Cannes. Versailles.

"The abandoned child is a sure-fire dramatic devise, and it is to writer-director Pierre Schoeller's credit that in Versailles he uses it to explore true sentiment rather than mere sentimentality."

The Hollywood Reporter's Kirk Honeycutt. "Charlie Chaplin made classic comic melodramas with similar material, but Schoeller merely wants to observe a character forced to adapt to an unexpected love."

Updated through 5/21.

"Versailles is a thoughtful, cumulatively affecting portrait of three social outcasts - including a very young boy - at critical junctures in their lives," writes Lisa Nesselson in Screen Daily. "This story of a single mother who abruptly abandons her beloved son to another homeless person she barely knows is as non-judgmental as it is leisurely. Intelligently demonstrating that in a nation of plenty, many have next to nothing, the film is loaded with the understated irony of subsistence-level lives in a Paris suburb whose very name is synonymous with wealth and opulence."

"Very Gallic in the way down-and-outers double as philosophers, pic requires a heavy suspension of belief and never really builds to anything memorable, though perfs are strong and lensing is finely textured," blurbs Jay Weissberg in Variety.

Un Certain Regard.

Update, 5/21: "The best thing in Versailles is what connects it, from the top, to what is becoming an obsession for the young French cinema," writes Emmanuel Burdeau in Cahiers du cinéma's Cannes diary:

Do you remember a time when people said that all first French features were literary love stories that took place in Paris, between the walls of tiny maid's rooms? That time has come and gone. Paris is now far away; the new studios are in Versailles, Boulogne, all of the rich suburbs to the west of Paris. Maid's rooms? Not at all; now we're off to the forest, to the edges of the city, to reconnect to the humus of our origins. Locking horns between young adults? Wake up! We the youth of the 2000's are old before our time, weighed down with maternity or paternity. The screenplay for the coming years is easy to sum up: it's about infanticide, abandoning one's child. The story told in Versailles will also be told by a number of other films in the fall of 2008.

---

Coverage of the coverage: Cannes 08.

Last year: Cannes @ 60. And Cannes 06.

---

Posted by dwhudson at May 20, 2008 12:24 PM