Cannes Proje(c)t 2014

If the Oscars are the Super Bowl, Cannes announcements are Christmas Morning, if Santa Claus was a sadist and would only let you hear about the presents that you will receive throughout the year. And also, some of those presents are going to suck. But in general, the Cannes film festival is the best thing ever. It celebrates the best in film and most of my favorite directors choose the Croisette to showcase their latest films.

Any film festival is more entertaining the more you know about the directors showing their work. You can get excited for a specific film, you can laugh if the reviews are bad for some other. So, every year (this is the third) my boyfriend and I do the Cannes Proje(c)t. The (c) is between parentheses to help with the pronunciation, by the way. The Cannes Proje(c)t consists in the following: Once the official competition lineup is announced, we choose a previous film by each one of the directors selected. We watch them before the festival begins to get an idea of the different directors in competition, to remember films we wanted to revisit and many times, in my case, to fill out shame holes in my watchlist. After watching them we rank them in a Letterboxd list because of course. So, without further ado here are the films we have chosen to see before the festival.

Olivier Assayas: Irma Vep (1996)

Bertrand Bonello: Tiresia (2003)

Nuri Bilge Ceylan: Distant (2002)

David Cronenberg: Naked Lunch (1992)

Jean Pierre and Luc Dardenne: Rosetta (1999)

Xavier Dolan: Laurence Anyways (2012) [This is the only film I had watched before this project]

Atom Egoyan: Exotica (1994)

Jean-Luc Godard: Le Mépris (1963)

Michel Hazanavicius: OSS 117: Le Caire, nid d'espions (2006)

Tommy Lee Jones: The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005)

Naomi Kawase: The Mourning Forest (2007)

Mike Leigh: Topsy-Turvy (2000)

Ken Loach: Kes (1970)

Bennett Miller: Capote (2005)

Alice Rohrwacher: Corpo Celeste (2011)

Abderrahmane Sissako: Heremakono (2003)

Damián Szifrón: Tiempo de Valientes (2005)

Andrey Zvyagintsev: The Return (2003)

We are about half-way through the project and so far, this year is having a tremendous quality. Let's see if it holds up...

The best movie I saw last week

I had intented to write a little bit about every film I watch in this blog but it gets daunting when I've had a good week like the past one. So, instead, I decided to focus on one movie each week. The best one, ideally.

And even though this week I've seen a lot of amazing five-star films, there was really no contest. The best movie of the week is:

A Passage to India (David Lean, 1984)

For all good things that posmodernity has given us, there is something to be said about neo-classicism in contemporary film. Its peak is most likely Lean's A Passage to India, but can also be appreciated in Minghella's The English Patient (1996) or Cold Mountain (2003).

This is not to say that they are old-fashioned movies or out of date. They are, especially A Passage to India, thoroughly modern as the best classic movies were in their time. The movie has a classical narrative pulse but the story it tells us is contemporary even though it is set in the past. I'm sure it has been read through the prism of post-colonialism and post-feminism and it is a natural thing, because when a text is as rich as this one, every angle is worthwhile.

The supporting cast is extremely good, Peggy Ashcroft's Oscar is possibly one of the most deserved, but this is Judy Davis' show. Adela is a smart and complex character on paper but Davis layers it so thoughtfully that it is impossible not to be mesmerized by her.

David Lean is one director in an extinct breed. His command of the action, of the shots filled with people, of the shots filled only with a face, is astonishing and has provided us with one of the best movies I have ever seen.

Other films I saw this week:

Anna Christie (Clarence Brown, 1930)

Shadow of a Doubt (Alfred Hitchcock, 1943)

Shirley Valentine (Lewis Gilbert, 1989)

The Remains of the Day (James Ivory, 1993)

Min and Bill (George W. Hill, 1930)

The Letter (William Wyler, 1940)

Face to Face (Ingmar Bergman, 1976)

Theodora Goes Wild (Richard Boleslawski, 1936)

I'll Cry Tomorrow (Daniel Mann, 1955)

Le Mépris (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963)

Kes (Ken Loach, 1970)

Naked Lunch (David Cronenberg, 1992)

Vacas (Julio Medem, 1992)

Exotica (Atom Egoyan, 1994)

Irma Vep (Olivier Assayas, 1996)

Away From Her (Sarah Polley, 2007) [Rewatch]

Rosetta (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, 1999)

In general, it has been a ridiculously good week in terms of quality, heavy on Best Actress Nominees on the beginning and with the Cannes Proje(c)t 2014 (about which I intend to blog about) later in the week.