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.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist