Cannes Day Six: "You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet" (video)

  May 21, 2012 - 22:48 AMT

PanARMENIAN.Net - Cannes film festival Day Five: According to Film Français journal the competition film rankings, Jacques Audiard's "Rust and Bone" was beaten by Michael Haneke's “Love” to become the new favorite.

As wind and rain swept through Cannes Sunday May 20 night, part of the roof collapsed at the Soixantième Theatre, the temporary structure behind the Palais that hosts Special Screenings, Day-After screenings and Tributes.

The collapse forced the cancellation of the last two screenings of the night, a special screening of Gonzalo Tobal‘s Villegas and a day-after screening of Christian Mungiu’s Competition entry Beyond the Hills.

A festival crew arrived on the scene early Monday morning and repaired the damage. Villegas was rescheduled and screened Monday at 11 a.m. and and will repeat Wednesday at 10 p.m at the Salle Bunuel in the Palais, The Hollywood Reporter said.

"You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet"

The Cannes Film Festival received a dose of theater Monday, May 21 in the form of French director Alain Resnais' new film, AP reported.

"You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet" is a love letter to the acting profession that shows a troupe of thespians performing a play based on the Greek myth of lovers Orpheus and Eurydice.

There are several plays-within-a-play in the drama, which features a who's who of French dramatic talent, including Lambert Wilson, Michel Piccoli and Mathieu Amalric.

The 89-year-old Resnais told reporters that he was trying to show the similarities between theater and film, often portrayed as completely different art forms.

He said Monday that "people often say that the theater is a noble art whereas films are not." But, he said, "in both cases, you need actors" — and both plays and films need to keep an audience enthralled.

"When a scene is being played in the theater you can't raise your hand in the room and say 'I didn't really understand, can you start the scene again?'" Resnais said. "You have to listen and try to understand.

"And at the cinema, up until now I haven't seen anyone go to the technical staff and say, 'Could I please see the second sequence again because I fell asleep in the middle of the film? These are parallels between the theater and the cinema. These are things they have in common."

"You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet" is one of 22 films competing for prizes at the French Riviera film festival, which runs until Sunday.

Resnais became a pioneering figure in French cinema half a century ago with adventurous films such as "Hiroshima Mon Amour" and "Last Year at Marienbad."

He won Cannes' second prize in 1980 for "My American Uncle," and the festival gave him a lifetime achievement prize in 2009.

The director turns 90 in June but is not ready to retire. He's planning a new film, a comedy based on an Alan Ayckbourn farce.

"You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet" is, in part, a meditation on aging and death. Several generations of actors play musician Orpheus and Eurydice, the bride he tries to rescue from the underworld.

But Resnais said he did not look back when making films. He said his philosophy was: "I try not to repeat myself, ever."

Resnais also said that if he thought people were going to see the film as his last testament, "I wouldn't have had the courage or energy to make it."

Isabelle Huppert as three French tourists “In Another Country”

Korean writer-director Hong Sangsoo's Competition film stars Isabelle Huppert in a triple role as three identically named French tourists who each visits the same seaside resort.

Two arthouse "worlds" collide with amusing and intriguing -- if hardly earth-shattering -- results in cult Korean writer-director Hong Sangsoo's In Another Country, a brisk trio of larkish tales each starring Isabelle Huppert as a French woman visiting a small coastal resort. Obvious catnip for both sets of fan-bases, it may give many Huppert admirers their first sampling of Asian auteur cinema and thus provide Hong -- whose dozen previous features have sparked much critical fervor -- with his biggest international box-office exposure to date.

But while there'll be no shortage of festival takers for an accessibly comic picture of such pedigree world-premiering in Cannes competition, it is - for all its charms, and despite Hong's trademark formal experimentation -- ultimately rather lightweight stuff. In terms of arthouse "marquee" appeal, Hong will likely remain a coterie interest for the time being in comparison to his better-known compatriots Park Chanwook and Bong Joonho.

As usual with Hong, In Another Country (Da-reun na-ra-e-suh) plays games with structure and operates on a stories-within-a-story format. Here the three episodes are the results of three scripts - or maybe they're one single script - penned as a pastime by a bored young film-student Wonju (Jung Yumi) who has travelled to seaside backwater Mohang with her mother (Youn Yuhjung) to evade debt-collectors. Whatever faults we may find in the resulting vignettes can thus be deflected onto the inexperienced Wonju rather than the veteran Hong -- whose underlying impetus here, as elsewhere, is to examine and celebrate the vagaries of the creative process, The Hollywood Reporter said.

“Like Someone in Love”

Abbas Kiarostami has found inspiration far from home. The Iranian director’s films are routinely banned in his home country, whose Islamist government has arrested or barred several younger filmmakers from working.

The 72-year-old auteur has responded by looking abroad for inspiration. His last feature, “Certified Copy,” was shot in Italy, and his new Cannes Film Festival entry “Like Someone in Love” was made in Tokyo, in Japanese and with a Japanese cast.

“In the past few years for fairly obvious reasons, perhaps, I had to work outside Iran,” Kiarostami told reporters in Cannes on Monday, saying this presented him with a challenge. “How could I convey to you what I had in my imagination without resorting to geography?”

Kiarostami built a global reputation with simple stories told with passion and conviction in Iran-set films like “Life and Nothing More” and “Through the Olive Trees. He said now setting a story in Japan had allowed him to “prove what I’m deeply convinced of — that we all share the same human condition.”

“That runs against something I thought in the past,” the director said. “I thought Japan and the Japanese must be the country and the people that were the most removed from me.”

“Like Someone in Love” — the title comes from an Ella Fitzgerald song — involves a listless young student who moonlights as a call girl, her mechanic boyfriend and an elderly professor who becomes involved in her life. It unfolds in the bustle and neon of Tokyo, but retains Kiarostami’s usual languid pace and naturalistic performances, AP said.

And on the 7th day…

Cannes Day Six will feature Andrew Dominik’s “Killing them Softly”, which follows Jackie Cogan, a professional enforcer who investigates a heist that went down during a mob-protected poker game.

Also to be screened is Ken Loach’s The Angels' Share. Narrowly avoiding jail, new dad Robbie vows to turn over a new leaf. A visit to a whisky distillery inspires him and his mates to seek a way out of their hopeless lives.