Cannes. Il Regista de Matrimoni.

In the Hollywood Reporter, Duane Byrge calls Marco Bellocchio's Un Certain Regard entry, Il Regista de Matrimoni (The Wedding Director), featuring Sergio Castellitto, "a filmic being whose overriding deceptions and flaws give ample cause for an early annulment with discerning viewers."

Updated through 5/28.

Variety's Deborah Young finds it "promises much more than it delivers in a disappointingly weak finale."

Update, 5/28: "Who knows why Moretti and Bellocchio both felt compelled to make their protagonists shoddy Italian directors (one a genre hack; the other a second-rate auteur), but there must be something happening that has made two of Italy's most prominent filmmakers to question their own profession," writes Anthony Kaufman at indieWIRE. Of The Wedding Director, he adds that it "employs the same strange and alluring Kafkaesque style as the director's My Mother's Smile - it's a fascinating milieu, populated with a menacing Prince, another filmmaker who has faked his own death to garner posthumous fame, and Bellocchio's repeated refrain, "It's the dead that command in Italy.'"

Posted by dwhudson at May 22, 2006 1:43 PM