Apichatpong Weerasethakul Takes the Palme d'Or

Tim Burton and the jury awarded Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives the Palme d'Or at Cannes today, marking the first Palme d'Or for the director and for Thailand. Weerasethakul won the Jury Prize in 2004 for Tropical Malady (which still feels like a giant oversight by Quentin Tarantino and his jury that year, who gave the Palme d'Or to Fahrenheit 9/11) and the Un Certain Regard Award in 2002 for Blissfully Yours. You can watch A Letter to Uncle Boonmee, the director's fantastic 17-minute short which he expanded into the feature, on MUBI. In his fourth outing as a feature director, Mathieu Amalric took home the Best Director prize for Tournée [On Tour]. In a rare tie, Javier Bardem and Elio Germano were named the Best Actors for Biutiful and La nostra vita [Our Life] respectively, and Juliette Binoche won her first Best Actress prize at Cannes this year for Abbas Kiarostami's Copie conforme [Certified Copy]. Rounding out the rest of the awards: Lee Chang-dong won Best Screenplay for Poetry, Xavier Beauvois' Des hommes et des dieux [Of Gods and Men] was awarded the Grand Prix and Michael Rowe's Año bisiesto [Leap Year] won the Caméra d'Or (for best first film). Full awards below:

Palme d'Or: Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, d. Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand/France/Germany/Spain/United Kingdom
Grand prix: Des hommes et des dieux [Of Gods and Men], d. Xavier Beauvois, France

Prix du jury: Un homme qui crie [A Screaming Man], d. Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, France/Chad
Prix de la mise en scène [Best Director]: Mathieu Amalric - Tournée [On Tour]
Prix d'interprétation féminine [Best Actress]: Juliette Binoche - Copie conforme [Certified Copy]
Prix d'interprétation masculine [Best Actor]: (tie) Javier Bardem - Biutiful; Elio Germano - La nosta vita [Our Life]
Prix du scénario [Best Screenplay]: Lee Chang-dong - Poetry
Caméra d'Or: Año bisiesto [Leap Year], d. Michael Rowe, Mexico

Cannes: Un Certain Regard, FIPRESCI, Queer Palm, Semaine de la Critique, Acquisitions...

Some early prizes at the 63rd annual Cannes Film Festival were given out today, in the Un Certain Regard sidebar (which was presided over by Claire Denis), as well as the FIPRESCI (Fédération Internationale de la Presse Cinématographique) awards, the Grand Prix of the Semaine de la Critique, the Art Cinema Award and Short Film Prizes of the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs... et plus.

Un Certain Regard Award: HaHaHa, d. Hong Sang-soo, South Korea
- Jury Prize: Octubre [October], d. Daniel Vega, Diego Vega, Peru/Venezuela/Spain
- Un Certain Regard Award for Best Actress: Adela Sanchez, Eva Bianco, Victoria Raposo, Los labios [The Lips]

FIPRESCI Awards
- Competition: Tournée [On Tour], d. Mathieu Amalric, France
- Un Certain Regard: Pál Adrienn [Adrienn Pál], d. Ágnes Kocsis, Hungary/Austria/France/Netherlands
- Quinzaine des Réalisateurs: Todos vós sodes capitáns [You Are All Captains], d. Oliver Luxe, Spain/Morocco

Queer Palm: Kaboom, d. Gregg Araki, USA/France
Grand Prix de la Semaine de la Critique: Armadillo, d. Janus Metz, Denmark
Art Cinema Award (Quinzaine des Réalisateurs): Pieds nus sur les limaces [Lily Sometimes], d. Fabienne Berthaud, France
Prix SFR (short films, Quinzaine des Réalisateurs): Căutare [Quest], d. Ionuţ Piţurescu, Romania; Mary Last Seen, d. Sean Durkin, USA

As expected, IFC Films snatched up the most films this year. Araki's Kaboom, Xavier Dolan's Heartbeats [Les amours imaginaires], Bertrand Tavernier's The Princess of Montpensier [La princesse de Montpensier], Jorge Michel Grau's We Are What We Are [Somos lo que hay] and Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy [Copie conforme] have all been picked up by the studio since the start of the festival. Prior to that, they had already struck a deal for Olivier Assayas' Carlos, along with The Sundance Channel (they're owned by the same company); The Sundance Channel will air the 333-minute-long version later this year, followed by a theatrical release from IFC of a shorter, three-hour-long cut.

The other US distributor that typically returns from Cannes with several films added to their roster, Sony Pictures Classics, has been more conservative than usual in their purchases thusfar (possibly due to the reportedly weak line-up this year), taking only Xavier Beauvois' Of Gods and Men [Des hommes et des dieux] and Mike Leigh's Another Year. They had already secured Woody Allen's You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger and Stephen Frears' Tamara Drewe, both playing out of competition. The only other US purchase at the festival so far came from Magnolia's genre arm, Magnet Releasing, who picked up Quentin Dupieux's horror/comedy Rubber. Rubber, which screened during the Semaine de la Critique, stars Roxane Mesquida and Stephen Spinella (Milk, Love! Valour! Compassion!). The official closing ceremony of the 63rd Cannes Film Festival will begin in just a few hours.

The 2010 Cannes Film Festival in Posters, Round 1

With the 63rd annual Cannes Film Festival beginning shortly, I decided to unveil the posters for the films playing (in all the sections) that I've come across so far. Though I didn't find a poster for it, Ken Loach's Route Irish, a film dealing with the British's involvement in Iraq, was added to the competition line-up, making the grand total of films in competition nineteen; ten of which (Biutiful, Burnt by the Sun 2, Copie conforme, The Housemaid, Des hommes et des dieux, Outrage, Poetry, Un homme qui crie, La nostra vita and Tournée) I did find posters for. In total, there's 26 in this round (I had more before realizing they were just cover sheets for the press booklets), including a collage of posters for Im Sang-soo's The Housemaid and Xavier Dolan's Les amours imaginaires. The rest: Abel, Alting bliver godt igen, Blue Valentine, Carancho, Copacabana, Draquila - L'Italia che trema, Illégal, L'autre monde, Año bisiesto, Life, Above All, Petit tailleur, Rubber, Film socialisme, Somos lo que hay and Wall Street 2.

The Decade List: Le scaphandre et le papillon (2007)

Le scaphandre et le papillon [The Diving Bell and the Butterfly] – dir. Julian Schnabel

My disdain for the "docudrama" or the "biopic" is a frequent topic of discussion on this blog, so a retread isn't necessary. Director Julian Schnabel has made his film career out of the genre. His first film looked at the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat (Basquiat), and the second was an adaptation of Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas' autobiography (Before Night Falls). As The Diving Bell and the Butterfly marks only his third film, it's difficult to say whether Schabel's adaptation of Jean-Dominique Bauby's memoir of the same name completes an unnamed trilogy of artists whose lives were cut too short. Nonetheless, the film continues Schnabel's fascination, approaching Bauby, the former editor of French Elle magazine, with an impeccable perspective that almost completely overshadows the work he did on Basquiat and Arenas.

At the peak of his career, Bauby (Mathieu Amalric) suffers a stroke that renders him almost entirely paralyzed and unable to speak. At the age of 43, Bauby was the editor of the prestigious Elle, a father of three and lover of many women, including his wife Céline (Emmanuelle Seigner) and sometime mistress Joséphine (Marina Hands). The stroke drags Bauby, referred to by his friends as Jean-Do, into what's called "locked-in syndrome," with the only possibility of communicable interaction being in the form of his left eye. In a sort of updating of The Miracle Worker, language specialist Henriette (Marie-Josée Croze) develops a system of communication through blinking and a utilitarian alphabet, thus prompting Jean-Do to write his memoir through a long series of winks.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is, as you probably know, a lot more vibrant that it sounds. With the aid of cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, who's acted as director of photography on almost every film Steven Spielberg has ever made, Schnabel turns The Diving Bell and the Butterfly into an experiment in perception. A large portion of the film is shot from the viewpoint of Jean-Do's functioning eye; the film inevitably draws up its curtains at the very moment Jean-Do wakes up from his coma. The images are blurry, frustrating and entrancing and eventually form a rhythm of storytelling unlike anything you've likely seen before. It only becomes more apparent how well Schnabel and Kaminski's experiment worked when they do the unthinkable and take the camera outside of Jean-Do's head. I'm still a bit unsure why Schnabel found it necessary to switch the film into third-person, if for no other reason that to remind you how remarkable the film was when it was still communicating in the first.

Ultimately, when you peel off everything and get to its core, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly serves as an especially good example of "well, if you're gonna make a film about [insert your exhausted subgenre of film, in this case an uplifting film about real person who becomes an invalid], you'd be lucky to make it as good as this." The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is less about Jean-Dominique Bauby, a man few Americans probably were aware of before the film came out, than it is about voice and language in film and storytelling. It's at turns dazzling and beautifully chaotic and, at the end of the day, Schnabel's finest foray into infusing his artistic roots into the landscape of film (because, let's face it, the only thing exceptional about Before Night Falls is its lead actor, Javier Bardem, and maybe Johnny Depp as a transsexual... and can you even remember if Basquiat was any good?).

With: Mathieu Amalric, Marie-Josée Croze, Emmanuelle Seigner, Anne Consigny, Patrick Chesnais, Marina Hands, Max von Sydow, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Niels Arestrup, Olatz López Garmendia, Isaach De Bankolé, Emma de Caunes, Jean-Philippe Écoffey, Gérard Watkins, Théo Sampaio
Screenplay: Ronald Harwood, based on the book by Jean-Dominique Bauby
Cinematography: Janusz Kaminski
Music: Paul Cantelon
Country of Origin: France/USA
US Distributor: Miramax

Premiere: 22 May 2007 (Cannes Film Festival)
US Premiere: 31 August 2007 (Telluride Film Festival)

Awards: Best Director, Technical Grand Prize – Janusz Kaminski (Cannes Film Festival); Best Director, Best Foreign Language Film (Golden Globes); Best Adapted Screenplay (BAFTAs); Best Actor – Mathieu Amalric, Best Editing – Juliette Welfling (César Awards, France); Best Director, Best Cinematography (Independent Spirit Awards); Audience Award, European Film (San Sebastián Film Festival); Best Cinematography (Stockholm Film Festival)