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Cannes '11 Day 1: From the jury to the moon

Print | Comments () Posted by Wesley Morris May 11, 2011 07:07 PM

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The best thing about coming here to watch movies is that you often wind up watching a lot of theater. This evening I saw a small man argue with two younger and much bigger ones from a table on the street at a restaurant near the Palais, where most of the festival occurs. I think the little guy was being obnoxious. Or maybe the two men, who worked at the restaurant, were? I had to back away because you could feel it all about to take a violent turn. It didn't, but no one who walked by did so easily, and I think we all agreed that the whole thing must have had something to do with the woman the little gentleman was with. She seemed to want to have nothing to do with the scene her companion was making. That could have been because she'd already caused one. A lot of the upper half of her face was painted blue.

Across the street, closer to French Riviera, the theater was of the slightly more regular red-carpet variety. A Town Car arrives. A star emerges. Pandemonium ensues. Other years have been more exciting, though none I can remember has been this loud. Woody Allen tends to have that effect over here. Indeed, the Cannes Film Festival decided to open its 64th edition with what feels like Allen's 64th film (it's number 41). "Midnight in Paris" has a title whose regional appeal explains itself (of course, it's probably worth mentioning that the movie also stars Marion Cotillard and Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, or as we call her in my house: the French Michelle Obama.)

Even so, there's no point in pretending: One shouldn't beg against this festival's choosing to raise its curtain with "Midnight in Poughkeepsie," as long the director is Allen. As he's done as recently as last year, Allen walked the tapin rouge with his cast (Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Michael Sheen, Adrien Brody). The carpet is a wide, unencumbered space. Having walked upon it myself, I can appreciate the intimidating difficulty. How do you stand there and not look like a fool? Allen stood there and sent people -- young, old, cool, texting -- into mild hysterics. Maybe this is why he almost never attends the Oscars: He fears the sound of American crickets. People were also in hysterics about who didn't show up. Namely Mrs. Sarkozy. Her absence only exacerbated and intensified national speculation that she's expecting a baby.

For the price of a tuxedo and some bureaucratic clearance, the excitement outside is available indoors, where you can see people like Gong Li, Aishwarya Rai, Melanie Griffith, Antonio Banderas, and that most totemic of French icons, Agnès Varda, whose magenta pageboy now appears to be gray in the middle rather than on top officially confirming that she's aging in reverse. Before anyone could go undergo the uncomfortable experience of sitting through "Midnight in Paris" with its maker and stars (the film opens next week; Ty Burr's review will explain), the festival, which remains under the seductive touch of Thierry Frémeux, began with classy pomp.

Mélanie Laurent, the vengeful Shosanna of "Inglourious Basterds," emceed the opening ceremonies, and it must be said: I love her. She came to the stage in a smoky dress whose modest volume never contradicted her physical slightness and began to rhapsodize about the movies and the jury. After a few minutes of whispers and moans, it was obvious she didn't plan to host the event. She intended to perform it, which, to rousing applause, she did. To her credit, she dispensed with stage patter, although it would have been something to ask Banderas how he and Salma Hayek felt today doing seaside "Puss in Boots" publicity near a two-story pair of boots.

Instead, she brought out the Italian filmmaker and honorary award recipient Bernardo Bertolucci, whose appearance in a tuxedo, sneakers, and a wheelchair has people worrrying about his health. Laurent introduced this year's jury, member by member -- the producer Nansun Shi, the actress and producer Martina Gusman, the filmmakers Olivier Assayas and Mahamat Saleh Haroun, the critic (and child of Liv Ullman and Ingmar Bergman) Linn Ullman, and the actors Jude Law and Uma Thurman. Laurent then offered a big windup for the unveiling of the jury's president, Robert De Niro, who came to the stage as a thunderous ovation lasted for well over a minute.

He said a few words in French, then took his place at the arrangement of thrones at the side of the stage, so the elfin English chanteur Jamie Cullum and a band could surprise everyone with a version of "New York, New York" that punched its way into Jay-Z and Alicia Keys's "Empire State of Mind." DJs have been pulling this for two years, but it did nothing to diminish the entertainment of seeing Laurent try to get Thurman to dance with her. Thurman showed on the red carper that she understood the power of the slit that run up the front of her alabaster gown. Apparently, its powers didn't extend to making her believe that Laurent had been reincarnated as Vincent Vega at Jack Rabbit Slims. Still, as she resisted, you wanted to draw your two pointer fingers into a square and say, "Uma, don't be a..." In her defense, she spent the rest of the night galloping out the tent of a 650-person-dinner letting strangers take her picture and tell her they love her.

Anyway, it didn't last long for any of the jurors, who seemed to take their cues from their president, who didn't move an inch. Before he arrived, we were treated to a De Niro highlight reel. Idiosyncratically, it opened with a scene from "Casino" in which he narrates as he walks across a parking lot and into a car that promptly explodes. From there it was clips from everything about De Niro the festival likes but that many of us, rather cruelly, have forgotten. We tend to think -- or I often do -- that he spent the decades after "Raging Bull" and "The King of Comedy" phoning it in or parodying himself, and, if his caustic lifetime-acceptance-award speech earlier this year at the Golden Globes is to be believed, so did he. But this festival is often the first and last word, and that reel felt like an institution trying to expand the terms of the conversation -- "Brazil," "Midnight Run," "Jackie Brown," "Analyze This." The tempo of the scenes found their own rhythm and built to a climax of his name in a series of opening credits that took my breath away. It was a montage only the people who coined the term could do.

Tonight was the premiere of Lobster Films's rediscovered complete and hand-colored print of Georges Méliès's 109 year-old-old 14-minute short "A Trip to the Moon." The reds and greens and yellows and blues look like they're partying atop the images, and the new score, by the French duo Air, gives the whole thing -- the building and sending off of the shuttle, its legendary landing smack in the moon's eye, the way the voyage's "astronauts" look like homeless bankers, the puff of smoke that vanquished lunar natives -- a kind of electro-orchestral sense of perversity and industry.

To watch "A Trip to the Moon" now is to be reminded of just how influential the movie's been on the general history of fun -- drugs, video games, horseplay. Méliès was working from Jules Verne, but his pioneering illusionism made him the Steve Jobs, Ray Bradbury, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and James Cameron of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The movie itself is the wishful story of popular art: the dream of being transported somewhere new and never coming back. Come to think of it, that's actually the point of this festival: to make the dream last for 10 days.

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