Even at this early stage, it wouldn’t be too ambitious to trumpet Mike Leigh’s Another Year as a leading contender for the 47th Palme d’Or. However, a fanfare seems slightly inappropriate for such a delicate film, a picture of everyday lives so achingly true and lovely and sad that one almost feels like an intruder for watching it, especially in an atmosphere as frenetic as Cannes, which ends on Sunday.
Another Year has an elegiac quality rare in this director’s work, dealing with death, ageing, love and loneliness in the most tender of ways. It unfolds in four chapters, moving through spring, summer, fall and winter.
Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen play a loving, professional couple called Tom and Gerri in a lived-in north London home. He’s a geologist, she’s a counselor at a local health practice. They spend their time digging on their allotment and cooking. Their home is cozy and happy and a bit empty since their son Joe left years ago, although he does come to visit quite often.
In spring, Tom and Gerri invite Mary (Lesley Manville), a secretary at the health practice, for dinner. She’s attractive but battling chronic loneliness and alcoholism. Mary gets hideously drunk and has to stay the night. In the summer section, Tom and Gerri hold a barbecue in their garden and some more unhappy friends are invited, including Ken, a hopeless childhood pal of Tom’s, movingly etched by Peter Wight.
In the fall, Joe turns up with a surprise guest that delights the family but upsets the increasingly unwelcome Mary. In winter they attend a funeral, a superbly orchestrated episode, full of awkwardness, anger and uncomfortable silences.
So little happens in terms of tangible drama that Leigh seems to be saying, this is the way life is, small events accruing at the mercy of time.
Out of his body of work, it’s probably nearest to Secrets & Lies. And, in 1996, that won the Palme d’Or.
Even further back, Michael Douglas won an Oscar for playing Gordon Gekko in Wall Street. He and Oliver Stone are very much the co-creators of an enjoyable sequel Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, in which Gekko returns to prowl the markets once more. The prologue is great fun as Gekko receives his possessions from a prison guard in the traditional movie manner: “One watch, one money clip [with no money], one ring, and ...” big pause as something large and heavy plunks down “... one mobile phone.”
While Stone can’t bring himself to actively mock his previous work, there is a strain of distancing irony to the action now.
Shia LaBeouf is a thrusting trader and the boyfriend of Gekko’s estranged daughter Winnie. She is played by Carey Mulligan in a performance that gives a macho and incomprehensible plot a whole lot of soul.
Gekko uses a best-selling book called Is Greed Good? to get back into the public eye and then starts using everyone else — including his daughter — to muscle into the crashing, subprime world. Douglas has still got the big-screen chops and Josh Brolin makes an admirable foe from a rival bank.
I never understand films about the stock market. Still, I got this film’s basic idea: money is bad but without it you can’t get a nice apartment.
Stone’s film was certainly lighter on its feet than the grumpy Robin Hood that opened the festival, with its beards and dubious accents. And where Ridley Scott’s film cravenly leaves itself open for the quick franchise treatment now endemic in Hollywood, Wall Street felt like a genuine, old-fashioned sequel, with characters worth revisiting because their world was worth re-examining.
Robin Hood and Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps were both shown out of competition. Of last week’s other films competing for the Palme d’Or, all worlds away from Hollywood, China’s Chongqing Blues (日照重慶) gripped me from the first nihao. The opening shot is of a rusty cable car, jammed with people, framed against a misty mess of skyscrapers. A taciturn sea captain returns to the city he left years ago to piece together the circumstances surrounding his son’s death in a shooting in a supermarket. There is so much to admire in the story and the thumbnails of Chinese life — the trams, the dirty rivers, the women playing mahjong on the roof — that when the film begins to drift badly in the final half-hour, I felt a real pang of disappointment.
In Tournee, that master of neurotic smoking, French actor and Bond villain Mathieu Amalric, directs and plays a downtrodden impresario leading American burlesque dancers around French port towns such as Nantes and La Rochelle. The indulgent film has a
Felliniesque fascination for cleavage and the sadness of the circus, but a fatal lack of drama. I enjoyed
The Housemaid, a
sexy film from South Korea, and a remake of a renowned 1960s original. A rich family hires a young nanny and the cocky master of the (very flashy) house gets her pregnant. It’s a blend of Hitchcockian gothic and cracked Korean psychodrama, with a climax you certainly don’t see everyday.
Feb. 17 to Feb. 23 “Japanese city is bombed,” screamed the banner in bold capital letters spanning the front page of the US daily New Castle News on Feb. 24, 1938. This was big news across the globe, as Japan had not been bombarded since Western forces attacked Shimonoseki in 1864. “Numerous Japanese citizens were killed and injured today when eight Chinese planes bombed Taihoku, capital of Formosa, and other nearby cities in the first Chinese air raid anywhere in the Japanese empire,” the subhead clarified. The target was the Matsuyama Airfield (today’s Songshan Airport in Taipei), which
For decades, Taiwan Railway trains were built and serviced at the Taipei Railway Workshop, originally built on a flat piece of land far from the city center. As the city grew up around it, however, space became limited, flooding became more commonplace and the noise and air pollution from the workshop started to affect more and more people. Between 2011 and 2013, the workshop was moved to Taoyuan and the Taipei location was retired. Work on preserving this cultural asset began immediately and we now have a unique opportunity to see the birth of a museum. The Preparatory Office of National
China has begun recruiting for a planetary defense force after risk assessments determined that an asteroid could conceivably hit Earth in 2032. Job ads posted online by China’s State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defence (SASTIND) this week, sought young loyal graduates focused on aerospace engineering, international cooperation and asteroid detection. The recruitment drive comes amid increasing focus on an asteroid with a low — but growing — likelihood of hitting earth in seven years. The 2024 YR4 asteroid is at the top of the European and US space agencies’ risk lists, and last week analysts increased their probability
On Jan. 17, Beijing announced that it would allow residents of Shanghai and Fujian Province to visit Taiwan. The two sides are still working out the details. President William Lai (賴清德) has been promoting cross-strait tourism, perhaps to soften the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) attitudes, perhaps as a sop to international and local opinion leaders. Likely the latter, since many observers understand that the twin drivers of cross-strait tourism — the belief that Chinese tourists will bring money into Taiwan, and the belief that tourism will create better relations — are both false. CHINESE TOURISM PIPE DREAM Back in July
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