Sight & Sound. June 07 + Cannes.

June's is a Tim Lucas and Cannes sort of issue of Sight & Sound. With both Quentin Tarantino's half of Grindhouse (earlier entries: 1, 2 and 3), Death Proof, and David Fincher's Zodiac (site; earlier entry) competing at the festival and set to open in the UK, I'll gather fresh takes on the American features from France and Britain here as well.

"What is a grindhouse movie?" asks Lucas. "Here's my best definition: it's a movie that makes you want to run, not walk, to the nearest shower, but leaves you unable to decide whether the shower should be hot or cold." A generously annotated Top Ten follows.

Lucas also reviews a DVD, by the way, that may not be as far from the grindhouse aesthetic (by way of Europe) as it might at first seem: Alain Robbe-Grillet's La Belle Captive. "Robbe-Grillet is said to be rigorously protective of his films - despite their exploitable elements of sex, mystery, fetishism and even supernatural horror - not wishing them to become associated with the similar though less cerebral works of fellow oneirics and eroticists like Jean Rollin and Jess Franco," he notes. "The man has no more devout English-speaking admirer than this writer, but La Belle Captive smacks of Robbe-Grillet lite."

"Cannes was political from the outset, conceived in the pre-war years as a counterweight to the Venice film festival, which under Mussolini was fast becoming a stage for fascistic tub-thumping." Chris Darke offers "four snapshots of some of the flashpoint moments in the festival's history."

The S&S "Film of the Month" is Valeska Grisebach's Longing (Sehnsucht). Catherine Wheatley finds "an echo of the Heimat films that extolled rural German values for audiences from the 1930s to the 1950s. The latent violence that pervades Longing also chimes with the atmosphere of later rethinkings of the genre by mainly Austrian directors such as Wolfram Paulus, Peter Patzak and Wolfgang Glück." But "while Grisebach and her contemporaries are undoubtedly influenced by their predecessors, their films tend to eschew the social agenda that marked the new German cinema of the late 1970s and early 1980s. As in recent films such as Stefan Krohmer's Sommer '04, Barbara Albert's Fallen and Andrea Staka's Das Fraülein, the concern of Longing is not politics but people."

S&S calls in no less a critic from anywhere, never mind Australia, than Adrian Martin to assess a landmark: "The success of Ten Canoes in Australia rewrote several hitherto ironclad suppositions of the local film industry. Rolf de Heer showed that it was possible, by careful and sympathetic collaboration with co-director Peter Djigirr and all the indigenous participants, to make a film that was not condescending, exploitative or misrepresentative. He also proved that the general audience could take a film spoken largely in the Aboriginal dialect of Ganalbingu, with English subtitles.... [A]udiences realised they were seeing something that marked a quantum leap beyond such well-meaning but limited 'whitefella' depictions of Aboriginal life as Bruce Beresford's The Fringe Dwellers (1986) and Phillip Noyce's Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002)."

While "rigorously masculine... Zodiac is considerably more adult than both Se7en, which salivates over the macabre cat-and-mouse game it plays with the audience, and the macho brinkmanship of Fight Club," finds Graham Fuller.

Recent reviews of Zodiac in the British press: Peter Bradshaw (Guardian), Philip French (Observer), Robert Hanks (Independent), Wendy Ide (Times) and Derek Malcolm (Evening Standard). (The Telegraph's site seems to be down at the moment.) Update: Here we go: Tim Robey in the Telegraph.

In the Independent, Leslie Felperin revisits the working relationship of Tarantino and Harvey Weinstein - and wonders if it can last.

Earlier: New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis chats with S&S editor Nick James in Cannes: MP3.

Update: Death Proof is longer than the Grindhouse cut and Premiere's Glenn Kenny will tell you all about what's back in or new; otherwise: "Grindhouse motivated a fair number of critics to implore Quentin Tarantino to grow up or something. I don't think it's gonna happen and I don't think I care. Somebody's gotta make Quentin Tarantino movies, might as well be him."

Updates, 5/22: Eric Kohn for the New York Press on the additions to Death Proof: "It's all quite long winded, pointless and self-indulgent, but for the most part, it's also quite entertaining. So yeah, it's a QT movie." But then come the extensive notes from the press conference, dominated, naturally, by Harvey Weinstein's explanation of his new strategy for distributing DP and Planet Terror as separate movies. "We will dwarf Grindhouse. Trust me." By the way, Robert Rodriguez, who was also there, is going to remake Barbarella.

Death Proof not only stands on its own, the new footage improves its second half, finds Variety's Todd McCarthy.

"Admittedly George Clooney is not yet in town, but the mad crush to get into Tarantino's press conference was like nothing I've experienced in two years at Cannes," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. The Weinstein stuff follows, but here's a nice bit:

When another eastern European asked how it felt to be a "big star" at Cannes, Tarantino showed some uncharacteristic humility. "To the extent that I could call myself a favorite son of Cannes, and I'm only saying that because you're saying it," he said, "I just don't have the adjectives for it. I was probably a teenager before I figured out what Cannes was, or even knew what a film festival was. I probably rented some movie that had the Palme d'Or on the box. Once I figured it out, it seemed like Mount Olympus, where the gods go, where the greatest films ever made premiere. Just to be invited here was amazing, and the possibility that I might someday win the Palme d'Or [as he did for Pulp Fiction] was so far beyond anything I could have imagined. There's nothing I'm prouder of in my whole career."

As for the film at hand, "Is it a better motion picture than the first Death Proof?" O'Hehir asks the air. "Maybe. But I'm not sure that's the right question."

Update, 5/28: Emmanuel Burdeau gets quite a quote from Tarantino for the next issue of Cahiers du cinéma.

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Cannes @ 60. Index.

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Posted by dwhudson at May 21, 2007 5:33 AM