Cannes best films reflect a new world

Philippine film industry celebrates Jose’s Cannes win

LOS ANGELES, May 23, (Agencies): Movies channel the world, even when they’re not trying to. At a festival like Cannes, the films that win awards — and the ones that are most celebrated, which aren’t always the award winners — have usually had a heartbeat of relevance. They’re movies that speak to us because they matter, and they matter because they express what’s going on around them.

Yet at Cannes this year, that reality was only heightened by a gathering awareness — of a theme that cuts across movies, directors, cultures, nations. Accepting the Palme d’Or for “I, Daniel Blake”, director Ken Loach observed, “We must say that another world is possible, and necessary.” He was speaking of the issue that runs like a current through “I, Daniel Blake”, and that makes it such a trenchant and moving film: not just the bureaucratic perils of the British welfare system, but the fraying social safety net in the world at large — the loss of security, jobs, the whole promise of a room with a view. What once might have seemed a “leftist” or even “Marxist” vision has become, for people across the globe, and for movie audiences everywhere, the new normal. The rich are concentrating their wealth; the sense of stability for almost everyone else is slowly eroding. It’s a brave, scary, threatening new world. And the best films at Cannes this year were about pulling back the curtain on what that looks like.

“I, Daniel Blake” does it with scalding passion, which is why this may

After last year’s controversy about no flats on the red carpet (and charges of sexism), A-listers decided to kick off finally be the movie to give Loach, at 79, his Mike Leigh crossover moment. Another Cannes highlight, “Hell or High Water”, tells the story of two bank-robbing brothers in West Texas — it looks like a gun-totin’ wild-boy pop-genre exercise, and might have been nothing more had it been made 10 years ago — and embeds that crackling tale in the maw of middle-class economic erosion. In these two movies, the desperation is right up front. To watch them is to touch a nerve of topical anxiety.

But two of the other festival highlights tap into this theme with a sidelong resonance that sneaks up on you. “Toni Erdmann”, Maren Ade’s twohour-and-42-minute-long German comedy about an oil-company consultant, Ines (Sandra Huller), who is trying to come to grips with her shambling, annoying, prankish semi-wreck of a father, is one of the first movies you have ever seen about the one percent that’s really about the one percent, the intricacies of their spirit and style. It shows us the new breed of suits who are operating in a world far above the rest of us, so that almost nothing they do seems real, whether it’s cutting deals or cutting the jobs that grow out of them.

Power

Ines, beneath her tailored pantsuits and PowerPoint manners, actually appears to be a loving person, but she has made herself over into the high-level version of a human computer chip. She earns a lot of money, but that means that she can never speak truth to power.

their shoes entirely as a sign of protest. Kristen Stewart was spotted carrying her Louboutins outside the Palais, and She’s on call to power, 24/7. Enter her dad, Winfried (Peter Simonischek), who’s the grizzled, eccentric Germangoofball version of one of those insufferable aging boomers who thinks that the world has been getting worse ever since he started getting older. He shows up in Bucharest, where Ines lives and works (one of the film’s themes is that the new money culture is an international club too expansive to have borders), and he tracks her to parties and meetings as if he were Bill Murray in “What About Bob?” He does it wearing false teeth, which make him look like Fredric March in the 1931 version of “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde”, and then a more elaborate disguise consisting of a long-haired wig and slovenly jacket and tie that make him look like Leatherface minus his skin-mask. You may sense the theme here: He’s a walking horror. And an irresistible one.

He is, in other words, the walking horror that Ines deserves. “Toni Erdmann” is about a father and daughter who need to lay down their arms — which, on the film’s art-house crowdpleaser terms, means either getting naked or putting on a massively oversize furry monster suit. This may be the most naggingly Teutonic movie ever made that builds to a big hug — and a giggle. Yet what gives “Toni Erdmann” its subtle juice is the way that Ines and her father seem to be occupying completely different planes of existence. The way the film bridges them is not, in the end, entirely convincing, yet the double portrait is memorable. We all know that family relationships

later changed into denim sneakers for the premiere of “Personal Shopper.” Julia Roberts went barefoot for “Money Monster,” can be impossible, but in “Toni Erdmann”, it’s the crack in the earth between the haves and the have-nots that has left these two on separate spheres.

Hailing

The Philippines’ entertainment industry on Monday celebrated Jaclyn Jose’s surprise win at the Cannes Film Festival, hailing her as one of the nation’s hardest working and most versatile actresses who deserves global acclaim.

Jose, 52, famous at home mostly as a soap opera star, won best actress Sunday for her mesmerising performance as a Manila slum matriarch who falls prey to corrupt police in acclaimed Filipino director Brillante Mendoza’s “Ma’ Rosa”.

“This is a victory for the Filipino film industry. This is a victory for the Philippines as a whole”, Joel Lamangan, another well-known director, told AFP.

“Filipinos are very good actors. They can be compared to anybody. That’s what Jaclyn Jose proved.”

Jose’s original manager Ed Entrella said that although Jose has been one of the nation’s most popular actresses for three decades, she decided at a young age she “wanted to be an actress, not a star”.

Her current manager Perry Lansigan described her as a “workaholic” who relentlessly pursued as many roles as possible.

“She doesn’t take a rest of two or three months (between roles) like other actors”, Lansigan said.

and Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis did the same at Kering’s Women in Motion dinner on May 15.

The market was very cold, with only two big sales out of the festival: Martin Scorsese’s “The Irishman” (which sold international rights to STX Entertainment for $50 million) and Aaron Sorkin’s directorial debut “Molly’s Game” ($9 million to STX). At a time when most indie movies are struggling at the box office, many buyers griped that the packages for sale at Cannes were too risky or not commercial enough. This follows a trend from the last Toronto and Sundance, where after a few bidding wars erupted, distributors played it safe with their checkbooks.

Amazon Studios might be rethinking their marketing strategy for “Cafe Society” after Woody Allen found himself in the middle of numerous Cannes controversies. The festival’s opening night emcee, Laurent Lafitte, shocked with a rape joke that seemed to be targeted at the director. (“I am completely in favor of comedians making any jokes they want,” Allen later told Variety about the incident.) His son Ronan Farrow wrote a guest column about how the media didn’t take seriously the sexual abuse allegations by his sister Dylan against their father. And Sarandon said of Allen at a Variety event: “I think he sexually abused a child and I don’t think that’s right.” (RTRS)