Cannes at Home: Love in the time of COVID

by Cláudio Alves

Could Koji Fukada's THE REAL THING have been a Palme contender in 2020?

The second day at Cannes came and went, and the race for festival gold is on. Not just the prizes chosen by Park Chan-woo’s jury, mind you. In a rare move by the programmers, the Main Competition opened with two films that are also up for the Queer Palm. They are Koji Fukada’s Nagi Notes and Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet’s A Woman’s Life. Neither was effusively received, but there are pockets of praise, even love, here and there. The latter has been getting especially high praise for Léa Drucker’s performance. And yet, this Main Competition might mean even more to the Japanese auteur who was among those selected for the festival edition that never was in 2020. At the time, Fukada was included among the returning cineastes and would’ve likely experienced his first go at the Palme d’Or if not for the COVID lockdown.

So, it only seems appropriate to consider his film that would’ve played at the Croisette six years ago, a near four-hour epic love story named The Real Thing. And to keep things thematically cohesive, let’s also remember Bourgeois-Tacquet's 2021 Critics’ Week selection, Anaïs in Love…

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Cannes: Peter Jackson

by Elisa Giudici 

Peter Jackson. Photo by Elisa Giudici

At the end of the ’80s Peter Jackson arrived in Cannes for the first time as a self-taught splatter filmmaker from New Zealand and immediately got thrown out of the Palais for wearing shorts. Nearly four decades later, he returns to the Croisette as the director behind one of the most successful trilogies in cinema history. The director is still talking about movies with the enthusiasm of somebody who never stopped being the kid borrowing his parents’ Super 8 camera to film homemade monsters. Across an unusually relaxed and funny conversation at the festival, Jackson moved freely from King Kong to The Beatles, from Andy Serkis to artificial intelligence, from Tintin 2 to the collapse of DVD culture. What emerges most clearly is how little of his career feels planned in retrospect. Again and again Jackson describes cinema as a chain of accidents, obsessions, and strange coincidences somehow turning into films...

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Meet the Cannes Jury: What they revealed about the festival to come?

by Elisa Giudici

Park Chan Wook and Chloe Zhao © Elisa Giudici

What kind of festival the 79th Annual Cannes Film Festival will be is something the films in Competition and the side sections will ultimately determine. But there’s little doubt that the final perception of Cannes - and the line between winners and losers - will also be shaped by the jury presided over by Park Chan-wook, who today faced the traditional opening press conference.

What became immediately clear is how prepared every juror was to answer politically charged or potentially controversial questions. After the turbulence of Berlin earlier this year, publicists and agents clearly did their homework: politics, Gaza, artificial intelligence and representation were all addressed with awareness and, in most cases, notable intelligence. It also helped that Paul Laverty quickly positioned himself as the most openly political voice on the panel, absorbing much of the pressure around the more sensitive topics...

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Cannes at Home: “Moulin Rouge!” @25

by Cláudio Alves

The 79th Cannes Film Festival is upon us and, as ever, Elisa is on the ground to report directly from the Croisette. Sadly, most of us can only watch from afar. For years, I struggled with festival-related FOMO, but one little annual series here at The Film Experience has helped combat it. Obviously, I’m referring to “Cannes at Home,” the rubric I’m happy to revive once more, perusing past films from the various cineastes in the Main Competition that are widely available. Alas, it’s very rare for a title vying for the Palme to open celebrations at Cannes, and this year is no different. Pierre Salvadori’s The Electric Kiss marked the fest’s official start, but it’s playing Out of Competition so the director’s work won’t be showcased here, in “Cannes at Home.”

Instead, let’s rewind to 2001, when the Cannes Film Festival celebrated its 54th edition. A quarter century ago, the Opening Film was actually among the competition lineup. It was none other than Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge!, the best movie musical yet produced since the millennium changed. Damn, 21st century cinema peaked early…

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Tony Nominations ~ The Plays

by Nathaniel R

While I made a real effort to catch all the musicals this season I'm weaker on the plays having seen only 5 of the 18 that opened this past season. Let's talk about the nominees. I'll be sure to mention any film connections to keep the less theater-inclined interested...

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