TIMELESS BEAUTY
Sophia Loren still has it
CANNES Playing an assistant to a fa-mous actress, Kristen Stewart gave the Cannes International Film Festival a self-referential and immediately acclaimed performance on the festival’s final day.
Olivier Assayas’ Clouds of Sils Maria reveals a new dimension of Stewart, acting in a European production alongside Juliette Binoche. As the cellphone-tethered assistant to an international, revered veteran actress (played by Binoche), Stewart’s character is full of ironies.
When the two arrive in front of a sea of photographers, the paparazzi ignore Stewart, who rushes to open the door for her boss. Toggling through prospective roles for the star, the Twilight star notes one that has werewolves “for some reason.” And retelling tabloid stories about a famous, scandal-plagued Hollywood starlet (played by Chloe Grace Moretz), she defends it without a wink: “It’s celebrity news. It’s fun.”
“For Kristen to play the assistant was hilarious,” Binoche said. “Those kind of details she knows more than I do, in a way, because she’s really in a world of paparazzi and all that.”
LOREN SHINES STILL
Sixty years after her first appearance at Cannes, Sophia Loren was still stealing the limelight as she promoted a movie directed by her son, in which she stars.
Loren, 79, first appeared on the Croisette in 1955, before winning the best performance award for Two Women in 1961, serving as president of the jury in 1966 and appearing in eight films at the festival.
After the screening of La voce umana, a short film directed by her son, Edoardo Ponti, Loren spoke to a master class for aspiring actors, explaining how she had nearly given up acting when told she had a mouth too big, a nose too short and teeth too wonky.
“Beauty is not important,” she said. “You have to be interesting, someone who is different to other people. “Otherwise you just turn up and look beautiful, and there’s nothing more to you.”
She argued that actresses who rely on their beauty will never make it in the industry, saying they are “dolls” without any substance to back it up.
PLANE APOLOGY
The director of a film loosely based on the Malaysian Airlines plane disappearance is apologizing for a trailer that suggests a love triangle among members of its crew. Rupesh Paul announced The Vanishing Act at Cannes. A brief trailer for the film, which has not yet been cast, shows two crew members kissing as a third looks at them angrily.
Rupesh Paul Productions said it was removing that element of the teaser trailer soon “so as not to hurt sentiments” of the families of those on the plane. Paul also offered “an unconditional apology to the families of the missing MH 370 passengers” and said he never “meant to hurt any of the grieving friends and families of the passengers in the missing plane nor make profit over the missing passengers.”