Cannes Day Nine: “Holy Motors,” “After darkness, light” in Mexico (video)

  May 24, 2012 - 21:30 AMT

PanARMENIAN.Net - Cannes film festival Day Nine: According to Film Français journal competition film rankings, Leos Carax's "Holy Motors" made it to Cannes favorites list, to become the 2nd runner-up.

Cannes Top 3

Michael Haneke’s “Amour” (Love) tops the favorites’ list, to be followed by Jacques Audiard’s “Rust &Bone” and Leos Carax's "Holy Motors."

Lee Daniels’“The Paperboy”

The 9th day of Cannes festival featured Lee Daniels’ “The Paperboy”.

Based on a novel by Pete Dexter, “The Paperboy” is set in late '60s Florida. Zac Efron plays Jack, a young guy who's aimless and living with his dad and soon-to-be step mother. His older brother (Matthew McConaughey) is a journalist who comes to town to investigate a death-row inmate (John Cusack) he believes is wrongly convicted of murder. Meanwhile, Cusack is corresponding with a platinum blonde (Nicole Kidman) with a fabulous wardrobe, fake eye-lashes and pillowy lips. She's also the object of Jack's raging hormones — and things get complicated.

"I felt like I was let out of some cage," Cusack said Thursday, May 24 morning in Cannes about his role. "Lee [Daniels] and I talked at the Chateau Marmont about a film I made called The Grifters and then he looked at me and said, 'I think you have more to give than you've been giving lately,' and that is just music to an actor's ears," MovieLine quoted him as saying.

Zac Efron in tighty-whities, Nicole Kidman as sex kitten

This is Thursday in Cannes: Zac Efron in tighty-whities, Nicole Kidman as a luscious sex kitten, Matthew McConaughey as a journalist with a sexual secret and a very creepy John Cusack. Such was just the tip of the iceberg this morning in Lee Daniels's outrageous “The Paperboy”, which will have its world premiere tonight as the festival hits its final swing. Opinions seemed to range wildly in all directions following the film's early morning screening: Applause and cries of "Bravo!" mixed with boos, laughter and a swift rush out of the huge Lumière Theatre to get reaction from Daniels and the cast at the press conference. The conversation in the press room took cues from the film's flamboyant flare, and then it went from there.

What many girls (and some boys) may have secretly wished to see back in the High School Musical days they can now get a big dose of it here: Efron is tan, trim and spends a good chunk of his scenes in his underwear, at one point dancing in the rain in his briefs with a very platinum and seductive Nicole Kidman. Never one to mince words, Lee Daniels set the record straight when asked about Zac Efron being "eroticized" in the new film: "He's good looking, the camera can't help but love him... And I'm a gay man - you know!"

"I don't think I was supposed to feel comfortable," said Efron, laughing after Daniels's quip. "This character is learning the ways of the world and it is uncomfortable. It was a great character to play."

“After darkness, light” with Reygadas

“Post Tenebras Lux”, by the Mexican director Carlos Reygadas (Silent Light), is the second ‘strange’ film – or third, if you count “The Paperboy” – to be screened in competition at Cannes over as many days. But compared to Leos Carax’s majestic Holy Motors it feels frustratingly aimless, and its proximity to that film in the screening programme has done it no favours, The Teleghraph review said.

The title is a Latin phrase meaning “after darkness, light”, and Reygadas’s reverential images of nature certainly have an awestruck crepuscular glow about them. A distorted lens used in outdoor scenes makes the landscapes ripple like the surface of a mountain lake.

And yet after a terrific opening sequence, in which an adorable child (Reygadas’s daughter Rut) scampers around a field in twilight, the sense of wonder quickly fades. Dreary family drama goes on to dominate what could almost be described as the plot, and mid-film sorties into a cheerless sex club and a rugby match at an English secondary school are as bamboozling in isolation as they are in context.

Tenth, Penultimate Day

Cannes Day Ten will feature Sergei Loznitsa’s “In the Fog”: Western frontiers of the USSR, 1942. The region is under German occupation. A man is wrongly accused of collaboration. Desperate to save his dignity, he faces impossible moral choice.

Also to be screened is David Cronenberg’s Robert Pattinson-starring “Cosmopolis”: Riding across Manhattan in a stretch limo in order to get a haircut, a 28-year-old billionaire asset manager's day devolves into an odyssey with a cast of characters that start to tear his world apart.