"Wherever it hits me is where it's going to be": Reports from Cannes 2016

As those reading me at the Village Voice may know, I was at the 69th Cannes Film Festival over the past couple of weeks. Here, for your convenience, are all my reports from the festival (along with the films discussed), in one handy list o' links:

"Simplicity and Irony": Nanni Moretti on Popes, Politicians, and Cannes

When the Italian actor-director Nanni Moretti’s new film We Have a Pope premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last year, some critics were perplexed. Moretti, an outspoken leftist and a longtime atheist, had skewered religious piety in The Mass is Ended (1985) and had not long ago made some waves with his incendiary satire of Silvio Berlusconi, The Caiman (2006). But We Have a Pope was a seemingly gentler film – a comic drama of a newly elected Pope (Michel Piccoli) who, suffering an existential crisis, flees the Vatican and wanders among the people of Rome, visiting with a psychotherapist and reliving his youthful dreams of becoming an actor. And yet it contained a subtler, more humanist critique of the Papacy, underlining the tension between the power of the office and the messy, all-too-human thoughts and needs of the people who inhabit it. But this sort of humanism has always been the hallmark of Moretti , an iconic figure in Italy and Europe who isn’t particularly well known in the U.S. (Although his 1993 film Caro Diario [Dear Diary], was a small arthouse hit.) I sat down with him during a recent visit to New York, to talk about his new film, crossing Silvio Berlusconi, making political movies, and much more.

In Defense of Stealing Beauty. Yes, Stealing Beauty.

 So, anyway, perhaps you’ve heard that there’s this little film festival going on in France right about now. I’m not there, but that will (hopefully) not keep me from commenting on some of the goings on, especially since most of my favorite filmmakers currently working appear to be in the spotlight. Malick, Von Trier, Sorrentino, Winding Refn, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Bertolucci…Seriously, a well-placed bomb on the Croisette could basically destroy all my cinematic hope for the next decade or so.

As anybody who’s read more than one thing I’ve written can tell, I’m particularly happy that one Bernardo Bertolucci is getting an honorary Palme this year (he's never gotten an actual Palme), in the wake of an international touring retrospective of his work and winning the prestigious BBC Four World Cinema Achievement Award last year. And, oh yeah, the Blu-ray release of Last Tango in Paris a couple of months ago. All this activity around Bertolucci is probably why I found myself in a debate the other day about the relative merits of one Bertolucci film that likely did not factor into the honorary Palme decision, which also ironically happens to be the last film he actually had in Competition: Stealing Beauty, one of those movies people like to trot out whenever they want to argue that Bertolucci has lost a step, or two, since his '70s heyday. On one level it’s hard to argue that Stealing Beauty is in any way the equivalent of masterpieces like The Conformist or 1900, so it’d be foolish to try. Nevertheless, I love it dearly, madly, tragically, and perhaps I should say something here.

I Guess Kathy Griffin Really Wants an Oscar…

This alarming image comes from Paolo Sorrentino’s upcoming This Must Be the Place, starring Sean Penn, Frances McDormand, and (um) Judd Hirsch. One of a number of films screening at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, it sounds utterly insane: Penn basically appears to be playing an aging rock star-cum-potential Nazi hunter. Advance word suggests though that the film is closer in feel to the director’s breakthrough film The Consequences of Love -- which is a masterpiece, but a very understated, mournful one.