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| Cannes 2013 roundup | Cannes 2013 roundup |
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| Nicole Kidman is here in Cannes, so is Ang Lee, and Audrey Tautou, and a second-generation Jagger, and Justin Timberlake, and Cindy Crawford, and Cheryl Cole, and Pelé, and all of them have been rained on, stubbornly, for days. Rain at Cannes used to be rare, regulars say. Russell Crowe has an anecdote about sitting in a screening wearing sodden zip-ups back in 1991, and Bruce Willis got splashed by a freak wave in 2006 – but for a couple of decades straight, at least, this festival was a dry deal, screenings and parties staged outdoors, everyone "cooked to a turn" (as F Scott Fitzgerald described the local way of sunbathing). Then last year the roof of the Soixantième theatre blew off. Storms halted yacht parties, and the trade papers were left calculating the value of deals not done, with every producer and distributor hiding indoors instead of agreeing contracts on sunny terraces. | Nicole Kidman is here in Cannes, so is Ang Lee, and Audrey Tautou, and a second-generation Jagger, and Justin Timberlake, and Cindy Crawford, and Cheryl Cole, and Pelé, and all of them have been rained on, stubbornly, for days. Rain at Cannes used to be rare, regulars say. Russell Crowe has an anecdote about sitting in a screening wearing sodden zip-ups back in 1991, and Bruce Willis got splashed by a freak wave in 2006 – but for a couple of decades straight, at least, this festival was a dry deal, screenings and parties staged outdoors, everyone "cooked to a turn" (as F Scott Fitzgerald described the local way of sunbathing). Then last year the roof of the Soixantième theatre blew off. Storms halted yacht parties, and the trade papers were left calculating the value of deals not done, with every producer and distributor hiding indoors instead of agreeing contracts on sunny terraces. |
| At this year's festival, the 66th, those attending are more seasoned and sanguine. Opening-night fireworks went ahead regardless, the rockets fired into low, dark clouds. "I can handle a rain shower," said Kidman, joined on a swampy, bubbling red carpet by Carey Mulligan; the British actor was struck by someone's umbrella and was happy to laugh it off. Baz Luhrmann promised any watery streaks on his face were weather-related – "not tears". He'd brought his film The Great Gatsby to Cannes and the critics, for the most part, had been unkind. | At this year's festival, the 66th, those attending are more seasoned and sanguine. Opening-night fireworks went ahead regardless, the rockets fired into low, dark clouds. "I can handle a rain shower," said Kidman, joined on a swampy, bubbling red carpet by Carey Mulligan; the British actor was struck by someone's umbrella and was happy to laugh it off. Baz Luhrmann promised any watery streaks on his face were weather-related – "not tears". He'd brought his film The Great Gatsby to Cannes and the critics, for the most part, had been unkind. |
| It was fitting that Gatsby kicked off festival fortnight, given that this is Fitzgerald country, the stretch of coast around Cannes memorably caught in the writer's next-most-famous novel, Tender is the Night. But by Wednesday Luhrmann's brash adaptation was already out in the US, and had previewed in the UK , and everyone I met seemed to have seen it already. Talk in queues and foyers was of a silly, thin movie that drowned its stars, Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan, in swampy computer effects – a 143-minute music video. "It reminded me of the films you see in the queue at theme parks," one critic said on the Croisette. About the nicest thing I heard said was that this was "the Good Gatsby", hardly great. I'd adjust that to the Perfectly Reasonable Gatsby or the Look, It Was Fine Gatsby. | It was fitting that Gatsby kicked off festival fortnight, given that this is Fitzgerald country, the stretch of coast around Cannes memorably caught in the writer's next-most-famous novel, Tender is the Night. But by Wednesday Luhrmann's brash adaptation was already out in the US, and had previewed in the UK , and everyone I met seemed to have seen it already. Talk in queues and foyers was of a silly, thin movie that drowned its stars, Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan, in swampy computer effects – a 143-minute music video. "It reminded me of the films you see in the queue at theme parks," one critic said on the Croisette. About the nicest thing I heard said was that this was "the Good Gatsby", hardly great. I'd adjust that to the Perfectly Reasonable Gatsby or the Look, It Was Fine Gatsby. |
| It wasn't in competition for Cannes's main award, the Palme d'Or – shortlisted films for that began to be screened on Thursday, after the celebrity judging panel had introduced themselves and laid out their goals. "I'm looking for honesty," said director Cristian Mungiu. Actor Christoph Waltz expected "a discussion on the highest level" with his peers, while jury president Steven Spielberg, dressed in a drab grey suit (all his sparkle within), gave a wicked smile and said: "Everyone judges us. So – it's our turn." | It wasn't in competition for Cannes's main award, the Palme d'Or – shortlisted films for that began to be screened on Thursday, after the celebrity judging panel had introduced themselves and laid out their goals. "I'm looking for honesty," said director Cristian Mungiu. Actor Christoph Waltz expected "a discussion on the highest level" with his peers, while jury president Steven Spielberg, dressed in a drab grey suit (all his sparkle within), gave a wicked smile and said: "Everyone judges us. So – it's our turn." |
| François Ozon's new film, Jeune et Jolie (Young and Beautiful), was tipped as a potential winner. We squelched into the Palais des Festivals to see it one morning, just in sight of two workmen in an elevated crane trying to get rid of an enormous globule of rainwater that had collected in a plastic roof panel. While they punched the water out, the Ozon got under way – set, cruelly, somewhere on the sun-drenched French coast. Isabelle (Marine Vacth) is on holiday with her family, and the 17-year-old has started a fling with an older boy. "Dumb," Isabelle tells her mother, Sylvie (Géraldine Pailhas), but he'll do, she says to her brother Victor (Fantin Ravat) to whom she's confessed a plan to lose her virginity. When it happens, Isabelle seems to have an out-of-body experience. Afterwards, Victor wants details and Isabelle won't share them. Sex, now done, has lost any imagined romance. | François Ozon's new film, Jeune et Jolie (Young and Beautiful), was tipped as a potential winner. We squelched into the Palais des Festivals to see it one morning, just in sight of two workmen in an elevated crane trying to get rid of an enormous globule of rainwater that had collected in a plastic roof panel. While they punched the water out, the Ozon got under way – set, cruelly, somewhere on the sun-drenched French coast. Isabelle (Marine Vacth) is on holiday with her family, and the 17-year-old has started a fling with an older boy. "Dumb," Isabelle tells her mother, Sylvie (Géraldine Pailhas), but he'll do, she says to her brother Victor (Fantin Ravat) to whom she's confessed a plan to lose her virginity. When it happens, Isabelle seems to have an out-of-body experience. Afterwards, Victor wants details and Isabelle won't share them. Sex, now done, has lost any imagined romance. |
| Next, at an uncertain point in the future, wearing a business suit and thick lipstick, Isabelle arrives in a hotel room to meet an older man. Folded €100 notes are handed over. This pampered, middle-class girl, now using her grandmother's name as a pseudonym, has become a prostitute. Ozon cunningly delays a surprise: she's still 17, only weeks or months having elapsed since the summer holiday. How has such a transformation taken place? | Next, at an uncertain point in the future, wearing a business suit and thick lipstick, Isabelle arrives in a hotel room to meet an older man. Folded €100 notes are handed over. This pampered, middle-class girl, now using her grandmother's name as a pseudonym, has become a prostitute. Ozon cunningly delays a surprise: she's still 17, only weeks or months having elapsed since the summer holiday. How has such a transformation taken place? |
| Ozon explores his subject without making any obvious judgment, even with a breezy French permissiveness. Sylvie, sensing that Isabelle is sexually active, leaves out condoms one night. Later, knowing much, much more, she frets about her daughter being a prostitute and is told by her partner: "No point being dramatic!" The humour is subtle and unsettling, generally relying on Isabelle's precocious and inflated understanding of what by-the-hour services – babysitting, therapy – should cost. Only when a police officer lays the blame on internet porn ("Kids get ideas") does Ozon's finger seem to wag. "I didn't want to underscore too many points," the director said at a post-film conference. Outside, the photography corps waited to get at Marine Vacth, actually 23 and a former model, the breakout star of Cannes's first week (see Trash interview). | Ozon explores his subject without making any obvious judgment, even with a breezy French permissiveness. Sylvie, sensing that Isabelle is sexually active, leaves out condoms one night. Later, knowing much, much more, she frets about her daughter being a prostitute and is told by her partner: "No point being dramatic!" The humour is subtle and unsettling, generally relying on Isabelle's precocious and inflated understanding of what by-the-hour services – babysitting, therapy – should cost. Only when a police officer lays the blame on internet porn ("Kids get ideas") does Ozon's finger seem to wag. "I didn't want to underscore too many points," the director said at a post-film conference. Outside, the photography corps waited to get at Marine Vacth, actually 23 and a former model, the breakout star of Cannes's first week (see Trash interview). |
| Young and Beautiful concludes with the sense that things may turn out all right for Isabelle. There's no such sense of second chances in Amat Escalante's Heli, a Mexican film also in competition. Again we're introduced to a teen romance and, again, this means about 15 minutes of introductory sweetness (ice cream and kisses) before things get ugly. Estella (Andrea Vergara) has fallen for an army cadet, Beto (Juan Eduardo Palacios), who gives her a puppy called Cookie as a symbol of his love, and as a sop to get her to go to bed with him. A sister-in-law offers counsel while Estella's brother, Heli (Armando Espitia), forbids the relationship. | Young and Beautiful concludes with the sense that things may turn out all right for Isabelle. There's no such sense of second chances in Amat Escalante's Heli, a Mexican film also in competition. Again we're introduced to a teen romance and, again, this means about 15 minutes of introductory sweetness (ice cream and kisses) before things get ugly. Estella (Andrea Vergara) has fallen for an army cadet, Beto (Juan Eduardo Palacios), who gives her a puppy called Cookie as a symbol of his love, and as a sop to get her to go to bed with him. A sister-in-law offers counsel while Estella's brother, Heli (Armando Espitia), forbids the relationship. |
| There's no time for a family tug-of-war. Beto has stolen some coke and foolishly stashed it at Estella's house, where crooks showed up, wanting revenge. Heli, Beto and Estella are taken off at gunpoint. "You're fucked now," they are told – and the walk-outs, in my screening, began soon after that. Scenes of torture are protracted and inventive. "Bloody Heli" might have been a better title, and the theatre became noisy with gasps and the commotion of mid-film flight. | There's no time for a family tug-of-war. Beto has stolen some coke and foolishly stashed it at Estella's house, where crooks showed up, wanting revenge. Heli, Beto and Estella are taken off at gunpoint. "You're fucked now," they are told – and the walk-outs, in my screening, began soon after that. Scenes of torture are protracted and inventive. "Bloody Heli" might have been a better title, and the theatre became noisy with gasps and the commotion of mid-film flight. |
| I wondered what Steven Spielberg would make of the beatings, hangings, a two-minute genital bonfire and poor Cookie abruptly halved. Perhaps he'd snuck into a non-competition screening of Sofia Coppola's The Bling Ring, though, and had other things on his mind. For instance, did he definitely, definitely lock the pool doors back home? | I wondered what Steven Spielberg would make of the beatings, hangings, a two-minute genital bonfire and poor Cookie abruptly halved. Perhaps he'd snuck into a non-competition screening of Sofia Coppola's The Bling Ring, though, and had other things on his mind. For instance, did he definitely, definitely lock the pool doors back home? |
| In Coppola's measured, cynical drama, a group of spoilt teens ransack the homes of Hollywood celebrities who might have assumed their splendid and remote addresses (rather than, say, alarms, triple-locks and moats) would keep them secure against burglaries. Not in the Google age. Joints are cased by Rebecca (Katie Chang) and Marc (Israel Broussard) using Street View. They decide which stars to strike and when by browsing TMZ.com, easily learning who's out of town at a party, a launch or – who knows? – a French film festival. | In Coppola's measured, cynical drama, a group of spoilt teens ransack the homes of Hollywood celebrities who might have assumed their splendid and remote addresses (rather than, say, alarms, triple-locks and moats) would keep them secure against burglaries. Not in the Google age. Joints are cased by Rebecca (Katie Chang) and Marc (Israel Broussard) using Street View. They decide which stars to strike and when by browsing TMZ.com, easily learning who's out of town at a party, a launch or – who knows? – a French film festival. |
| After a test-invasion of Paris Hilton's palatial home – dare they pinch her dog? – Marc and Rebecca's posse expands to include Nicki (Emma Watson, whose American accent, I'm afraid, would sink a school play). They walk into the homes of Orlando Bloom, Megan Fox and Lindsay Lohan, and walk out with millions in clothes, shoes and sunglasses. Hilton's place, brilliantly, is so poorly guarded it becomes a sort of lair for the gang. They frequently make use of a pole-dancing suite. | After a test-invasion of Paris Hilton's palatial home – dare they pinch her dog? – Marc and Rebecca's posse expands to include Nicki (Emma Watson, whose American accent, I'm afraid, would sink a school play). They walk into the homes of Orlando Bloom, Megan Fox and Lindsay Lohan, and walk out with millions in clothes, shoes and sunglasses. Hilton's place, brilliantly, is so poorly guarded it becomes a sort of lair for the gang. They frequently make use of a pole-dancing suite. |
| But these are artless thieves, sprawling on a kerb outside a looted home, for instance, surrounded by stolen goods and waiting like exhausted shoppers for a lift. Money from the spoils is spent on nightclub booths and jeroboams of vodka, better to prettify their Facebook updates. Everyone poses endlessly for self-taken photographs, fanning cash and wearing pinched luxuries. They are 17 and 18 and even criminality must be documented through social media. When the police catch up with them, it is Coppola's gentle suggestion that the switching of Facebook accounts from "public" to "private" is as sad and mighty a fall as prison time. | But these are artless thieves, sprawling on a kerb outside a looted home, for instance, surrounded by stolen goods and waiting like exhausted shoppers for a lift. Money from the spoils is spent on nightclub booths and jeroboams of vodka, better to prettify their Facebook updates. Everyone poses endlessly for self-taken photographs, fanning cash and wearing pinched luxuries. They are 17 and 18 and even criminality must be documented through social media. When the police catch up with them, it is Coppola's gentle suggestion that the switching of Facebook accounts from "public" to "private" is as sad and mighty a fall as prison time. |
| Coppola's film, my favourite of the festival so far, benefited from a little documentary zing: these events actually happened, the real-life bling ring active in Los Angeles about five years ago. (And curiously, in the early hours after Coppola's premiere, £650,000 of jewels were stolen from a Cannes hotel room: had the Ring reformed, and gone international?) Back in 2008 Paris Hilton really was blithe enough not to notice that thieves were wandering in and helping themselves, over and over. | Coppola's film, my favourite of the festival so far, benefited from a little documentary zing: these events actually happened, the real-life bling ring active in Los Angeles about five years ago. (And curiously, in the early hours after Coppola's premiere, £650,000 of jewels were stolen from a Cannes hotel room: had the Ring reformed, and gone international?) Back in 2008 Paris Hilton really was blithe enough not to notice that thieves were wandering in and helping themselves, over and over. |
| Lindsay Lohan, at least, may have learned something from her experiences. Elsewhere in the Palais des Festivals, I tried to get into a showing of her new film, The Canyons, a troubled project directed by Paul Schrader, which was quietly screened for distributors in a faraway room. I made it as far as the door. An American security man had been posted there, instructed to keep undesirables out. | Lindsay Lohan, at least, may have learned something from her experiences. Elsewhere in the Palais des Festivals, I tried to get into a showing of her new film, The Canyons, a troubled project directed by Paul Schrader, which was quietly screened for distributors in a faraway room. I made it as far as the door. An American security man had been posted there, instructed to keep undesirables out. |
| • Trailer Trash in Cannes with Jason Solomons | • Trailer Trash in Cannes with Jason Solomons |
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