April 15: Special Cannes Edition

The selections for Cannes have been announced, although they are not yet complete:

http://www.indiewire.com/article/cannes_film_festival_lineup_2010/

My initial take is that overall, people will be a lot less excited about the line-up than they were last year. If Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life is able to be added, that will help; it would act as a "tent peg" for the Main Competition, which it seems to me it otherwise lacks. 

Last year, in the Main Competition, you had Pedro Almodovar, Jane Campion, Michael Haneke, Ang Lee, Ken Loach, Gaspar Noe, Alain Resnais, Quentin Tarantino, Tsai Ming-liang, and Lars Von Trier for starters, plus Andrea Arnold, Jacques Audiard, Marco Bellocchio, Brillante Mendoza, Park Chan-wook, Elia Suleiman, and Johnnie To among the less well-known but still impressive names. For marquee value, this year is very weak by comparison, with Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Abbas Kiarostami, Takeshi Kitano, and Mike Leigh providing the most "pop," and Bertrand Tavernier and Apichatpong Weerasethakul certainly no slouches. 

A few days ago, Cannes director Thierry Fremaux told the press, "It's a very difficult, complicated year," which I think is code for "It sucks." Cannes is totally about marquee value. Always has been. And even the most rarefied cineastes respond to those "big names." No one looks to the Main Comp for unknowns; that's what Un Certain Regard, the Directors Fortnight, and the Critics Week are for. The Main Comp is for already proven star auteurs, and a few of those who are about to be so. The number of star directors who had films ready for Cannes this year seems to have been much smaller than in a really good year.

I also think that Fremaux was sending a message that the quality wasn't there this year. The committee probably saw some films by bigger names that, even with a certain relaxation of standards in consideration of their marquee value (which goes on all the time), didn't pass muster. Notice how incomplete today's announcement is. Four to six more films to select for the Main Comp? -- That's unusual. Last year I believe that only one film was added to the Main Comp after the initial announcement. So I suspect that Fremaux is crossing his fingers that some miracles, among them the Malick, come through.

One of the head-scratchers in the Main Comp is Mathieu Amalric's Tournee. I adore Amalric as an actor; he's great. He directed an obscure feature, Mange Ta Soupe, in 1997; a couple of TV films in 2001 and 2003; and a few shorts over the years. But for him to bust into the Main Competition suggests, I don't know, that he has dinner with Thierry Fremaux fairly frequently. Ah, politics (and Cannes is as political as it gets). If I were Amalric, I wouldn't even have wanted to be in the Main Comp, because of the nasty chatter factor. Un Certain Regard would have suited me just fine, thanks.

Among notables born on this date are painters Leonardo da Vinci, Charles Willson Peale, Thomas Hart Benton, and Arshile Gorky, mathematician Leonhard Euler, sociologist Emile Durkheim, psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, conductor Neville Marriner, blues singer Bessie Smith, rocker Dave Edmunds, film director Fruit Chan, novelists Henry James and Robert Walser (Swiss German), science fiction writer Boris Strugatsky, poets Wilhelm Busch (Germany), Maximilian Kronberger (Germany), Bliss Carman (Canada, Jean Moreas (Greece/France), and Nikolai Gumilyov (Russia), and actors Hans Conreid, Elizabeth Montgomery, Emma Thompson, and Seth Rogen. There can't be many writers with encyclopedia entries who didn't make it out of their teens, but Maximilian Kronberger (1888-1904), who died of meningitis just one day after his 16th birthday, is one of them. The homoerotically inclined German poet Stefan George met "Maximin" when the boy was 15 and was utterly smitten (abstractly or not, we don't know):

Maximilian became George's close friend and companion over the next year, and was admired by many members of the George-Kreis not only for his youth and beauty, but for his poetic talent as well. Indeed, George saw in Maximilian such perfection that he considered the boy to be an incarnation of the godhead, and worthy of absolute devotion. In 1904, Maximilian died of meningitis, an event which shattered George's stability and drove him to the brink of suicide. Soon afterwards, however, a new focus for George's work emerged: the series of Maximin-Gedichte center on George's belief in the transcendence of Maximin's earthy life - his idealized figure becomes for George the Stern des Bündes, "one of the new awakened spirits who would one day form the new kingdom on earth." 
 

This whole essay by Nancy Thuleen on George and his....enthusiasms, makes excellent reading:

http://www.nthuleen.com/papers/711George.html

UPDATE: Cannes excitement is pretty muted stateside. The selection announcement has not cracked the top four entertainment stories on my Yahoo home-page all day, and it has not made the Huffington Post home-page, either. With only one American film, Fair Game, announced for the Main Competition, this is not really surprising.