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.
When nature calls, Masana Izawa has followed the same routine for more than 50 years: heading out to the woods in Japan, dropping his pants and doing as bears do. “We survive by eating other living things. But you can give faeces back to nature so that organisms in the soil can decompose them,” the 74-year-old said. “This means you are giving life back. What could be a more sublime act?” “Fundo-shi” (“poop-soil master”) Izawa is something of a celebrity in Japan, publishing books, delivering lectures and appearing in a documentary. People flock to his “Poopland” and centuries-old wooden “Fundo-an” (“poop-soil house”) in
Jan 13 to Jan 19 Yang Jen-huang (楊仁煌) recalls being slapped by his father when he asked about their Sakizaya heritage, telling him to never mention it otherwise they’ll be killed. “Only then did I start learning about the Karewan Incident,” he tells Mayaw Kilang in “The social culture and ethnic identification of the Sakizaya” (撒奇萊雅族的社會文化與民族認定). “Many of our elders are reluctant to call themselves Sakizaya, and are accustomed to living in Amis (Pangcah) society. Therefore, it’s up to the younger generation to push for official recognition, because there’s still a taboo with the older people.” Although the Sakizaya became Taiwan’s 13th
Earlier this month, a Hong Kong ship, Shunxin-39, was identified as the ship that had cut telecom cables on the seabed north of Keelung. The ship, owned out of Hong Kong and variously described as registered in Cameroon (as Shunxin-39) and Tanzania (as Xinshun-39), was originally People’s Republic of China (PRC)-flagged, but changed registries in 2024, according to Maritime Executive magazine. The Financial Times published tracking data for the ship showing it crossing a number of undersea cables off northern Taiwan over the course of several days. The intent was clear. Shunxin-39, which according to the Taiwan Coast Guard was crewed
For anyone on board the train looking out the window, it must have been a strange sight. The same foreigner stood outside waving at them four different times within ten minutes, three times on the left and once on the right, his face getting redder and sweatier each time. At this unique location, it’s actually possible to beat the train up the mountain on foot, though only with extreme effort. For the average hiker, the Dulishan Trail is still a great place to get some exercise and see the train — at least once — as it makes its way
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