Cannes

SHOPLIFTERS: The closest families are chosen by each other

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Ando Sakura, Sasaki Miyu, Jyo Kairi, Lily Franky, Matsuoka Mayu and Kiki Kirin in SHOPLIFTERS, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

Shoplifters is a witty, and finally heartbreaking, look at a family that lives on the margins – and then is revealed to be not what it seems. Everyone in this contemporary Japanese family – dad, mom, teen girl and even grandma – has some shady job or outright scam. The dad has taught the 10-year-old boy to become a skilled shoplifter and tells him that he isn’t sent to school because he’s too smart. The dad and son rescue a lost and neglected four-year-old girl from a harsh winter night; the family decides to adopt her into the family. Of course, we wonder if the little girl’s biological parents will report her missing and whether the authorities will track her down.

Other than informally adding a child, not much seems to happen as the family goes on with its daily life – “work”, “shopping”, meal prep, bedtime and the rest, even a beach excursion. These lovable scoundrels are a hoot, and Shoplifters is very funny.

Writer-director Hirokazu Koreeda reveals – character by character – how each came into the family. Eventually that becomes critically important to the family’s survival – and leads to an emotionally powerful ending. The closest families are chosen by each other.


Lily Franky and Jyo Kairi in SHOPLIFTERS, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

Shoplifters features a magnificent performance by Sakura Andô as the family’s mother figure – pretty understated until she gets to a knock-your-socks-off seduction scene. Her two jailhouse interviews at the end of the film are heartbreaking.

Jyo Kairi, with one of the best child performances of the year, is also superb as the boy.

Shoplifters just won the Palm d’Or, the top award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Koreeda is known for the 1995 art house hit Maborosi, one of the best movies of 2008, Still Walking and this year’s The Third Murder. I saw Shoplifters in early October at the Mill Valley Film Festival.

Seduced and Abandoned: a sly look at money grubbing

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Seduced and Abandoned is director James Toback’s (The Pickup Artist, Tyson) documentary about that overlooked aspect of filmmaking: the pitch.  The camera follows Toback and his star Alec Baldwin through the Cannes Film Festival as they try to get funding for their new movie. The project they are pitching is Last Tango in Tikrit.  One can only imagine…

Toback is shameless in his pursuit of backers: “250 years from now, the only reason anyone will know your name is when it rolls on the screen as producer of my movie”.  When Toback and Baldwin learn that a young actor-wannabe has a very rich dad, they pounce and dangle a newly written role for the son.   Toback is willing to dump Neve Campbell for a younger box office hottie and to change the plot from a Middle East story  so he can shoot in the US.  It’s all very sly.

Seduced and Abandoned is playing on HBO.  Here’s the teaser.

Amour: we face heartbreak

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If you’re lucky, you get old.  When you get old, you eventually get infirm and then you die.  I generally do not focus on this grim truth, but no one can argue it isn’t part of the human condition, and director Michael Haneke explores it with his film Amour.

We meet a delightful elderly couple played by French film icons Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva.  They live a comfortable and independent life, engaged in culture and current events, until she suffers a stroke.  He steps up to become her sensible and compassionate caregiver.  However, the decline of her health brings humiliating dependence is  for her and frustration and weariness for him.  It finally becomes unbearable for both of them (and for the audience).

Amour is heartbreaking, made so by its utter authenticity.  I have been plunged by circumstance into the caregiving role at times, and I recognized every moment of fear, frustration, resentment and exhaustion that the husband experiences.

I tend to despise Haneke because he is a sadistic filmmaker. I hated his critically praised The White Ribbon because the audience has to sit through 144 minutes of child abuse for the underwhelming payoff that parents of Germany’s Nazi generation were mean to them.  In Funny Games, where a gang of sadistic psychos invade a home, Haneke toys with the audience’s expectation that the victimized family will be rescued in a thriller or avenged – but they are simply slaughtered.  However, he doesn’t manufacture cruelty in Amour, the cruelty is in the truth of the subject.

Haneke’s brilliant skill in framing a scene, his patience in letting a scene develop in real-time and his severe, unsparing style are well-suited to Amour’s story.  He is able to explore his story of love, illness and death with complete authenticity.  That, and the amazing performances by Trintignant and Riva, make the film worthwhile.  That being said, it is a painful and not enjoyable viewing experience.

Amour is an undeniably excellent film.  Whether you want to watch it is a different story.

Footnote: a comedy of awkwardness reveals two guys choosing misery

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A rising Talmudic scholar sees his career-topping prize accidentally awarded to his grumpy father.  This potentially comic situation reveals a character study of the two men.  At the beginning, we see the father as bitterly sullen.  As the story peels back the onion, we see the pomposity and narcissism in both men.

As you would think from watching the trailer, the first two-thirds of the film is very funny.  In fact, the scene of an academic meeting in a cramped office is one of the funniest moments you’ll see in any movie this year.  However, once the father makes a discovery, the movie darkens as the two men miss every chance to grasp selflessness.

As the end of the movie nears, the filmmakers create tension that makes the ending too abrupt for me, with too little payoff.  I think that the filmmakers of A Separation, by winding down the end of the movie, created a much successful ambiguous ending.

I admired Footnote more than I liked it, and, indeed, the critical consensus warmed to the film more than I.  Footnote won the screenplay award at Cannes and was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Oscar.

Capturing the essence of the film perfectly, Roger Ebert wrote, “The Talmud provides guidance to Jews about how to lead their lives, but these two Jews have learned nothing that helps them when they find themselves in an impossible situation.”

What we learned from Cannes 2011

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It’s not news that the French love Woody Allen (Midnight in Paris) or that Terrence Malick can make a beautiful, profound and confusing film (The Tree of Life).  And we’ll get to see Midnight in Paris for ourselves this weekend and The Tree of Life in a couple of weeks.  But I’m especially looking forward to four more films screened at the festival:  The Artist, Drive, The Kid with a Bike and Polisse.

The film that captured the most fans at Cannes is The Artist, a mostly silent film about a silent film star at the advent of talking pictures.  By all accounts, it’s a visually and emotionally satisfying film.   The French actor Jean Dujardin won Cannes’ best actor award; John Goodman, James Cromwell and Penelope Ann Miller also appear.  The Artist will be released in the US by The Weinstein Company.

Drive is an action movie starring Ryan Gosling as a stunt driver by day, criminal getaway driver by night.  It’s getting attention for the emotionally vacant character played by Gosling and the stylishness of the car chases and violence. Drive will be released in the US in September by FilmDistrict.

The Kid with a Bike is the latest from the Belgian Bardennes brothers, two of my favorite film makers (The Son, Rosetta).  a 12-year-old boy wants to find the father who dumped him at a children’s home, but meets a woman who becomes his de fact foster mom.  The Kid with the Bike will be released in the US by Sundance Selects.

Polisse is a reputedly riveting French police procedural about the child protective services unit.  It stars an ensemble cast led by Karin Viard (Paris, Potiche, Time Out).  Polisse will be released in the US by IFC Films.

Here’s the trailer for The Artist.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgAvXlG68Y8]

2010 in Movies: Biggest Disappointments

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1. I couldn’t see some of the Cannes and Sundance Festival favorites because they haven’t been released where I live: Poetry, Certified Copy, Uncle Boonmee, Cane Toads: The Conquest, Aurora, The Princess of Montpensier.

2. After director Niels Arden Opley’s super rockin’ The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the second and third films in Stieg Larsson’s Milenium trilogy were dragged down by plodding director Daniel Alfredson.

3. The 2004 French action movie District B13 introduced us to thrilling parkour and was an original, offbeat spectacle.   But this year’s sequel District 13: Ultimatum was cartoonish and very, very dumb.

4.  Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps:  First of all, I hoped that the movie was going to be primarily about the Michael Douglas characterization of Gordon Gekko – which Douglas knocked out of the park yet again. Will someone explain to me why Shia LaBeouf seems to be a movie star? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

Second, the screenplay keeps raising the issue of moral hazard (whether to bail out people from the consequences of risks that they knew they were taking).  Yet, at the end, the two flawed main characters each get exactly what they wanted at the beginning of the film despite making risky or evil choices throughout.  The movie’s payoff (things will turn out OK no matter how badly or foolishly you behave) is exactly opposite of the movie’s sermonette.

5. No one could find a better vehicle for the sublime Amy Adams than the execrable Leap Year?

6.  Pirate Radio:  Has Philip Seymour Hoffman been in a worse film?

7. From the trailer and the buzz, I thought that The Kids Are All Right was shaping up to contend for Best Picture.  It’s a good movie with a wonderful performance by Annette Bening, but  it didn’t fulfill its promise as one of the year’s best.

8. I really wanted to like Ireland’s animated The Secret of Kells, but it was a snoozer.

9. The German comedy Soul Kitchen had a fun trailer (that contained the actually funny three minutes in the entire film).

10.  Shutter Island:  Marty, what were you thinking?

Carlos

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I haven’t seen it yet, but Cannes audiences loved this 5-hour biopic of the 70s terrorist Carlos the Jackal, and the film was bought by IFC and Sundance Channel.  The Sundance Channel is broadcasting it in three parts, this Monday through Wednesday, October 11-13.  Set your TiVos.

Many see this as a star-making breakthrough for its Venezuelan star Edgar Ramirez.

Police, Adjective

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This Rumanian film played in US theaters briefly earlier this year and is showing on The Sundance Channel in August.  It’s a cop story about a cop who is trying NOT to catch someone.  The cop is a young guy who doesn’t want to ruin a teenager’s life by jailing him for a little hash smoking, especially when the kid has been fingered by another kid with designs on his girlfriend.  As far as the cop’s superiors are concerned, the informer has handed them some low hanging fruit, and they insist that the cop bring in the kid.  Here’s a first for cop movies – in the climax, a dictionary is brought into an office to facilitate a debate over definitions.

Long segments of the film are taken up by real-time trods through a grim industrial city for  surveillance and by the filling of reports with minute details.

I appreciated seeing a police procedural without chases and fire fights, but wasn’t sure that the payoff was worth watching so much tedious surveillance.

Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune pretty well nailed it in his review: “It’s not for all tastes; it requires some patience. The more your own job involves absurd, time-consuming bits of minutiae, the more familiar (and amusing) it’ll seem.”

Police, Adjective won a jury prize and the Critic’s Prize at Cannes and has a very high Metacritic rating of 81.