Detention of Iranian movie director raised at Cannes.
Knight, B2
There are 20 films in competition at the Cannes festival, which kicked off Tuesday night with a gala screening of the Spanish-language movie Everybody Knows, starring wife-and-husband Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem, and directed by the Iranian Asghar Farhadi. But only 18 directors will be in the south of France; two are detained in their home countries.
Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov’s new film Leto (Summer) will screen Thursday morning for the world’s press. But Serebrennikov has been under house arrest since August, allegedly for defrauding the state of more than $1 million, though critics say it is because of his support of the LGBT community and criticism of Russian foreign policy.
Meanwhile, Iranian director Jafar Panahi has been unable to leave his home country since 2010 and was under house arrest for a time. Even so he has continued to make movies, with the 2011 documentary This Is Not a Film smuggled to Cannes inside a birthday cake. His newest, Three Faces, screens Sunday at the festival.
Farhadi raised Panahi’s detention at the press conference for his own film. “I have great respect for his work,” he said of Three Faces. “I continue to hope he’ll be able to come.” (French diplomats have made inquires about letting Panahi travel, so far without success.) “It’s a strange feeling to be here while he is not. I have difficulty living with this.”
Everybody Knows is the second film Farhadi has made outside his home country; his 2013 film The Past was set in France, and won the best actress prize at Cannes for Bérénice Bejo. His Spanish co-stars were full of praise for his ability to cross cultural and linguistic divides to make this movie.
“He’s produced one of the most Spanish films that a director could make,” said Bardem. “What’s important is people. People know no borders.”
Said Cruz: “Two years ago he moved to Spain. He had a Spanish teacher every day with him. He was living the culture ... He was like a sponge. People asked, ‘How can he identify on the set if you make a mistake in one line?’ Because he doesn’t sleep so much; during the night he was memorizing all of our dialogue. So you can never trick him. He knows everything.”
Referring to a traditional Iranian artistic technique, Farhadi’s Spanish producer, Alvaro Longoria, added: “He was doing a Persian miniature with Spanish culture. I’m amazed by what the master has done. In truth I think he speaks Spanish.”
The movie, a dramatic thriller, opens on a family reunion and wedding that is soon disrupted by a kidnapping. Cruz and Bardem, married since 2010, play old friends who were once lovers but now are married to other people. Ricardo Darin plays Cruz’s religious husband, while Barbara Lennie plays Bardem’s wife.
Asked about working with her spouse — they also appeared in 2007’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona while they were dating, and in last year’s Loving Escobar — Cruz was blunt. “We don’t take the characters home at the end of the day,” she said. “Maybe I did that experiment when I was younger. When I was in my 20s I thought the more I would torture myself and the more I would stay in character for months the better the result would be, but I have realized that it’s not really related to that.
“I have a life and I have my job, and that allows me to jump many times in one day from reality to fiction, and I love that beautiful dance back and forth from both dimensions. That’s what I’m passionate about in this work that we do.”
With so much of the conversation at Cannes this year revolving around treatment of women by the film industry, it wasn’t surprising that someone asked whether the couple had been equally paid for their work in Everybody Knows. Cruz took the question: “Actually, yes!”