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.
Aug. 25 to Aug. 31 Although Mr. Lin (林) had been married to his Japanese wife for a decade, their union was never legally recognized — and even their daughter was officially deemed illegitimate. During the first half of Japanese rule in Taiwan, only marriages between Japanese men and Taiwanese women were valid, unless the Taiwanese husband formally joined a Japanese household. In 1920, Lin took his frustrations directly to the Ministry of Home Affairs: “Since Japan took possession of Taiwan, we have obeyed the government’s directives and committed ourselves to breaking old Qing-era customs. Yet ... our marriages remain unrecognized,
During the Metal Ages, prior to the arrival of the Dutch and Chinese, a great shift took place in indigenous material culture. Glass and agate beads, introduced after 400BC, completely replaced Taiwanese nephrite (jade) as the ornamental materials of choice, anthropologist Liu Jiun-Yu (劉俊昱) of the University of Washington wrote in a 2023 article. He added of the island’s modern indigenous peoples: “They are the descendants of prehistoric Formosans but have no nephrite-using cultures.” Moderns squint at that dynamic era of trade and cultural change through the mutually supporting lenses of later settler-colonialism and imperial power, which treated the indigenous as
An attempt to promote friendship between Japan and countries in Africa has transformed into a xenophobic row about migration after inaccurate media reports suggested the scheme would lead to a “flood of immigrants.” The controversy erupted after the Japan International Cooperation Agency, or JICA, said this month it had designated four Japanese cities as “Africa hometowns” for partner countries in Africa: Mozambique, Nigeria, Ghana and Tanzania. The program, announced at the end of an international conference on African development in Yokohama, will involve personnel exchanges and events to foster closer ties between the four regional Japanese cities — Imabari, Kisarazu, Sanjo and
By 1971, heroin and opium use among US troops fighting in Vietnam had reached epidemic proportions, with 42 percent of American servicemen saying they’d tried opioids at least once and around 20 percent claiming some level of addiction, according to the US Department of Defense. Though heroin use by US troops has been little discussed in the context of Taiwan, these and other drugs — produced in part by rogue Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) armies then in Thailand and Myanmar — also spread to US military bases on the island, where soldiers were often stoned or high. American military policeman
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