescent emotion to place us inside these characters’ heads while having enough distance from it to impart a wisdom through its storytelling.

The film was made on a modest production budget but it nonetheless looks fantastic; great credit here should be given d.p. James Laxton, who also shot the gorgeous Medicine for Melancholy. It’s also another achievement for the Florida State University film program. Mitchell and several of his collaborators, like Medicine‘s Barry Jenkins, hail from the school.

Another thing: Myth of the American Sleepover is the kind of solid success that now seems old-fashioned within American independent film. Through critical acclaim it got accepted into the world’s top film festival, and its reception there has spurred healthy foreign sales. Visit Films’ Sylvain Tron told me at the film’s lunch reception that several territories were sold by mid-week, including France (Metropolitan) and Benelux (Film Freak), with the U.K., Australian and Italy imminent.

I caught up with Mitchell briefly at the American Pavilion in Cannes for a short Flip camera conversation, posted below. (Apologies for the background noise.) Check out the trailer too.

… Read the rest

BILL GUNN SURFACES AT BAM

By Brandon Harris

You could say that Bill Gunn was a man who came before his time, but that leaves you working under the flimsy assumption that a time more hospitable to this man of undeniable talents and mercurial preoccupations would some day come. If you don’t already know this is a weak proposition, you’re not paying attention to the tenor of the times we live in. One can be forgiven for being unable to relate to the struggles of an unorthodox black artist to find proper patrons and an appreciative audience I suppose. Still, it is better to say that Bill Gunn, the African-American actor, director, screenwriter, and playwright who died from encephalitis on April 5th, 1989, just one day before Joseph Papp opened Gunn’s new play The Forbidden City at the Public Theater, was a man with a vision we were never quite ready for, black or white, studios or independents, 1970 or 2010. He just didn’t fit the equation of black writer/director = realist/earnest, racialized subject matter that the comers of his generation, especially his peers among Hollywood’s first black directors, Ossie Davis, Gordon Parks and Melvin Van Peebles, very willingly molded themselves into. No wonder then that the author Greg Tate, while eulogizing this unclassifiable man in a 1989 piece for The Village Voice shortly after Gunn died at 59 (or 54, depending on who you talk to), his couple of near masterpieces long forgotten, so aptly observed that “The attempt to bury Bill Gunn began in his life.” While his work on the New York stage spanned from roles in 1950s Broadway and Off-Broadway shows like The Immoralist and Take a Giant Step to his dying days, in his all too short and undervalued career as a director and screenwriter, we hardly got to know him. This weekend, BAM is offering us a second chance.

In the series The Groundbreaking Bill Gunn, which begins tomorrow and runs through Sunday, one can get a glimpse at both of Gunn’s studio screenwriting credits (Hal Ashby’s remarkable Brooklyn gentrification comedy The Landlord and Czech New Wave … Read the rest

THREE TIMES THE CHARM

By Admin

New York Times critic A.O. Scott writes in his Cannes Journal today, “I have written earlier about the folly of coming to Cannes expecting masterpieces, but no sooner had I weaned myself of this habit than a masterpiece was staring me in the face. At least that’s how it feels at the moment. A movie like David Cronenberg’s History of Violence, one of the high points up until today, is an example of excellent filmmaking. [Hou Hsiao-hsien's] Three Times exists on another level entirely; this is why cinema exists. With its slow, oblique, beautifully shot scenes, and its stories that are at once utterly simple and full of resonance and implication, it creates an emotional and sensual effect that is something like falling in love. Or perhaps making love, given the afterglow that seemed to float through the Palais after the screening.”

According to the Festival de Cannes Web site: Three Times relates a series of three love stories which, although they take place at different points in time (1966, 1911 and 2005), are played by the same couple of actors (Shu Qi and Chang Chen).

“Today in Taiwan, you can’t find a single trace of what daily life was like there in the 1960s, whether you’re talking about objects or architecture,” said Hou Hsiao-hsien at a press conference about the film. “That’s why, for the first story, I chose to focus on the characters. And, for the same reason, in the second part, which takes place in 1911, I shot the whole thing using a single set. As for the third part, it may seem more fragmented, because I wanted to express the disorder which, for me, characterizes contemporary Taiwanese reality…

“The best moments we’ve experienced are lost forever,” he added. “The only way to retrieve them is to call upon your memory. Cinema is a tool which enables me to preserve these memories. I think that everything a person experiences is liable to become one of his own future ‘fondest memories,’ and that’s why I wanted to shoot these short sequences, which capture different moments.”
.… Read the rest

OPEN ENDED

By Admin

The Cineuropa Web site features brief interviews with director Michael Haneke about his latest film Cache (Hidden), and Marco Tullio Giordana about Once You’re Born…, both of which premiered in competition at the Festival de Cannes earlier this week.

“All my films deal with the same theme,” says Haneke, “they ask what’s the nature of truth. The truth in cinema, in the media, the manipulation of it. That’s why I use images within images, to destabilize the viewer’s perception and to ask him or her to pose the question as to where the truth is hiding. It’s a question I ask myself all the time and which makes me react. But I’m not a school teacher. I simply stimulate the spectator’s will to communicate with the film.”

“Before the final editing, I showed my film [Once You're Born...] to some students, in several schools,” says Giordana. “They totally identified with young Sandro, the main character, and they were sure they too would make it without the grown-ups. I reckon a film must exist hic et nunc, that is, remain open and never end. Rome, Open City and The Bicycle Thief were not that successful when they were released. Yet, think how many people have seen them in the past 60 years!”
.… Read the rest

JULY IN CANNES

By Admin

Via The Guardian: “There are a lot of conversations among Cannes festival-goers that start: ‘Seen anything good?’ Discussions tend to ensue about the big-hitters from the main Palme d’Or competition: Gus Van Sant, Carlos Reygadas, David Cronenberg and the like. But then, chances are someone will pipe up: ‘And I’ve seen this really nice film called Me and You and Everyone We Know.’

“Written, directed by and starring a 32-year-old American performance artist called Miranda July, [who is featured on the cover of the current issue of Filmmaker], the film, her debut feature, is showing in the Critics’ Week section of the festival. And, without a doubt, it is this year’s Cannes word-of-mouth hit…

“Already feted at Sundance, Me and You and Everyone We Know is charming Cannes audiences with its quirky vision, as it interrogates with witty lightness of touch those age-old preoccupations of the struggle to connect with other people, the alchemy of love, and the hunger of loneliness. The interstices between childhood and adulthood are deftly investigated: the children in the film seem at times knowing in their grasp of the world, better able in their naivety to connect with others than the blundering adults — and at others deeply vulnerable.”

Also of interest in this week’s Guardian: Britain’s leading scientists weigh in on the unexpected indie hit What the Beep Do We Know?, which is about to open in the U.K.

.… Read the rest