The 62 annual Cannes Film Festival is over, we get that, it’s not like we’re clinging on to it or something, but there’s still a lot of films people haven’t seen and ostensibly many of us, including you and I, are going to see them this fall at various film festivals. We decided to dig up a bunch of trailers for Cannes films you probably haven’t seen so far. A few of them aren’t subtitled in English, but it’s still a cool and interesting first-look for most of us.
VENGEANCE (Johnnie To)
One of us caught Hong Kong action director Johnnie To’s latest at Cannes this year, and the other is a huge To fan and is bummed he missed it. Damn. The trailer doesn’t help to stave off anticipation, as this looks to be To’s most explosive and international film yet – in the lead is French icon Johnny Hallyday, of all people. Like most of To’s films, “Vengeance” seems to be heavily reliant on its visual style and meticulously staged action set-pieces. This has carried both films in To’s ‘Election’ series, his Sergio Leone-esque “Exiled,” and perhaps his career peak, the noir-ish “PTU: Police Tactical Unit,” to considerable heights, so there’s no reason to believe that won’t be the case here. Plus, The Playlist himself dug it .
Trailer:
MAP OF THE SOUNDS OF TOKYO (Isabel Coixet)
Last year’s “Elegy” is a film full of erotic visuals and explicit sex, all shot with a fluid, sinewy style that earned the film’s director Isabel Coixet comparisons to the “world’s most romantic filmmaker,” Wong Kar-Wai. If to anyone those claims seemed strained, behold the trailer of Coixet’s latest film, the Cannes competitioner “Map of the Sounds of Tokyo” (which we missed as it played late in the fest). Consider the film’s Asian setting, its woozy lensing and its plot, about a woman who lives a double life as a hitwoman (sounding very similar to Wong’s “Fallen Angels”). Of course, none of this is a bad thing; there are far worse modern filmmakers to be likened to, and few better. Despite a mixed-to-poor reception at the festival this year and chemistry between its two leads (“Babel” star Rinko Kikuchi and “Dirty Pretty Thing’s” Sergi Lopez) that seems as awkward in the trailer as reports from Cannes suggest – still, we’re interested.
Trailer:
VINCERE (Marco Bellocchio)
The trailer for this one has no subtitles, so we consult the synopsis: “The story of Mussolini’s secret lover, Ida Dalser, and their son Albino.” Thanks IMDB. The melodramatic flare of “Vincere” seems an odd stylistic choice for director Marco Bellocchio, known as a purveyor of Italian Neo Realism way back in the day (1965’s “Fist in His Pocket” is a chilling debut classic), but who’s complaining: With a story this big, some over-the-top energy is probably necessary, and performances from both Filippo Timi (as Mussolini) and Giovanna Mezzogiomo (secret lover Dalser) look positively electrifying. Our review confirms this, on both counts.
Trailer:
IN THE BEGINNING (Xavier Giannoli)
We/I caught this at Cannes but never got around to writing about it. Since reception was mostly muted for French filmmaker Xavier Giannoli’s competition entry, “In the Beginning” (A L’origine), its biggest claim to fame at the moment may be Roger Ebert, in his daily Cannes diary, (prematurely) claiming it will win Best Foreign Language film at next year’s Oscars. We hope not. The film is essentially an after-prison pic, based on true events, about a man who gets out of jail and then cons an entire town into believing he works for a big-shot construction company in order to build a highway. Sounds kinda like a comedy, no? Well there’s not an ounce of humor in this self-serious, bloated film, which lumbers along in an uninspired fashion for two and a half hours.
The trailer below does show off a few of the film’s stronger elements: its foreboding, utterly symphonic and pervasive score, striking cinematography, and the great French actress Emmanuelle Devos (also in Alain Resnais’ “Les Herbes Folles” at the fest), who’s always engaging screen presence counterbalances the utterly wooden performance of the film’s lead, Francois Cluzet from “Tell No One.” (Gerard Depardieu is also in the film, but his performance is limited to a cameo.) The trailer also gives us one of the film’s most striking visuals – a shot of its lead casting a shadow over shifting earth, for better or worse ripped directly from Abbas Kiarostami’s “Taste of Cherry.”
Trailer:
FACE (Tsai Ming-Liang)
Of all the trailer’s written about in this piece, perhaps none better convey the film they’re advertising than this one for Tsai Ming-Liang’s “Face” (this writer’s favorite film at Cannes ’09). Just as mysterious, sexy and visually dazzling as the film itself, the “Face” trailer gives you a very good idea of what to expect from Tsai’s narratively ambiguous work of art. Both film and trailer are made up of a series of mostly unconnected and recurring vignettes, exquisitely shot by Tsai’s reliably brilliant cinematographer Pen-jung Liao, and interrupted occasionally by musical numbers. It stars many of France’s most legendary actors: Jean-Pierre Leaud, Fanny Ardant, Nathalie Baye, and Jeanne Moreau – Truffaut collaborators all, and that’s not a coincidence. Along with Tsai regular Kang-sheng Lee, gorgeous French model Laetitia Casta and a cameo from Mathieu Amalric. All are seen in this trailer, if you’re paying attention. The film teems with erotic tension, and even the most mundane of sequences – covering a window with black tape, for instance, which you see briefly here – become meaningful and enchanting. Still, it’s not a film for the impatient, and if the trailer doesn’t cast a spell on you the film likely won’t either.
Trailer:
AIR DOLL (Hirokazu Kore-eda)
“Air Doll” is the latest from kinda prolific Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda (it’s his fifth film this decade, and his “Still Walking” is finally getting a stateside release this fall), and, from the trailer, it looks to be his strangest: the absurdity sort of speaks for itself, but “Air Doll” seems to be about a blow-up sex toy that becomes human – a veritable “Pinnocchio” story, we’re sure – and falls in love with a video store clerk. This is material far and away from Kore-eda’s family drama “Still Walking” and child abandonment tragedy “Nobody Knows” (both we think are excellent, by the way), and seems more like a lost chapter from this year’s overrated “Tokyo!” triptych, or the plot of a derivative anime series. Still, there’s a tinge of melancholy to this trailer, and Kore-eda is such a skilled filmmaker, so emotionally attuned to his characters, that perhaps he can even breath life into this inflatable one?
Trailer:
ADRIFT (Heitor Shalia)
Camilla Belle has endeared us ever since her beguiling turn alongside Daniel Day-Lewis in “The Ballad of Jack and Rose.” Recent projects have been rough going – shrill “American Beauty”-esque suburban drama “The Quiet” and the generic superhero riff “Push” haven’t done her any favors – but this new film, which played in Un Certain Regard at the fest this year, could put her back in good graces and reaffirm her status as an actress to watch. It seems like only yesterday that she was the free spirited teenager of ‘Ballad,’ but already she’s grown up, and here she plays the adulteress to Vincent Cassel’s cheating father. The trailer makes “Adrift” look like a summery, “sexual awakening” film akin to “My Summer of Love” or one of Eric Rohmer’s moral tales (“La Collectionneuse,” “Pauline at the Beach”). In retrospect, we’re bummed we missed.
Trailer:
NYMPH (Pen-ek Ratanaruang)
Acording to Twitch, there are two “distinct” versions of Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s “Nymph”: One being the arthouse appropriate version that showed at Cannes and the other a more mainstream oriented cut, aimed at the movie going public of Thailand. This trailer is for the latter. Having not seen “Nymph” in Cannes, it’s hard to say what the differences might be, but from this trailer there seems only one logical point of comparison: Apparently Lars von Trier wasn’t the only one at Cannes ’09 getting freaky in the woods. The obsession with evil, ethereal atmosphere, the grainy hand-held and the erotic elements of this trailer provoke unavoidable comparisons to von Trier’s Cannes provocation “Antichrist.”
Trailer:
THE SILENT ARMY (Jean van de Velde)
Jean VD Velde’s “The Silent Army” joins Ed Zwick’s “Blood Diamond” and Fernando Meirelles’ “The Constant Gardener” in the putrid genre of white-man-saves-Africa thrillers. And like those other two films, VD Velde’s Un Certain Regard selection likes to pretend that it gives a damn, lamenting the enslaving of child soldiers, when really its focus is how many explosions and gun battles it can fit into its thankfully short, 92 minute runtime. “The Silent Army” is laughably bad, opting out of any real character development in favor of getting the action going faster and, like “Hotel Rwanda” and a host of other films, depicting its African “villains” as over-the-top caricatures of pure evil. The one saving grace, as this trailer shows, is the cinematography, which is vibrant and rich even as it lapses into “City of God” territories of stylized colorization.
Trailer:
SAMSON & DELILAH
“Samson & Delilah” looks like “Bonnie & Clyde” (or maybe “Badlands”) by way of Nicolas Roeg’s “Walkabout”; it’s a love-and-crime story set in the midst of flattened, sand-covered Australian barrenness. This is a raw portrait of Australia’s harsh, heat-baked landscapes and a vision of the country far removed from Baz Luhrmann’s cartoonish epic of last year. It’s good to see that the debut film from Warwick Thornton, winner of the Camera d’Or at Cannes, is receiving so much critical acclaim since there’s been so little cinema of interest coming out of this country since “Walkabout” (with a few notable exceptions of course: early Heath Ledger flick “Two Hands,” gritty Australia-set western “The Proposition” and Sue Brooks’ “Japanese Story,” among others). Hopefully the film itself is less heavy handed in its gestures than the endless barrage of jumbo-sized words that clutter its trailer.
Trailer:
