Yes We Cannes
by Brian Tallerico

Four Hours With Benicio

One of the best actors alive, Benicio Del Toro, will add to his impressive resume this year with one of the most challenging releases of 2008, Steven Soderbergh's two-part biography of Che Guevara, The Argentine and Guerrilla. The two films played under one banner, called Che, at this year's Cannes, but will supposedly be released separately this fall. The four-hour-plus experience caused such a rift among the critics at this year's Cannes, that it instantly became a film high on our must-see list. When a movie (or, in this case, two) can provoke this much dissent, it almost makes us more interested, just to see which side of the argument we fall on. In an era when things like Tomatometers are creating a sensation that all critics need to be on one side or the other with every movie, something like Che gets us excited at the potential for high-spirited debate. And we love Benicio and Steven.

The first film, The Argentine, tells the story of Che in 1956, as he and a band of Cuban exiles that includes Fidel Castro (Demian Bichir) reach the shores of Cuba from Mexico. This film chronicles the story of Che and Fidel's toppling of the regime led by dictator Fulgencio Batista. Argentine co-stars Franka Potente, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Edgar Ramirez, and Rodrigo Santoro. Guerrilla picks up eight years later when Che travels to New York City to address the United Nations. The second film adds Benjamin Bratt and Lou Diamond Phillips to the ensemble cast.

The "love" side of the Che reaction at Cannes included the Jury giving the Best Actor prize to Benicio Del Toro and virtually locking an Oscar nod in the same category for him later this year. And some critics, most notably Jeff Wells of Hollywood-Elsewhere clearly adored the film. He openly called it "my choice for the most exciting and far-reaching film of the Cannes Film Festival." But the opposition was just as fierce, with Todd McCarthy of Variety calling the film(s) "defiantly nondramatic...a commercial impossibility." The great Michael Phillips of The Chicago Tribune was one of the stronger defenders of Che, expressing his adoration for a film that seemed nearly incomplete (indeed some say that it will be tinkered with heavily before Stateside release), saying, "The result is a shaggy beast-maddening, incomplete, the work of a historical ironist who has no taste or interest in conventional biography. Another American competitor, director Clint Eastwood’s Changeling, is severe pulp, late 1920s style, guided by a fearsomely committed performance by Angelina Jolie. But Che is the more interesting work. It is defiantly non-dramatic as well as a commercial impossibility. And it’s the most vital work Soderbergh has done in years."

Complicated masterpiece, jumbled mess, or both? It's still a little unclear what form we'll see Che in, how much it will be changed and if we'll be able to see the two films back-to-back, but, no matter what, we can't wait.

The Writer Directs

One of the more popular writers working today, Charlie Kaufman, brought his directorial debut to the fest and, like a lot of films this year, the reaction was mixed. Personally, we'll line up for anything that the man who wrote Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind has anything to do with at all, and when you add Philip Seymour Hoffman to the mix, we'll wait in line. Kaufman's film is called Synecdoche, New York (say THAT ten times fast) and stars Hoffman as a theater director who works to stage a theatrical production of his entire life. But, in classic Kaufman fashion, there may be more to it than that. Michael Phillips noted that the film fits perfect within "Kaufman's preoccupation with mortality, the creative muse and his own fertile imagination." Variety called the film "A wildly ambitious and gravely serious contemplation of life, love, art, human decay and death, the film bears Kaufman's scripting fingerprints in its structural trickery and multi-plane storytelling." The reaction seemed to be mostly positive, but the controversies around Che and the acclaim for the Eastwood film, along with winning no prizes from the jury, seems to have stolen Synecdoche's thunder. With Hoffman's track record lately and the ingenuity of Kaufman, don't be surprised if this is your favorite film from Cannes 2008.

A Movie We Can't Wait to See

The Cannes reaction to Blindness, the brilliant Fernando Mereilles' first film since The Constant Gardener, was a little disappointing. Still, it can't possibly hamper our expectations for a movie from a spectacular director based on a fantastic book and starring Julianne Moore, a woman who rarely makes a bad decision as an actress. Supporting Moore in the movie based on the book by Jose Saramago (who you should read nearly everything by, if you haven't already) are Gael Garcia Bernal, Alice Braga, Danny Glover, and Mark Ruffalo. The film is about a future where nearly everybody goes blind. It's another story about the dissolution of a society and a voyage to save it, with thematic echoes of Children of Men, one of our favorite movies of the decade so far, but the response was definitely mixed. Wells reports that Saramago himself was a big fan of the film, which is nice, but some of the reviews make us nervous. Salon called the film "earnest and dreary" and Variety went further, blaming the film's infectiveness on "an excess of stylish tics". We don't care. We're still there.

The Rest of The Fest

James Gray (We Own the Night) debuted yet another film starring Joaquin Phoenix, although this one was pretty well-received. Two Lovers stars Phoenix, Gwyneth Paltrow, Isabella Rosselini, and Vinessa Shaw in a love triangle drama. It's unlikely to make a huge impact when it's released later this year, but, based on some of the Cannes response, it has the potential to be a critically acclaimed drama. Wim Wenders, a Cannes regular, debuted Palermo Shoooting with Dennis Hopper and Lou Reed. Wenders has become such a staple of Cannes - Don't Come Knocking, The End of Violence, Paris Texas, and many more all played there in competition - that it really wouldn't be Cannes without him. Atom Egoyan (The Sweet Hereafter, Erotica) hasn't wowed us in a while, but his Adoration played in competition and received some moderate raves. Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Distant, Climates) is one of the most consistently fascinating directors working today and his Three Monkeys earned some great reviews this year, but probably won't play anywhere outside of festivals and big city arthouses. As great as Ceylan is, a Turkish director can still be a hard sell to mass audiences and distributors. Ceylan won Best Director at this year's fest.

The Winner?

The irony of Cannes is that the big winner this year, Laurent Cantet's The Class, is probably the film in this feature the least likely to grab a major audience. Winning the Palme d'Or looks nice on a poster but it rarely translates to major success in the States. Sometimes it doesn't even translate to getting released in major cities. The Class is about a teacher preparing for a new year at a school in a tough neighborhood. Hopefully, winning the big prize, will get the clearly-worthwhile film a bigger audience. The President of the Jury, Sean Penn, explained the choice, courtesy of the official website for the festival, "One of the reasons that we agreed unanimously on the Palme d'Or – we start with the art of film. And in that integration and completeness of integration: virtually a seamless film. All of the performances: magic. All of the writing: magic. All of the provocations, and all of the generosity: magic. It's simply everything that you want film to give you. On top of that, because of the things that it takes on, and the issues that it confronts, and the timeliness of them, in a world that, everywhere you go, hungers for education and for a voice – it just touched us so deeply."