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 hammams  shopping  fashion  movies
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"EDtv"

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"8 1/2 Women"

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"EDTV"

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"Bonnie and Clyde"

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"Entrapment"

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"Le Temps Retrouve"

Summer Screenings

by Carol Mongo

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hot flics and cool classics

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As we go to press, the aisles of my local grocery constitute a not terribly amusing Belgian joke. Ever since dangerous concentrations of dioxin were reported in Belgian poultry, signs abound: "We wish to inform our faithful clientele that nary a chicken of Belgian origin currently sullies our shelves." Then there's the result of things not going better with Coke- at least where headache and gastric disturbance caused by cans of same originating at specific plants are concerned: "We have taken the precaution of removing all cans of Coke, but we invite you to ravish our stock of Coke-related liquids in plastic bottles."

I like chicken, I drink Coke and I consume an abnormally large diet of movies. But if the outrage and anger many of my colleagues evinced in the wake of the 52nd Cannes International Film Festival (May 12-23) were properly acknowledged, movie theaters would banish most of the Cannes prizewinners and post disclaimers to reassure their customers: "No self-indulgent, narratively tepid, pretentious or depressing films of minimal interest within."

There were, in fact, some crowd-pleasing movies at the world's most famous film festival this year but the jury, led by Canadian director David Cronenberg, chose to champion films that hardly anyone had seen, or that had to be seen to be believed. So controversial were the awards that, from Woodstock to Vladivostock, forests' worth of trees were felled to inform readers worldwide that "jury choices suck," or words to that effect. Here in France, the debate continued full-tilt for over two weeks, with more trees sacrificing their bark so critics and pundits could continue to bite.

In a carcinogen-free nutshell, what my American colleagues wanted to know was, "Whose idea was it to bring these idiotic, terminally self-indulgent, seemingly endless artsy-fartsy films to fruition when they should have been snuffed at inception like so many mad cows, deranged chickens or malodorous soft drink containers?"

The Palme d'Or, the festival's top award, went to "Rosetta" an unrelenting and emotionally harrowing look at the daily struggles of a Belgian teenager one waffle shy of destitution, co-directed by Belgian brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, whose outstanding previous film, "La Promesse," brought an unflinching eye to the realities of clandestine labor. Eighteen-year-old Emilie Dequenne, who made her acting debut as Rosetta, shared the best actress prize with Séverine Caneele. A former vegetable cannery worker, Caneele gave a brave but untrained performance in Bruno Dumont's "L'humanité," which won the Grand Jury Prize as well as a best actor nod for Emmanuel Schotté, another rank amateur who put his none-too-bright demeanor on the line for the camera.

Shown with little fanfare on the next-to-last day, "Rosetta" is a fine film, but locating people who might recommend all two hours and 28 minutes of "Humanity" to their friends is only slightly easier than finding takers for a vacation in Kosovo this winter. Festivalgoers were floored to see the top five awards spread between two movies that had fewer champions than Hitler and Eva Braun in their final hours. Apropos of Adolph and Eva, the screenplay award went to "Moloch," Alexander Sokurov's not-uninteresting but deliberately fuzzy look at 24 hours in the lives of the Führer and his mistress at their Bavarian castle retreat, circa 1942.

"Le Soir" rejoiced that the triumph of "Rosetta" would redeem Belgium on the international scene and restore the nation to its rightful cultural standing as people realized that Belgium is not just a haven for murderous pedophiles. How a movie - however well made - about a driven 18-year-old who lives in a trailer park with her alcoholic tramp mother and almost lets a guy drown in a bog so she can get his job selling waffles in a shack is going to improve Belgium's image abroad escapes me, but that pocket of Belgian glee lasted less than a week as Belgian waffling over carcinogenic chickens and other suspect foodstuffs grabbed headlines. With luck, we'll all be back to our EU-approved daily dose of dioxin (love those picograms!) by the time "Rosetta" and "L'Humanité" hit theaters this autumn (Sept 29, Oct 27).

Below is a rundown on other Cannes items within reach: a few are already in theaters, others will be released through the summer and still others at the rentrée or after.

Pedro Almodóvar's "Todo sobre mi madre" (Tout sur ma mère/All About My Mother, May 19), winner of the best directing prize and the only award recipient to meet with enthusiastic general approval, is an accomplished, shamelessly melodramatic romp with a terrific mostly female ensemble cast. Like John Waters in the US (don't miss "Pecker," out since June 16) and Cronenberg in Canada, Almodovar has evolved from shocking and outrageous to sly and subversive. A French colleague scoffed, "Yeah, the Almodóvar is good, but it panders so to the tastes of general audiences!"- as if every media outlet was saturated with stories about HIV+ pregnant nuns, pre-operative transsexuals, their ex-wives who work in organ banks and great legit actresses madly in love with drug addicted lesbian lowlifes in Spanish-language productions marbled with allusions to "All About Eve" and "A Streetcar Named Desire." Back on the cultural high road but not at all pretentious, Raoul Ruiz's polished, star-studded and melancholy "Le Temps Retrouvé" (May 19) is an ambitious and rather touching attempt to fit a hearty slice of Proust onto a movie screen.

As slow as a ceiling fan run on fading batteries yet poignant and satisfying, Arturo Ripstein's stylized adaptation of Gabriel Gárcia Márquez's "El Coronel no tiene quien le escriba" (Pas de lettre pour le colonel /No One Writes to the Colonel, June 2) takes spousal devotion and personal dignity to their crazed, stubborn limit. Among dedicated creative types, it's a timeworn tradition to suffer for one's art, the caveat being that sacrifices are only validated if the end result is, indeed, Art. Writer-director Leos Carax applies majestic camerawork to a plot so convoluted and silly it nearly defies description, in "Pola X" (May 13), the tale of a rich kid who trades his comfy ivory tower for the gutter in hopes of making amends to a feral young woman who may or may not be his half sister. Herman Melville gets a screen credit since "Pola" is an acronym drawn from "Pierre, ou les ambiguitiés," the French title of the novella Melville wrote after "Moby Dick." Carax has an "artistic vision" but his sequel to Melville's great white whale is a great white elephant.

 

"EDtv" (En direct sur Ed TV, June 16) is a jovial, well-made meditation on the wages of fame, bolstered by excellent performances from Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson as working class brothers who think television will improve their lives. Of course, having a camera crew on their heels improves their lives about as much as Kenneth Starr and Linda Tripp's keen interest in Monica Lewinsky improved hers. American audiences were reluctant to see "EDtv" because they thought it too closely mirrored the premise of "The Truman Show." That's balderdash. Director Ron Howard keeps things lively. Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio gives a knock-out performance in John Sayles' "Limbo" (July 7) as a flighty lounge singer who gets more than she bargained for in the wilds of Alaska. And Terence Stamp is superb as a British gangster single-mindedly seeking revenge for his daughter's death in the vicinity of a record exec played by Peter Fonda, in Steven can-do-no-wrong Soderbergh's "The Limey" (L'Anglais, Aug 4). But anyone knowingly purchasing a ticket to Peter Greenaway's "8 1/2 Women" (8 Femmes 1/2, Aug 25) can be said to have one and a half brain cells. I'd sooner eat dioxin stew than endure this toxic, juvenile, ultrapretentious exploration of the half-baked sexual fantasies of two wealthy Englishmen a second time.

In "Entrapment" (Haute Voltige, May 21) Sean Connery is a sly international art thief and Catherine Zeta-Jones is a sly insurance inspector specializing in art theft. Like so many insurance adjusters nowadays she also excels at wearing attractively clingy garb while performing down-to-the-wire contortions around deadly laser-triggered alarms. The plot is glossy nonsense, but Connery and Zeta-Jones kindle a surprising degree of romantic chemistry as they variously elude and collude en route to a goofy, logic-confounding finale. "The Barber of Siberia" (May 12) got a permafrost reception from serious critics yet continues to rack up warm figures at the French box office. The entire unwieldy confection rings as true as the political commentary in Pravda once did. Mother Russia, it tells us, is a huge and ancient nation that foreigners can never, ever hope to comprehend - a riddle wrapped in an enigma with a side order of borscht seasoned with broad farcical mugging. With this tale, the usually masterful Nikita Mikhalkov aims for the intricacy of a Fabergé egg and falls flatter than a potato pancake.

Another lengthy excursion to an exotic foreign land awaits in "The Emperor and the Assassin" (winner of the technical excellence prize, due out in November), a two hour, 43 minute competition entry from Chen Kaige starring Gong Li and a whole lot of men. If I followed the wide-ranging narrative correctly, the film tells us that China is a huge and ancient country that foreigners can never, ever hope to understand. China's first emperor, Ying Zheng, sets out to unify gobs of fiefdoms whether they like it or not, and lots of people die as a beautiful woman initiates a sneaky plan in alleged cahoots with Ying Zheng but ends up respecting the title assassin more than the title emperor. (I hate when that happens.) Did I mention that Chinese history and Russian history are, like, totally impenetrable? "The Blair Witch Project" (Le project Blair Witch, July 28) is a clever and effective answer to the question "How can I make a film for practically no money?" Shot handheld on video, the film purports to consist of the footage found after three documentary filmmakers on the trail of the legendary title entity vanished without a trace. Co-directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez sent their trio of gifted actors into allegedly cursed woods and proceeded to prime their improvisational juices by putting creepy obstacles in the cast's way. There's a convincing immediacy to the blood-free proceedings as the horror takes shape entirely in the viewer's imagination.

"Beautiful People" by Jasmin Dizdar (Aug 25) is an elaborate, bittersweet, London-set comedy that skewers British pieties, class differences, social services, marital strife, cross-cultural romance, nationalist allegiances, news professionals and the comfortable oblivion of ordinary people who think a nasty altercation like the war in Yugoslavia will be polite enough not to spill over its own bonkers Balkan borders. A few unforgettable set pieces and an assured, defiantly irreverent tone make this recommended viewing.

Spike Lee's "Summer of Sam" (due out in September) is a funny and resonant look at a batch of characters swept up in the trends and fears afoot in New York in the summer of 1977. Lee gets points in my book for having left the advent of "Star Wars" out of his pitch-perfect chronicle. Anyone who thinks Lee's portrait of vigilante justice and mob-mentality scapegoating is unrealistic need look no further than the spontaneous transit strike that paralyzed Paris for two days in June after RATP workers decided to protest the "fatal attack" on a Métro worker that turned out to be an unfortunately timed aneurysm. This is how rumors are fueled and lynch mobs are fanned.

One of the more terrifying things I've learned recently is that a Web site is about to be launched selling perfect replicas of clothes and furnishings from current American TV shows. The story, in Variety, said a network switchboard had received thirty five thousand calls about a lamp used in an episode of "Friends." The mind boggles. Then again, I just read the press kit for "Agnes Browne" (Aug 11) the pleasant new film directed by and starring Angelica Huston (with a cameo by Tom Jones), adapted from a 1996 bestseller by Irish author Brendan O'Carroll. O'Carroll is quoted as saying that the most gratifying thing about the book's success "was the number of people who came up to me to tell me it was the first book they'd ever read."

"Kadosh" by Amos Gitai (Sept 1) makes eating crushed glass or gargling with dioxin seem like attractive alternatives to ultra-Orthodox Judaism as practiced in the Mea Shearim section of Jerusalem. When an otherwise compatible couple is still childless after 10 years of marriage, the husband reluctantly agrees to dump his wife in favor of a presumably fertile replacement. Israeli filmmaker Gitai demonstrates the many ways in which dioxin-laced chickens get a fairer shake than the wives, daughters and widows of humorless religious fanatics.

 

 

The Matrix

Andy and Larry Wachowski burst on the art house scene in 1996 with the deliciously perverse caper film "Bound," starring Gina Gershon and Jennifer Tilly as lipstick lesbians trying to lift a fortune from the Mob. The brothers Wachowski have made a quantum leap with their smart, funny, visually thrilling "The Matrix." The premise is fun (the less you know going in, the better) and the cast does it justice. I suspect that a few decades from now, movies like "The Matrix" will seem as quaintly paranoid as the film noir classics of the 1950s that made communists and radiation the twin scourges of humanity. But viewed here and now, this intricate tale of a techie (Keanu Reeves) tapped by a band of truth-driven rebels to help expose the dire, barely glimpsed outcome of the most decisive battle in the ongoing tussle between men and machines feels fetchingly futuristic and exactly right. (June 23)

 

Bonnie and Clyde

If background checks for firearms had been in effect when Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow embarked on their Depression-era bank robbing and killing spree, quite possibly director Arthur Penn and his screenwriters would not have had the material on which to base 1967's "Bonnie and Clyde." Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty are swell in the title roles and the supporting cast is outstanding. July 14-20 this sexy, irreverent modern classic, with its justifiably famous slow-mo finale, will grace the giant screen at the Kinopanorama (60, av de La Motte-Piquet, 15e), followed by a run on smaller screens around town. (July 14)

 

Notting Hill

(Coup de foudre à Notting Hill)

Most of the production team behind "Four Weddings and a Funeral" had a hand in "Notting Hill," a romantic comedy about a reserved yet witty English bookshop owner (Hugh Grant) who encounters many an obstacle when attempting to date the most famous American movie actress on the planet (Julia Roberts). Whether you'll enjoy their booby-trapped courtship is so much a question of personal temperament and cuteness thresholds, I'm reluctant to say too much except that, as utterly implausible contempo fantasies go, it's way less vulgar and better paced than "There's Something About Mary," less heinous in its underlying logic than "You've Got Mail" or "My Best Friend's Wedding" and, uh, longer (by 11 minutes) than the weddings and funeral thing. (Aug 18)

 

 

 

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issue: July/August 99

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