Cannes film festival 2011: the big guns and Brangelina are out
Lars von Trier, Pedro Almodóvar, Gus Van Sant ... and Mr and Mrs Pitt. Cannes rolls out a classic red-carpet lineup
• In pictures: the Cannes contenders
• In pictures: the Cannes contenders
Pitt stop ... Brad Pitt in Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life, which will play in competition at Cannes 2011. Photograph: Merie Wallace/AP/Fox Searchlight
The announcement of the Cannes competition list is an exciting event. Rightly or wrongly, no other festival in the world can command anything like the same interest for its lineup-unveiling ceremony. The list is always guaranteed to trigger a canonical debate among critics and observers, an argument about which films and film-makers are thought to be making the grade. And the announcement is accumulating its own theatrical traditions, now that live TV coverage of the Paris press conference – hosted by the festival's ebullient head of selection Thierry Frémaux and its cool, mandarin president Gilles Jacob – itself can be watched online.
The announcement is a time when Cannes re-establishes a kind of cultural brand-identity by rehearsing the names of those heavyweight auteurs in which it has made a long-term investment. In Cannes this year will be Pedro Almodóvar, Lars von Trier, Nanni Moretti, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Ari Kaurismäki, Paolo Sorrentino andGus Van Sant. Terrence Malick's long-awaited The Tree of Life is to play in competition: Malick is not one of those American directors Cannes is especially associated with – such as the Coens or Van Sant – but he won the Director's prize in Cannes in 1978 for Days of Heaven. And Cannes and its corporate sponsors adore Hollywood celebrity and – starring Brad Pitt as it does – The Tree of Life will undoubtedly provide a colossal Brangelina-paparazzi storm on the red carpet.
The out-of-competition lineup includes Jodie Foster's weird-sounding film The Beaver, starring Mel Gibson, Pirates of the Caribbean 4 (On Stranger Tides), the Sarkozy biopic The Conquest. And, of course, the whole festival is to be kicked off with Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris. As to this last film, well, there are no massive expectations – but Allen has always had an indulgent sponsor in Cannes: his film can more or less be relied on to supply some confectionery for the opening night, and plenty of stars for the red carpet.
So far, the surprising omissions from the list are Andrei Zvyagintsev's Elena, about an old woman attempting to rescue her alcoholic son from poverty, Yorgos Lanthimos's Alps, about a night nurse who runs a bizarre psycho-therapeutic bereavement service, and Brillante Mendoza's Prey, starring Isabelle Huppert as a woman abducted by an Islamist separatist group. But the whispers are that at least one of these films – probably Alps – will be added to the competition list in the coming weeks.
There is some British interest. Lynne Ramsay makes her Cannes competition debut with We Need to Talk About Kevin, adapted by Ramsay and Rory Kinnear from the best-selling novel by Lionel Shriver and starring Tilda Swinton, John C Reilly and Ezra Miller as the eponymous Kevin. Ramsay has been a prizewinner for her short films in previous Cannes festivals, but this is her major debut. In fact, it is her first full-length feature since Morvern Callar back in 2002. It must surely be a personal boost for Ramsay, having famously been once attached to the movie version of The Lovely Bones, a project taken over by Peter Jackson. Ramsay found the experience disagreeable and bruising. But in or out of Cannes, it is a pleasure to welcome back this superb director, whose Ratcatcher and Morvern Callar announced her as a major talent at the beginning of the last decade.
Croisette conversations
We can, however, be in absolutely no doubt as to who the star of Cannes will be: Lars von Trier is certain to rule the Croisette conversations with his mysterious movie Melancholia, which the master of mischief has described as a "beautiful film about the end of the world". My colleague Xan Brooks has already blogged about Von Trier's genius for winding us all up.
The trailer is fascinating though, as Xan says, Von Trier is a master of misdirecting the press with these cheeky hints. When I discovered the title of Lars von Trier's new film, I wondered if it might be an allusion to the director's depression, which was solemnly announced and widely discussed when his sensational horror movie Antichrist came to Cannes two years ago. Apparently not: his depression is evidently in abeyance, or at any rate announcements about it are in abeyance. Similarly in abeyance are, apparently, plans to make the third in the projected Dogville movie trilogy – this too was once earnestly discussed at Cannes press conferences, but now the Von Trier caravan has passed on. Well, I have to say the trailer makes this movie look great. No other director can give me a feeling I can only describe as sinking-butterflies-in-the-tummy: a feeling that I am about to be hit with a brilliantly concealed sucker punch.
Pedro Almodóvar's La Piel Que Habito, or The Skin I Live in, reunites the director with Antonio Banderas and is a revenge drama about a plastic surgeon tracking down the men who raped his daughter. It is based on the 2003 novel Mygale by the French author Thierry Jonquet. There are some Spanish TV news clips online about the production here, here and here, but these are for Spanish speakers only. It looks like a much darker, more politically flavoured movie than Almodóvar's other works.
Palme d'Or
It had been expected to feature out of competition, but Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life is in the running for the Palme d'Or, and it will be interesting to see the odds that the bookmaker Paddy Power offers on this. It must surely be the odds-on favourite. Starring Brad Pitt, Sean Penn and Jessica Chastain, it is reportedly a symbolist, even surrealist film and a radical departure for Malick. Set in the 1950s, it centres on a boy in the midwest who grows up to be an adult lost in the modern world. This film, too, is bound to have thousands of cineastes milling around on the Croisette after the screening, excitedly debating its meaning. As I write, we are still being told that Tree of Life will actually have its world premiere in the UK in advance of the Cannes outing. This is a fascinating prospect for this director's British admirers (I am one), but I can't believe that Malick or his distributors would spike their global guns in this way.
Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne are double-Palme winners, and their Le Gamin au Vélo, or The Boy With a Bike, starring Cécile De France and Jérémie Renier, looks very much as if it will be a return to their classic theme: parenthood. Cyril is a 12-year-old boy searching for the father who abandoned him in a children's home. He forms a complicated friendship with Samantha, a woman who runs a hairdressing salon. Any Dardenne movie is guaranteed respectful attention at Cannes, but these directors are not in the business of offering us the shock of the new.
There are two Italian film-makers at Cannes. Nanni Moretti is the director whose sad and beautiful film The Son's Room (2001) is still, in my view, the best Palme winner of the last decade: the Palme of Palmes. His new film is Habemus Papam, or We Have a Pope, a comedy about the relationship between the newly elected pope and his therapist, starring Michel Piccoli and Moretti himself. The Italian trailer is online here.
Paolo Sorrentino's This Must Be the Place will, for my money, be one of the hottest tickets in Cannes. Sean Penn stars as a wealthy and faintly Robert Smith-like rock star in retirement in Dublin, who decides to travel to the US and search for the fugitive Nazis who persecuted his father. Hollywood names and an American setting will take Sorrentino out of his comfort zone, and European arthouse directors can sometimes come a cropper with pop music and pop culture. But this promises to be a fascinating film.
Gus Van Sant is a Palme winner for his nightmarish, Columbine-inspired movie Elephant (2003). Many had expected his new movie Restless, starring Mia Wasikowska, to be in competition. Instead, it is opening the Un Certain Regard sidebar. Why is this? Well, the trailer unmistakably announces it as one of Van Sant's more mainstream Hollywood-friendly pictures, such as his Good Will Hunting or Finding Forrester. It is also co-produced by Brian Grazer and Ron Howard. I wonder if Thierry Frémaux thought this a flimsier film, more appropriate as a glamorous opener outside the competition? We can only speculate.
High-risk strategy
Australian author turned director Julia Leigh is making a startling Cannes debut with her Sleeping Beauty, based on her own novel: a nightmarish thriller about a university student drugged and coerced into prostitution. It might be the hit of the festival, but it is high-risk stuff. There is something about Cannes that brutally magnifies failure.
Among the other directors, Nuri Bilge Ceylan has his Once Upon a Time in Anatolia and Aki Kaurismäki is there with Le Havre, about a man who attempts to help an immigrant child in the French port city. Kaurismäki is a director traditionally, if tacitly, entrusted with the tricky responsibility of providing some laughs at Cannes, and sometimes they can be in very short supply.
The Japanese director Naomi Kawase was a Grand Prix winner at Cannes in 2007 for her much admired film The Mourning Forest. Her latest film, Hanezu no Tsuki, is reportedly set in AD 500 – aside from that, nothing much is known. More will undoubtedly emerge in the next few weeks, including the lineup of the Director's Fortnight and Critics' Week sidebars.
On paper, this looks like a classic Cannes year, with familiar big names: Variety commented of one Cannes that it was an "auteur smackdown": and that is really what we hope and expect for in every Cannes list – a massive meeting up of powerfully original film-makers.
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