Now that Baz Luhrman’s The Great Gatsby has shimmied over the foggy horizon, the Cannes Film Festival has plunged into the serious business of proving it is still the most important – not “one of the most important”, as some pundit mistakenly said this week – film festival in the world.
First up, a day of bad girls.
Funny how these things come in sets, like waves: a few weeks ago we had Spring Breakers – Harmony Korine’s hallucinatory vision of a bunch of college girls turned sexy pulp-fiction gangsters in Miami – and now we have Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring, based on the true-life story of a gaggle of LA girls who take to robbing celebrities’ houses when said celebs are safely away being celebrated.
Their victims included Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan and Rachel Bilson: the kind of people who give their names to handbags.
Sofia, being a veritable princess within this brand-driven, acquisitive, fame-obsessed world she critiques so mercilessly, was able not only to inveigle Hilton into appearing as herself, but film inside her house.
So we are able to see that, just as one might have suspected, Paris’ couches are covered in cushions printed with her own face, that she has seemingly hundreds of shoes and dozens of pairs of sunglasses and, oh joy, her very own “nightclub room” ready for some at-home pole-dancing.
The Bling Ring was unquestionably one of Cannes’ big tickets; people started lining up two hours before the press screening, which would have meant they missed the French take on the bad girl: Francois Ozon’s Young and Beautiful.
Ozon is prolific – his last film, the deliciously slippery In the House, is still playing in cinemas – reliably original, beguiling, a masterly storyteller with a camera and – can I just say this – really, really good-looking. Most of his films focus on female characters delineated with a unique mix of empathy and utter ruthlessness. (Which sounds like a gay-man stereotype, but Ozon is much too subtle and clever to be boxed up that way.)
Isabelle, the heroine of Young and Beautiful, is a studious, inward girl of 17; her comfortably middle-class parents are pleased when she has a little summer romance while they are on holiday. They are in for a shock. A few months later, Isabelle’s second life as a prostitute, meeting men in hotel rooms for €300 a throw – not that she spends any of it, just adds to a fat wallet in her wardrobe – is uncovered by police.
“She’s bad to the bone!” wails her mother at one point; whatever’s the matter with Isabelle If Ozon knows, he isn’t telling; he plays with our assumptions and chucks them merrily aside at every turn. Performances are impeccable and, of course, Ozon’s muse Charlotte Rampling’s in it. More joy – but no pole-dancing, obviously.
From the movies to an interview with Lars Ulrich, trim and intense drummer with thrash metal stalwarts Metallica.
Lars is doing interviews on a yacht tied up to the Cannes dock, the point of which is that Metallica has made another movie, this time in the IMAX format, which is part concert movie and part drama.
Ad Feedback
Metallica – he speaks of the band as if it were a many-headed single beast – “loves to be out of its comfort zone”, he says. “We believe it ultimately keeps us edgy, keeps us alive, keeps us functioning. I think we are really scared of repetition.” Given the nature of the Metallica oeuvre, this means they would rather do almost anything than make a record. “We have more fun doing the other stuff.”
You can’t blame them for that. Lars Ulrich is 50 this year. He has been whacking those drums with the same band since he was 17, when he advertised for some other Iron Maiden enthusiasts to come jam with him. “Metallica exists in its own bubble,” he says. “We own all our own records; we financed this film ourselves, we don’t have to suck up to anyone or deal with the man, anything like that. We are living in our own little world.”
Why is it that being in Metallica – and they have survived so long, he says, because “somewhere along the line, we realised we would rather be in Metallica than not be in Metallica” – sounds curiously like being one of the Teletubbies
– Sydney Morning Herald
