Cannes 2010 Diary – Day 6

Monday is holdover day in the world of cinema which means Team PH spending a lot of the day glued to laptops planning what will play in our cinemas back home. There is nothing like the stress of a hectic day of holdovers to take the shine of the French Riviera!

Monday is also changeover day for a lot of the team. The fresh blood were mostly coming out on the train so avoided any ash clouds shenanigans and the one flyer cursed her way through check-in, a delayed sleazy jet flight and missed buses and trains from Nice! Eventually arriving, exhausted, after midnight – not the best start.

A better start and a brilliant end to the festival for a couple of us was THE MYTH OF THE AMERICAN SLEEPOVER. This might not take much money, but we loved it. A small American indie about the trials and tribulations of a collection of teenagers in small town America…so far so original. But this was a beutifully made piece of filmmaking with an excellent cast of young actors given the space to breathe by a confident director who was clearly in love with his characters. Not the masterpiece that Screen International think it is, but a funny, indulgent rites-of-passage tale nonetheless.

OUTRAGE
Takeshi Kitano returns to the yakuza underworld but sadly produces a film that doesn’t scratch the surface, merely charting innumerable violent killings as the yakuza families fight for supremacy in a fast changing world. A competent piece of work as you’d expect from Kitano but not bringing anything new to his canon.

BIUTIFUL
From the master of the multiple storyline, Inarritu, Biutiful is a complex, emotional and very real story set in the immigrant underclass where Javier Bardem (in what surely must be an award winning role) is a decent man trying to hustle a living and look after various groups of illegal workers and his own young children. It is a mark of the power of the film that by halfway I desperately wanted it to end but at the same time really hoped that it wouldn’t. Difficult viewing but certainly one of the most accomplished films of the competition so far.