67th Cannes Film Festival Report

The 67th annual Cannes Film Festival opened with Grace of Monaco, directed by Olivier Dahan and starring Nicole Kidman as Grace Kelly.This movie arrived in Cannes trailing months of bad publicity (the royal family in nearby Monaco have attacked Dahan’s biopic for inaccuracies in its depiction of their late parents, cancelling their usual attendance at the festival). The restored 4K version of Sergio Leone’s 1964 western A Fistful of Dollars served as the closing night film.

This year the Cannes Film Festival unveiled a serious Oscar contenders, from Steve Carell in Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher (the real-life drama starring Carell as John du Pont, heir to a family fortune, who becomes fatally obsessed with Olympic wrestlers Mark Schultz, played by Channing Tatum, and his brother, David played by Mark Ruffalo) to Timothy Spall in Mike Leigh’s Mr. Turner (a portrait of the British landscape painter J.M.W. Turner).Tommy Lee Jones, who received a standing ovation for his movie The Homesman, could also find himself on the awards season circuit. Jones, who wrote and directed this movie, turned in an original take on the traditional Western, telling the story of a lowlife who helps a pious spinster escort a trio of insane women to a church 400 miles away. Past Oscar nominee Julianne Moore is simply amazing in David Cronenberg’s Map to the Stars; she plays an aging actress watching her career slip away. Ryan Reynolds demonstrated admirable acting chops, playing a dad whose daughter has been missing for eight years in Atom Egoyan’s The Captive.

Cannes and the Italian team
The festival poster featured Italian actor Marcello Mastroianni from Federico Fellini’s 1963 film 8½, which was presented in the 1963 Cannes Film Festival. This year the Festival got a dose of movie star glamour when the legendary Sophia Loren arrived in Cannes for a special screening of her new film, The Human Voice Tuesday night, a 25-minute short directed by her son Edoardo Ponti (based on the Jean Cocteau play, basically a one woman show finding her running a gamut of emotions while on the phone). It preceded a stunning 50th anniversary 4K restoration premiere of 1964?s wonderful Marriage Italian Style. The film brought Loren her second (and last) Best Actress Oscar nomination, and it still holds up today. The audience gave her a 5-minute ovation, moving her to tears. This year’s Italian slate was all about coming of age, with films centered on young actors and actresses grappling with adolescence. One of only two female directors in the Competition category, Alice Rohrwache returned with a bigger-name cast, led by Monica Bellucci and the director’s sister Alba Rohrwacher: her movie, Le Meraviglie (The Wonders), is a glorious coming-of-age fable, in which a 12-year-old girl, Gelsomina, helps out with her family’s beekeeping business in the Italian countryside. The Un Certain Regard section paraded among others Incompresa (Misunderstood), directed by Asia Argento. Her movie boasts of some notable names in front of the camera (actress Charlotte Gainsbourg) and behind the scenes (co-screenwriter Barbara Alberti, who co-scripted The Night Porter and I Am Love).
In the Critics Week section, Piu buio di mezzanotte (Darker Than Midnight), directed by Sebastiano Riso, tells the tale of David (newcomer Davide Capone), a 14-year-old wrestling with identity issues who runs away from home and finds a new family in an unexpected place. The film stars, as David’s parents, Vincenzo Amato, a David di Donatello nominee for Nuovomondo (Golden Door), and Micaela Ramazzotti, a David di Donatello winner for La prima cosa bella (The First Beautiful Thing).
In addition to these three new Italian movies, making their debut at Cannes 2014, restored versions of four classic Italian films have played a major role: Vittorio De Sica’s Marriage Italian Style, Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars, Roberto Rosselini’s Angst and Federico Fellini’s 8-1/2.

And the winner is…
The jury headed by the film director Jane Campion (surrounded by Carole Bouquet, Sofia Coppola, Leila Hatami, Jeon Do-Yeon, Willem Dafoe, Gael Garcia Bernal, Jia Zhangke and Nicolas Winding Refn) gave the Palme d’Or to Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s three-hour plus drama Winter Sleep. The film beat out Xavier Dolan’s Mommy which settled for the Jury Prize, along with Jeal-Luc Godard’s Goodbye to Language. The runner-up Grand Prix award went to Alice Rohrwacher’s Italian-language film The Wonders. Bennett Miller nabbed Best Director for Foxcatcher. The film failed to win the Best Actor prize for Steve Carell’s much-praised lead performance. Instead Jane Campion’s jury decided to award the prize to Timothy Spall for his turn as J.M.W Turner in Mike Leigh’s Mr. Turner. Julianne Moore won Best Actress for playing an actress in David Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars.

– Barbara ZORZOLI
Italian Journal Columnist