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France hoping to break slump at home film festival
(Agencies)
Updated: 2005-05-19 09:47 France is enjoying a vintage
year at the Cannes film festival, as three homegrown pictures in the competition
raise hopes of ending the host country's long slump at cinema's premier
showcase.
French actor Daniel
Auteuil, director Arnaud Larrieu, his brother director Jean-Marie Larrieu,
actress Sabine Azema and Spanish actor Sergi Lopez, from left, arrive for
screening of their film 'Peindre ou Faire L'Amour'(To Paint or Make Love),
shown in competition at the 58th international Cannes film festival in
Cannes, southern France, Wednesday May 18, 2005.
[AP] |
A French film has not picked up the
festival's Palme d'Or since 1987 when Maurice Pialat's "Under Satan's Sun"
scooped up the coveted top prize, but critics are saying this year's unusually
strong crop could bring home the gold.
Wednesday saw the premiere of "To Paint or Make Love" by the brothers Arnaud
and Jean-Marie Larrieu, the third and final French production in the
competition.
The film presents William and Madeleine, a couple whose daughter leaves home.
As empty-nest syndrome sets in and William takes early retirement, the pair get
restless.
Madeleine pursues painting and in the process, stumbles upon a ramshackle
country house and the charming blind mayor of the village, Adam.
Adam and his wife Eva encourage the couple -- played by French superstar
Daniel Auteuil and the gifted Sabine Azema -- to buy the house. They become fast
friends and when Adam and Eva's own home burns down, they move in.
As the alcohol flows, the swinging begins, testing but never shaking the
foundations of their sturdy marriages. But more twists are to come.
"These type of things don't just happen to extraordinary people --
extraordinary things can happen to very ordinary people," Jean-Marie Larrieu
told reporters.
"You just have to push people a little bit and extraordinary things will come
out."
The film received warm applause at a packed press screening with a few
scattered boos. A number of critics remarked on the way out of the cinema that
the feature was "very French" for its intense character studies and freewheeling
sex.
But "very French" has come to be high praise at this year's festival, where
all three entries in the running for the Palme d'Or have held their own against
competition from heavyweight directors including Gus van Sant, Atom Egoyan,
Johnnie To, David Cronenberg and Lars von Trier.
"Hidden", a French production about dark family secrets and Western
indifference to Third World problems, has emerged as the front-runner, along
with Cronenberg's "A History of Violence" starring Viggo Mortensen.
The film, written and directed by Austria's Michael Haneke ("The Piano
Teacher"), was the first of two triumphs at the festival for the 55-year-old
Auteuil, who has been widely tipped for an acting prize when the awards are
passed out Saturday.
His appearance with Oscar winning French actress Juliette Binoche as his wife
was hailed by critics as an unsettling drama that provoked important questions
about immigration and the class divide in Europe.
The French film that opened the festival, "Lemming", starring Charlotte
Rampling and Charlotte Gainsbourg, also made a splash as a supernatural drama
exposing the vulnerability of a pair of couples.
Although it was not as well-received as "Hidden", entertainment trade bible
Variety called "Lemming" a "spooky, intellectually titillating and darkly funny"
picture that would "connect with filmgoers who don't find ambiguity
off-putting".
The British-born Rampling also won rave reviews for her terrifying
performance of a woman scorned.
Twenty-one films are vying for prizes at the 58th Cannes film festival, which
runs through May 22
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