What will Cannes Film Festival be without a touch of the outlandish? The showcase of the finest in world cinema also doesn’t fail in making you roll your eyes for some of its bizarre picks. A weird, old, semi-nude neighbour observed though binoculars; a missing billionaire; a disappeared girl; a dog killer; comic books; Hobo code; occult; purgatory; vampirism in pop culture; a secret map... David Robert Mitchell’s competition film Under The Silver Lake is about all these parts that can’t come together to become a whole. The film proves to be unforgivably boring, actor Andrew Garfield’s omnipresent backside notwithstanding.
If in Cannes, expect a fair share of the erotic, that too served hot to the critics at the early 8.30 a.m. show.
Yann Gonzalez’s Palme d’Or contender Knife+Heart is a horror film about a porn film within a porn film.
Even as a gay porn film is under production, its actors are getting murdered one by one with a dildo-knife.
Meanwhile, the production house boss is sold on replicating the real serial murders in her new film. Besides a celebration of the kitschy and the camp there’s not much else to the film, specially when it comes to the mystery, as things derail in an odd direction towards the end.
Vanessa Paradis, however, plays the role with a tangential dignity. Still, it is too slight a film to matter in the awards on Saturday.
Lars Von Trier ain’t the only one. Alejandro Fadel’s serial killer horror Murder Me Monster featured in the Uncertain Regard section also upped the disgust quotient at Cannes.
The delightfully revolting opening shot sets the gory tone as a woman tries to adjust her recently slit throat. A similar pattern of decapitations follow which all lead to a monster that looks like a curious combination of the male and female private parts.
However, none of these films were as strange as Vanessa Filho’s Guele D’Ange featured in the Uncertain regard category.
About a mother who abandons her young Lolita-like daughter for a man, the film felt pointless as it reduces its women to clueless creatures with no motivation for their actions.
On top of that it sports a strangely colourless performance from a normally glorious Marion Cotillard. A film about women, by a woman, need not necessarily be for women, it seems.
