Cannes. Go Go Tales.

"My favorite film by an American director so far - although it was shot and financed in Italy - is Abel Ferrara's Go Go Tales [site], screening out of competition as a midnight selection," writes Dennis Lim for IFC News. "A wild and wildly allegorical comedy, it's set in the course of one long, eventful night at the declining Paradise Lounge strip club.... The charmingly sleazy cabaret ambience evokes Killing of a Chinese Bookie, but with its overt melancholy and warm communal vibe, this could almost be Ferrara's Prairie Home Companion, ending not with a graceful fade-out but on a note of crazy defiance."

"[A]bout a third of the audience abandoned last night's screening," reports the Guardian's Xan Brooks. "The people who remained were Ferrara devotees, die-hards, near-fanatics. Offended by the exits of their milksop enemies they gained revenge at the end by roaring defiant appreciation through the closing credits."

Update, 5/23: "[E]asily Mr Ferrara's best since The Funeral (1996) and welcome news for his hard-core, patient admirers," announces Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "Willem Dafoe, his Joker-like smile stretched across his face," is "terrific"; and Asia Argento, "who delivers a fantastic star turn in another out-of-competition film here, Olivier Assayas's underappreciated Boarding Gate, has the kind of intense screen presence that could bring out the fire department. Actors are paid to emote and recite lines, but Ms Argento bares body and soul, throwing herself into both Mr Ferrara's and Mr Assayas's films as if her life depended on it. Maybe it does."

"Ferrara is in a wonderfully loose and comedic mood after the complex spiritual dramatics of Mary, expanding his fascination with big American dreams and corrosive addictions while filling the screen with a wild panoply of characters," writes Robert Koehler for Variety.

"[G]ood-natured but somewhat half-baked," writes Jonathan Romney at Screen Daily. "The main problem is that Ferrara gives an almost exclusively male view of this milieu, with its female characters depicted as decorative, ditzy or neurotic - a brash Argento predictably being the one exception."

Update, 5/24: "'It's better in Italy because they still care about cinema,' he wheezes. 'They got no fuckin' respect in America these days. I'm not prepared to go over to LA to be patronised by some fuckin' studio executive because his grandmother or whatever doesn't like my work.'" The Guardian's Xan Brooks meets Ferrara.

And so does James Mottram; for the London Times.

Update, 5/26: "It's hard to not get lost in the trash - for better or for worse - but the real strength of Ferrara's film is in the atmosphere," writes Michael Lerman at indieWIRE. "Seeped in a constant barrage of loud music, nearly every scene is intercut with performances from inside the club, creating the sense of the truly never-ending show."

Update, 5/30: "Ferrara has allowed his comic self to run free, and he imagines a universe in which sensuality and tongue-kissing your doggie is just fun, and an end unto itself," writes Robert Koehler at filmjourney.org.

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Cannes @ 60. Index.

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Posted by dwhudson at May 22, 2007 12:48 PM