Jornal da Mostra
Nº 333 > 28ª Mostra > 13/05/2005
Subscribe here the 'Jornal da Mostra'
Cannes 2005 - Gus van Saint - the obscure side of nirvana; Woody Allen - perverse and in London; Atom Egoyan - sumptuous and nostalgic; Kim ki-duk - claustrophobic, on the high sea
Another four films from the selection for the 58th Cannes Film Festival - to the delight of film-lovers everywhere. Gus van Sant and Atom Egoyan, in competition, scour two different Americas, dissolute and delirious. Woody Allen, most certainly in distress because his original formula as a comedian is wearing thin, and losing out in terms of an audience worldwide, has made an amoral film set in London with a British cast and without himself appearing on the scene.Kim Ki-duk, the Korean sensation in his meteoric and much applauded career, has brought a twelfth feature similar to the former - violent, hypnotic, enigmatic, explosive, terrifying, with rare and innovating talent in building all of this atmosphere within the confines of a fishing boat on the high seas.
In "Last Days/Últimos Dias",Gus van Sant exorcizes Kurt Cobain (1967-1994),the leader of the `Nirvana` group, dead from an overdose at the height of his career.Inserted into the Cannes 2003, with fragmented sequences and retakes with more details, we see the musician inspired in the tragedy of Kurt Cobain completely removed from reality and all alone in the last hours of his life.
There is no explicit drug in the film. Neither is it necessary. The state of mind, the delirium and unbalance say it all. Real America seems equally removed from reality, with characters acting on distinct tracks that will never meet: two young Pentecostal preachers, a seller of the Yellow Pages, an entrepreneur full of plans on the telephone. Most sad and exemplary.
Together with the morale of treatments for deintoxication, from which the character is fleeing at the start of the film, the vision of the film is enough of a warning against the inferno of drug addiction.
Gus van Sant`s talent simply brims over with each new film.And Atom Egoyan presents a superproduction of 24 million dollars, not that expensive on Hollywood standards, but sufficiently luxurious for those of Canada and England, in association for this film "Where the Truth Lies/Onde Estão as Mentiras", on a hypocritical America in the sixties and seventies. The film leads on to intimacy with a twosome of comedians and their popular career on primitive television with live audience programs. Research by a journalist on their careers 15 years later, shows new clues to the murder of a young girl, followed by an orgy, in the room which the comedians were occupying in Los Angeles.Sumptuous in his reconstitution of an age, careful in creating characters, Egoyan seems to be taking a change in position in his career with more ambitious and less independent projects.
The marks of a film-lover in good taste are still much in evidence - with David Lynch in mind.
Woody Allen, in turn, directs the focus of his new film on London, where he raised the funds to make "Match Point", a fable on social climbing inspired on the casual features of the game of tennis. Shockingly so, the public applauded in the first session of the festival to see evidence that the character was to get away scot free from a hideous crime he had committed. This is so because he is shown in the film reading Dostoievsky`s "Crime and Punishment", concomitantly with another book that explains the classics by the Russian author. Unfortunately Woody Allen himself is not in evidence in the film. He may have been advised to withdraw from the scene, strategically, for some time, because the last films that he directed, where he also acted, gradually pushed away audiences that were previously true to his trademark the world over.
For further information: www.festival-cannes.org
