Cannes Film Festival

Julianne Moore’s Long Red Carpet to the Oscars

May 21, 2015 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Julianne Moore sighs over a mondo coffee cup in ‘Maps to the Stars’ and wins Best Actress at Cannes 2014

Can it be only a year since Julianne Moore owned the red carpet at Cannes — and won the festival’s Best Actress — for playing a diva on the verge of a nervous breakdown in Maps to the Stars? And then David Cronenberg’s bitter little Hollywood pill lost its way to the theaters and what had once seemed like Julianne’s yearstumbled. And then came Alice, Still Alice and Moore was back in play. Here’s my interview of Moore for the New York Observer that appeared on January 21st on finding Oscar without a map:

It was a lunch at Le Cirque, it was star-studded, and actress Julianne Moore was at Table One. The star of Still Alice—a tough, raw portrait of an academic, wife and mother coping with the disintegration of her identity due to early-onset Alzheimer’s—looked, at 54, terrific. Friends surrounded her: Kate Capshaw, wife of Steven Spielberg, on her right; Ellen Barkin to her left. The mood was hopeful, even giddy, with a side of wood-knocking: Ms. Moore was and is the frontrunner for the Best Actress Academy Award. Last week, she received her fifth nomination and, if it happens February 22, this would be her first win.

It’s no coincidence that Cate Blanchett held down that same circular table last year on her juggernaut to the Oscar for Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine, also, not coincidentally, distributed by Sony Pictures Classics. But while Ms. Blanchett held the Best Actress lead from a midsummer release to the Oscars, it’s not an easy position to maintain. Ms. Blanchett’s frontrunner status could easily have been torpedoed by the abuse scandal surrounding director Woody Allen [Read more…]

TIFF Countdown – 6 Days – Movie Trailer “The Hunt”

August 31, 2012 By Thelma Leave a Comment

The movies of Danish Director Thomas Vinterberg (“The Celebration”) are like an empathetic yet unsparing novel — he sets his sights on an extended family or a community and he parses them with a surgeon’s precision. And through that closely observed human behavior, his movies become universal. Here, in what I’d call “We Need to Talk About Klara,” a reference to “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” a kindergartner accuses her teacher of exposing his willie. And the close-knit rural community unravels with accusations false and true. At its core, as the accused teacher, is the brilliant actor Mads Mikkelson, who is also in TIFF’s “A Royal Affair.” He won best actor honors at Cannes this year, and will be honored at Telluride along with Marion Cotillard for “Rust & Bone.” He’s a cross between Viggo Mortensen and Ciaran Hinds — intellectual, physical, sexy. I’m calling a best actor nomination for Mikkelson now.

Adams on Reel Women: Maiwenn Pulls no Punches in ‘Polisse’

June 4, 2012 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Maiwenn: They're no 'Charlie's Angels' (by Sundance Selects)

Americans want the French with baguettes and berets,” the actress-writer-director Julie Delpy (“Before Sunrise”) told me last month, “The way French people handle sexuality is too controversial for American audiences.” That remark resonated when I watched actress-writer-director Maiwenn submerge herself in the sordid world of the Paris Child Protection Unit. Maiwenn’s ripped-from-the-headlines drama, “Polisse” — a movie that won last year’s jury prize at Cannes — should appeal to anyone needing a “Law & Order” fix. Call it “Paris: SVU.”

Maiwenn plays a supporting role in the ensemble as Melissa, a disaffected upper-class photographer (“I only eat organic”) and mother who becomes intoxicated by the police unit’s urgency. As the officers under her lens confront pedophilia, rape, and child abuse in ethnically diverse Belleville, Melissa loses her objective distance, drawn to an angry but righteous cop named Fred (Joey Starr), who has a wife and kid at home.

Like “Law & Order: SVU,” the movie shifts between the domestic disturbances in the officers’ private lives and the domestic abuse the police confront on a daily basis — and how this screws with their heads. The cases overlap as if they were a season of the TV series compressed into one night: A junkie mother steals back her own baby, another uses sexual methods to put her infant boy to sleep, a grandfather pets his granddaughter’s “kitty cat,” and a male gym teacher instructs a young pupil in a different form of calisthenics in the dubious privacy of a bathroom stall.

One featured subplot follows the fractured work “marriage” of two partners, Nadine (Karin Viard) and Iris (Marina Fois). Nadine deals with her divorce at home; Iris tries to get pregnant while hiding bulimia. Meanwhile, on the job, their daily intimacy coping with unspeakable cases like that of a rape victim’s partial birth abortion of an unwanted fetus shows signs of strain. When their relationship finally implodes, the women sling intimate secrets along with work grievances as their colleagues try to separate them. The confrontation scene is unsparing: Women have their own ways to be crueler than a simple punch in the nose.

While Maiwenn pays significant attention to the inner lives of the policewomen, they exist within an ensemble where the bosses are male and equally oppressed by the human condition. This is no chick flick. The focus rests on women and men, some flawed, some sick, some smugly evil. And, perhaps, it’s that unspoken parity that makes “Polisse” more radical as a whole than, say, in an overt, telegraphing scene when an irate female police officer has a screaming fight with her male colleagues and yells, “A woman speaks out, and she’s a radical. F**k you!”

Using an existing form historically dominated by male storytellers, Maiwenn achieves a rich, challenging crime drama by dramatizing the storylines of men and women with equal urgency. By its very nature, the Paris CPU combines nurturing and policing — it has cops with a maternal side, treating the abused women and children of Belleville. And, having seen the absolute worst in people among Parisians, these officers look to each other to find the best. Sometimes, they even succeed.

See the trailer for ‘Polisse’:

Adams on Reel Women: The Cannes Sex Scandal

May 25, 2012 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Cannes Sex Scandal (by Danny Martindale)’

(note: I have migrated my column from AMC Filmcritic.com to Yahoo! Movies where I’m Contributing Editor)

Fact: Men directed all 22 films in competition for the Palme d’Or at the 65th Cannes International Film Festival. Fact: The only woman to win that coveted prize was Jane Campion for “The Piano” in 1993 — and that was a joint victory. Cannes, we’ve got a problem — and when I say “we,” I mean women and men who love film.

Four weeks ago, I first raised this controversy in my column “Thelma Adams on Reel Women” at AMC Filmcritic.com, a site that has since folded. At that time, I wrote, “I love David Cronenberg, whose ‘Cosmopolis’ has been welcomed into the competition and who headed the Cannes jury in 1999. I was a champion of his cerebral period drama ‘A Dangerous Method,’ which had a terrific star turn by Keira Knightley. But, really, not a single film by a woman? I’m just gobsmacked.”

Now that I’ve migrated my column to Yahoo! Movies, the world’s most viewed movie site, I want to expand the debate for our larger audience. In Cannes, where the festival opened last Thursday and will run through Sunday, the quotes on the gender controversy have been surprisingly subdued from the country that decapitated Marie Antoinette as part of its revolution.

The head of the boys’ club: The Boys Are All Right

Festival Artistic Director Thierry Fremaux explained: “I don’t select films because the film is directed by a man, a woman, white, black, young, an old man. … It wouldn’t be very nice to select a film because the film is not good but it is directed by a woman.” Fremaux lacks the self-awareness that his lock-hold on selecting the films may impact which movies get rewarded and which get tossed back. In every society, the gatekeepers determine the definition of quality.

The female director on the jury: Could it be Stockholm syndrome?

As the sole female director on the nine-person competition jury, British filmmaker Andrea Arnold (“Fish Tank”) got to field the “woman question.” While she decried the “pity” of gender inequality, she told a Cannes press conference, “I would absolutely hate it if my film got selected because I was a woman. I would only want my film to be selected for the right reasons and not out of charity because I’m female.” What she was doing, having achieved her spot in the inner circle (congrats!), was echoing Fremaux’s sentiment about the evils of “positive discrimination.”

The academic apologist: The glass is half-full

Columbia University professor and Cannes fixture Annette Insdorf took a wait-and-see approach: “For me, the question is less ‘How many women filmmakers are selected?’ than ‘Do the films illuminate female experience?'” After mentioning such Cannes projects as Marion Cotillard (“Rust and Bone”), Kristen Stewart (“On the Road”), and Jessica Chastain (“Lawless”), Insdorf continued: “It may turn out that the ‘female auteur’ presence in Cannes this year is the prolific international actress.” Having already seen Chastain in “Lawless,” a strong, well-made testosterone-driven film that showcases Tom Hardy and Shia LaBeouf, I can say that Chastain plays a runaway dancehall girl with a heart of gold. She’s great, but really, Annette, I’m not pinning any hopes on this role as a gender game changer.

[Related: Cannes’ buzziest movies]

Meanwhile, there has been an outcry from the French feminist group La Barbe (translation: The Beard), which published a satirical letter in the French newspaper Le Monde. The letter and attached petition accused the festival of sexism while joking, “Is it not enough for them [women] to aspire to be mistress of ceremonies someday during the festival’s opening night?” Clearly not, as La Barbe members in bright beards continue to protest on the Cannes red carpet.

Melissa Silverstein of Women and Hollywood took a more straightforward approach in the e-petition she drafted (and which I signed). In part, it stated: “We call for Cannes, and other film festivals worldwide to commit to transparency and equality in the selection process of these films. We judge films as human beings, shaped by our own perspectives and experiences. It is vital, therefore, that there be equality and diversity at the point of selection.” In pushing for transparency in the decision-making process, Silverstein’s petition strikes at the heart of the issue: the gatekeepers.

The point is not to assign quotas for women in film — to present films by women because they are by women. The underlying problem is: Why are women so drastically underrepresented among filmmakers, jurors, and entrants? Why do women with a record of success as filmmakers find it so hard to get projects produced, while men, even after significant failures, can still get the green light for their next projects? If there is nothing “special” about women filmmakers and writers, then there should be nothing “special” about either their presence OR their absence.

Unfortunately, it’s their absence that is special.

Again, the answer is not quotas for women. It avoids addressing the real problem. The answer is that, given the absence of any normal distribution in their selection process, the programmers, the selection committees, the gatekeepers are biased, not for quality or talent — since we all agree there’s a pretty good chance that that’s not gender-specific — but on gender.

If we all agree that quality and talent are not gender-specific, and the results of the gatekeepers’ selections is so gender-specific, then it must be the gatekeepers themselves who are at fault. They can’t see past the sex. Lacking any therapeutic insight into their problem, they should be removed and replaced by those who can, in fact, make judgments on talent and quality — and leave gender issues to those situations when gender selection matters. Like “birthin’ babies,” or finding a date.

Thelma Adams on Reel Women: What Does Cannes Have Against Women?

May 18, 2012 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Women directors, Woodstock Film Festival,Nancy Savoca,Mira Sorvino,Susan Seidelman, Debra Granik

Straight shooter Savoca

No one ever claimed that women had bridged the director’s-chair gender gap, but it’s a complete kick in the can that this year’s Cannes Film Festival has not a single female-directed film among the 23 in competition.

I love contenders like David Cronenberg, whose Cosmopolis — starring Robert Pattinson — has been welcomed into the competition, and who headed the Cannes jury in 1999. I was a champion of his cerebral period drama A Dangerous Method, which had a terrific star turn by Keira Knightley. But, really, not a single film by a woman? I’m just gobsmacked.

It is, however, a good year to be a North American male: In addition to Cronenberg, Lee Daniels (The Paperboy), Jeff Nichols (Mud), and Wes Anderson (Moonrise Kingdom) will premiere at what is considered the most prestigious film festival on the planet. The other 51 percent be damned.

There won’t be any shortage of sexy female actresses in evening gowns to attract paparazzi — so why does the female-director shortage matter? To paraphrase: It’s the sexism, stupid. Despite some recent indications to the contrary, women have yet to gain substantial ground in cinema’s most powerful positions. And beyond its inherent prestige, Cannes is significant because it’s at the forefront of the awards season. Last year, for example, The Artist debuted at Cannes, where Jean Dujardin won best actor honors, and went on to sweep the Oscars.

Half-full thinkers can still hope that there will be a bounty of female-helmed movies at the early fall Toronto-Telluride-Venice nexus. Oscar-winner Kathryn Bigelow has her as-year-unfinished Osama bin Laden film, Zero Dark Thirty (horrible title alert!), slated for the holiday season.

And, in a pleasant surprise, the Tribeca Film Festival, which is currently in full swing, overflows with female-directed films of all stripes. Among the most prominent are Sarah Polley’s quirky dramedy Take This Waltz, featuring Michelle Williams as a straying Toronto wife; Julie Delpy’s shrewd kooky relationship comedy 2 Days in New York, which pairs the actress with Chris Rock; and Lynn Shelton’s sexy sibling rivalry drama with Emily Blunt, Your Sister’s Sister. While not all movies are Oscar-bait, Tribeca presents a bounty of promising women filmmakers, including Tanya Wexler (Hysteria), Malgorzata Szumowska (Elles), Julia Dyer (The Playroom), Sharon Bar-Ziv (Room 514), Lucy Malloy (Una Noche), Kat Cairo (While We Were Here), and Beth Murphy (The List).

It’s unconscionable that the Cannes selection committee, which received in the neighborhood of 1,800 movie submissions, considers this artistic bias a non-issue. It’s up to bold filmmakers who are part of the boys’ club — Cronenberg, Daniels, and Anderson among them — to squawk about the inequity. We love them; now it’s time for them to return the love.

This column first appeared on AMC Filmcritic.com, and was edited by Nina Hammerling Smith