Cannes Market Dailies

by Alex Deleon, film festivals.com

The Riviera town of Cannes is all decked out for the seventieth birthday of the Mother of All Film Festivals.  

Wherever one  looks, at the entrance of nearly every shop is a red welcome mat reminding people that the Festival is ON and red festival posters centering on a slimmed down version of Claudia Cardinale in her heyday apparently flying through the air with the greatest of ease adorn the walls in every direction.

The first Cannes film festival toook place in 1946 just after World War II but it took a while to become the foremost world film event it is today.  However, today Cannes is the only place to be and be seen if one wants people in the film business  to think you are important. (ha-ha) 

The opening red carpet gala this year was "Les Fantômes d'Ismaël" (Ismael's Ghosts) a new all star drama helmed by Veteran "auteur" director  Arnaud Desplechin. This was called "a literary, layered, love triangle" in The Hollywood Reporter" and the triangle in questions involves a successful Film director (frequent tousled Desplechin protagonist Mathieu Amalric), his new intellectual astro-physicist girlfriend (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and his beautiful  long dead ex-wife (Marion Cotillard) who returns inexplicably from the Great Beyond twenty years later to thoroughly mess up his life not to mention that of her once adoring father, and, of course, of the new love of his life (Gainsbourg) who is caught in the middle of this tangle of strained cross-fire.

The picture starts out interestingly enough in what seems like it might turn into a political thriller involving a charming diplomat who speaks six languages and may be a spy but then gets heavily bogged down  in script that wanders aimlessly and gets more and more aimless as it drifts along toward ultimate nothingness. One has a hard time feeling anything for anybody in the film except for Gainsbourg  who always grabs your feelings, like it it or nor. There are other flashy actresses in France such as Juliette Binoche and Sophie Marceau, but for my money, Charlotte Gainsbourg in her straightforward unflashiness is the most gripping and appealing of all, a true chip off the old block; "Je t'aime, moi mon plus" -- (daughter of maverick composer Serge Gainsbourg) and she makes the film come to life whenever she's on, but in the end  it's basically a pretentious long drawn out yawn -- too multi-layered and slick for its own good.

Incidentally, the latest French cinema scam has it that Alain Delon will soon come out of retirement to do an older-younger love story with Binoche as his partner. Sophie Marceau was reputedly the first choice for the role but had previous commitments.  However, Monsieur Delon, coolest of the cool French tough guys claims to be a long term admirer of La Binoche. Sounds like a combinaison worth waiting for.