Last year was banner year for American films at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival. The crop yielded the Oscar-winning picture, “No Country For Old Men,” plus American director Julian Schnabel’s tour de force “The Diving Bell & The Butterfly” (though it was a French production) and the well-regarded “Zodiac,” “Death Proof” and “Paranoid Park” (the latter of which won director Gus Van Sant a special prize).
But according to Variety, the only U.S. film that will play in competition at this year’s Cannes fete will be Charlie Kaufman’s long-awaited directorial debut, “Synecdoche, New York.” Kaufman of course is the mind-bending surrealist screenwriter behind many of Michel Gondry’s and Spike Jonze’s films (his screenwriting credits: “Being John Malkovich,” “Human Nature,” “Adaptation,” “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind” and “Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind“; he was also wrote for the very absurdist comedy TV shows, “Get A Life” and “The Dana Carvey Show“).
‘Synecdoche’ was originally supposed to be yet another vehicle for Spike Jonze, but once he left the project to direct the long-gestating and potentially controversial “Where The Wild Things Are,” Kaufman took it upon himself to direct the project.
The film is said to be as equally bizarre and ambitious as anything Kaufman has ever written (or moreso). The movie stars Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Michelle Williams, Samantha Morton and Tilda Swinton. Hoffman plays a theater director who ambitiously attempts to put on a play by creating a life-size replica of New York inside a warehouse after finding out something is wrong with him on a trip to the dentist.
A much vaguer synopsis says the film blends realities, points of views and narratives, “Synecdoche, New York is as its definition states: a part of the whole or the whole used for the part, the general for the specific, the specific for the general.”
LA Times columnist Jay Fernandez said, “Ambitious doesn’t even begin to describe the sublime and scary head-trip that is ‘Synecdoche, New York’, ” when he read it last year. “[It’s] really a wrenching, searching, metaphysical epic that somehow manages to be universal in an extremely personal way. It’s about death and sex and the vomit-, poop-, urine- and blood-smeared mess that life becomes physiologically, emotionally and spiritually (Page 1 features a 4-year-old girl having her butt wiped).”
Sounds great, but ‘Synecdoche’ has been pushed and pushed. It was originally scheduled for March of this year and currently stands with an ambiguous “2008 release date.” Sounds like some people don’t know what to do with the very-odd-sounding film.
According to Variety:
Distribution sources say they’ve been waiting so long to see the finished film that they have no idea what to expect, or how Kaufman’s singular voice as a writer will transfer to a film he directs. Most distribs read the script long ago, when [the producers] were looking for one of them to come aboard as financing partner. But nobody stepped up back then on a film with a budget north of $20 million and populated with specialty film regulars Philip Seymour Hoffman, Michelle Williams, Catherine Keener, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Samantha Morton.
In 2004 in the early stages of writing Kaufman said, “I don’t know what it will be,” he says. “I think it’s gonna be creepy. I’m in the very early stages of figuring it out, so there’s not a lot to say about it. It’s a movie about the breakup of a relationship.”
Creepy? You’ll remember that after “Adaptation,” Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman announced plans to make a non-traditional horror film, so this could be very well what, ‘Synecdoche’ eventually morphed into since it now doesn’t sound like a horror movie in the slightest (In 2o05, Kaufman said he was “bored” with the script so it very well could have changed from the original conception).
“I have no interest in making a genre horror movie,” Kaufman said in May 2004. “So I keep trying to make sure that’s not what I am doing, so I keep trying to figure out what’s really scary, not what’s scary in movies because that is too easy, and it’s a real struggle, but it’s a struggle that I choose.”
More Cannes
While other U.S. films are playing at Cannes, the “Indiana Jones 4” thingy, a Dreamworks animation film (“Kung Fu Panda”) and Barry Levinson’s inside-baseball Hollywood film, “What Just Happened,” with DeNiro, John Turturro and Stanley Tucci, none of them are playing within competition. Many had hoped that Steven Soderbergh’s Che Guevara double bill, “The Argentine” and “Guerrilla,” would be ready to screen the Croisette, but it seems that the director – who has wanted either both or neither of the films to play the fest – wasn’t able to put the finishing touches on the four hour plus opus before deadline. Woody Allen’s “Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” – the one that boasts a steamy three-way with Penelope Cruz, Scarlett Johansson and Javier Bardem – apparently missed its deadline too.
Other films expected to be announced at Cannes include Wim Wenders’ “The Palermo Shooting,” which stars Milla Jovovich, Dennis Hopper and Giovanna Mezzogiorno; Fernando Meirelles’ “Blindness,” with Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo; and possibly Atom Egoyan’s latest, “Adoration”
featuring Scott Speedman and Rachel Blanchard and Theo Angelopoulos’ “The Dust of Time,” with Willem Dafoe, Harvey Keitel and Alexandra Maria Lara among many other possible contenders.
The full (or at least partial) Cannes line-up is expected to be announced tomorrow (April 23).