In Contention

Tag: Of Gods and Men

  • CANNES CHECK: ‘House of Tolerance’

    The director: Bertrand Bonello (France)

    The talent: Unsurprisingly for a brothel-set narrative, the film is heavy on rising female stars, including Hafsia Herzi (“The Secret of the Grain”) and Italian ingenue Jasmine Trinca (“The Son’s Room”); their more senior co-star, Noémie Lvovsky, is arguably more of an institution in France than on the international arthouse scene. Two male cast members also prompt interest: Louis-Do DeLencquesaing, so excellent in last year’s “The Father of My Children,” and the more unlikely figure of “Of Gods and Men” director Xavier Beauvois.

    The pitch: An evidently sumptuous period affair, Bonello’s film (also known by its French title “L’apollonide”) examines the goings-on in a Paris brothel at the beginning of the 20th century. After one prostitute is brutally disfigured for life by a client, the other women of the house shut themselves off from the outside world; the film tracks the rivalries and camaraderie of their isolated day-to-day existence. Bonello has been something of a controversy-monger with sexually frank films like “The Pornographer” and “Tiresia”; expect that trend to continue with his latest.

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  • Césars for Polanski, ‘Gods,’ ‘Illusionist’… and Fincher

    When the nominations for the César Awards — known in glib terms as the French Oscars — were announced last month, I wrote that I anticipated a tight race between Roman Polanski’s widely acclaimed Euro thriller “The Ghost Writer” and Xavier Beauvois’s lofty Cannes prizewinner “Of Gods and Men,” with the latter just winning out.

    As it turned out, I was right. Beauvois’s film (the French Oscar submission, which surprised many by failing to make the Academy’s shortlist) took the top prize, but it was “The Ghost Writer” that netted the most wins, with four — including two for Polanski himself (Best Director and Adapted Screenplay), plus honors for editing and Alexandre Desplat’s score.

    Given that combination of awards, it’s tempting to call Polanski’s film the “Social Network” of the French awards circuit — except that title goes to, well, “The Social Network.” David Fincher’s one-time Oscar frontrunner beat a rum bunch of mismatched nominees, including “Bright Star,” “Inception” and “Invictus,” to be named Best Foreign Film.

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  • ‘Of Gods and Men,’ ‘Ghost Writer’ lead César nominations

    The film may be smarting from its widely (if not, ahem, entirely) unexpected omission from the Oscar foreign-language shortlist earlier this week, but Xavier Beauvois’s sombre religious drama “Of Gods and Men” found more love in its home country, where it scooped a leading 11 nominations for the César Awards.

    The so-called “French Oscars” also unsurprisingly took a shine to Roman Polanski’s “The Ghost Writer,” which has dominated the European awards circuit and is angling for a surprise Oscar nod or two on Tuesday. Expect these two films to battle it out for the gold; I’d bet on the weighty prestige veneer of Beauvois’s film winning out, but sentimental loyalty to Polanski shouldn’t be underestimated — he is, after all, a previous winner for both “Tess” and  “The Pianist.”

    Beyond those two frontrunners, I’m pleased to see a strong showing for Mathieu Amalric’s scrappy burlesque comedy “On Tour,” though their other choices suggest the Césars can be as frustratingly MOR as their US counterpart.

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  • 1/21 OSCARWEB ROUND-UP: French indignation, talking threads with costumers, Portman’s extended laugh

    • The French lose their marbles not just over the exclusion of “Of Gods and Men” from this year’s foreign film shortlist, but the INCLUSION of Algeria’s “Outside the Law.” [The Carpetbagger]

    • Elizabeth Snead talks to a number of costumers on this year’s awards circuit [Deadline]

    • Is this Banksy? [Cinematical]

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  • Greece makes foreign Oscar shortlist, France snubbed

    “Dogtooth.” That’s the title an every Oscar pundit’s lips right now, as Greece’s critically beloved but super-outré submission — which includes inter-sibling sex and feline homicide in its curious bag of tricks — stunned pretty much everyone by showing up on the nine-title shortlist for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. I can hardly believe I’m typing this myself.

    There can be no doubt whatsoever that this is the work of the Academy’s executive committee, which was set up two years ago to give more challenging fare a leg up in the Oscar race by hand-picking an extra three titles to go on the shortlist compiled by general voters in the category. They’ve certainly done their job on this occasion — bravo, guys. (Japan’s reportedly edgy “Confessions” appears to be the second film they saved; the third is open to question.)

    As it turned out, I predicted only four of the nine — not hard in the case of Denmark’s Golden Globe winner “In a Better World,” Canada’s “Incendies” and Mexico’s “Biutiful,” which have been installed as favorites for weeks now.

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  • Predicting the foreign-language Oscar shortlist

    Tomorrow, we get the last of the Academy’s crucial pre-nomination shortlists, as the list of 65 entries for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar is slashed to just nine titles, from which the eventual nominees will be announced in a week’s time. Predicting these nine is a vague and mostly thankless task, but I am nothing if not vague and thankless, so let’s give it a go.

    Remember, here’s the system as it currently stands: six of the nine titles on the shortlist are voted in by the general committee of volunteer voters in the category, based on the scores given at each film’s official Academy screening. The remaining three are selected by a hand-picked executive committee, with the specific intention of “saving” significant and/or challenging titles that didn’t win the approval of the larger, more conservative body of voters.

    This curious system was set up two years ago, following the uproar that greeted the exclusion of critically beloved Palme d’Or winner “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” in the 2007 race.

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  • Ruiz’s ‘Lisbon’ takes Louis Delluc prize

    Well, here’s an awards announcement a million miles away from “The Social Network” — the Louis Delluc Prize, the single most prestigious award in French cinema. (Yes, loftier than the César Awards.) And I do mean “single”: awarded to one film from a shortlist of eight by a jury of French journalists and industry types, it’s one of the simpler ceremonies on the block.

    While last year’s award went to the ubiquitous crossover hit “A Prophet,” this year’s jury (headed by Cannes festival president Gilles Jacob) threw a slight curveball: the award was handed this morning to Raul Ruiz’s epic Portuguese-French production “Mysteries of Lisbon,” a dreamy 272-minute period puzzle piece that I was thoroughly bewitched by at the London Film Festival. (Rebecca Zlotowski’s “Belle Epine” received debut filmmaker honors.)

    The film beat out one hell of a heavyweight shortlist, listed after the cut.

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  • LONDON: Five foreign Oscar contenders

    (Please note that one of the films reviewed here, “Aftershock,” was not screened as part of the London Film Festival programme — but since I saw it this week, it made sense to include it in this discussion.)

    Admittedly, 11 out of 65 is a figure that is only impressive if you’re counting the listenable tracks on most latter-day hip-hop albums, but as a measure of the number of Best Foreign Language Film contenders I’ve seen, it’s more than I’ve ever managed by this early point in the race. For that, I have my growing trail of film festivals to thank (even if I also have Venice schedulers to blame for ensuring that I missed Canada’s hot prospect “Incendies” in favour of — of all things — “Miral”), and this year’s London Film Festival has served me particularly well in this regard.

    I’ll be seeing Belgium and Spain’s entries toward the back end of the festival, but having attended screenings of five contenders in the past week (four of them at the fest), it seemed a neat number for a cluster-review. (I’ve already discussed the hopefuls from Algeria, Czech Republic, Greece, Mexico, South Africa and Thailand on these pages, as well as in Friday’s episode of Oscar Talk. Meanwhile, I thought it less curmudgeonly to limit myself to a 140-character review of India’s entry a few weeks back.)

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  • Foreign Oscar update

    I neglected to mention this over a busy weekend, but the deadline for Best Foreign Language Film Oscar submissions passed on Friday. That doesn’t necessarily mean we have all the contenders set in stone, however — we’re still waiting on the official list from the Academy, which always features a couple of latecomers and a switched selection or two.

    Still, to all intents and purposes, the eventual Oscar shortlist is set to come from the 62 titles entered thus far. (Check out our updated list here.) The most notable submission among the last-minute stragglers is Argentina’s “Carancho,” a romantic legal thriller from director Pablo Trapero — whose previous feature, the strong female proson drama “Lion’s Den,” was the country’s unsuccessful Oscar submission in 2008.

    The film stars Ricardo Darin, a familiar face to that voting branch; the Argentine superstar has headlined five of the country’s last nine entries, including reigning Oscar champ “The Secret in Their Eyes.” The film played in Un Certain Regard at Cannes, where it was rather well-received. I’ll be catching up with it at the London fest this month.

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  • France leads latest batch of Oscar entries

    As you may have noticed, we’ve been doing our best to keep you abreast of submissions for this year’s Best Foreign Language Film Oscar — the deadline for which is officially (but not definitively) October 1. At last count, 27 countries have entered films, and we now have a separate page where you can keep track of the growing list. (You can also find a link to it under the foreign-language category in the right-hand sidebar.)

    The most prominent contender to enter the race since my last update is France’s “Of Gods and Men,” also known on these pages as the monk movie I embarrassingly couldn’t stay awake for at Cannes, where it wound up taking the Grand Prix. (We’ll be having a rematch at the London Film Festival next month — I look forward to tackling the film again with more than two hours’ sleep behind me.)

    It’s a wholly unsurprising pick, following as it does the country’s simple selection formula since 2007: just choose the French film that took the highest honors on the Croisette. It’s worked for the last two years running, with “The Class” and “A Prophet” both landing nominations.

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  • CANNES: What will win… and what should

    Okay, so that took longer than I expected. I had hoped to get this post up last night, but instead got quite easily talked into a night on the tiles with a band of merry Film Dweebs led by James Rocchi — not the wisest idea with a morning flight to catch, but by the time we found ourselves in a friendly 3am chat with Atom Egoyan about our respective issues with the ending of “Chloe,” that hardly seemed important. (Name dropped and duly picked up. Apologies.)

    Anyway, after a smooth morning’s traveling, I am now writing to you from my North London living room — not quite as glamorous as the Croisette, though surprisingly, just as sun-splashed.

    In a few hours, Cannes 2010 will come to a close as Tim Burton and his fellow jurors reveal their selections for the best of the fest, perhaps shedding some light on the burning question I’ve asked myself after every Competition screening: “But what does Kate Beckinsale think?”

    (More analysis, and full list of predictions and preferences, after the cut.)

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  • ‘On Tour,’ ‘Of Gods,’ ‘HaHaHa’ take early Cannes prizes

    The big guns, the Competition jury, announce their prizewinners tomorrow night, but ahead of that, there are a host of smaller, independent juries making their voices heard.

    I’ve just returned from the Un Certain Regard award ceremony, a short, sweet tuxedoes-and-sneakers affair presided over by UCR jury president Claire Denis. As delighted as I was to see one of our greatest living filmmakers in the (tiny) flesh, I was less pleased with her team’s selection — by handing their top prize to Hong Sangsoo’s wispy romcom “HaHaHa,” they continued an increasingly disconcerting trend whereby films that I walk out of at major festivals are handsomely rewarded. (Hey, I wasn’t alone: James Rocchi bailed too.)

    The Ecumenical Jury got that memo, too, handing their top prize to another film I didn’t finish, Xavier Beauvois’s “Of Gods and Men.” Of course, that was a gimme — if you don’t know, the Ecumenical Jury Prize was established in 1974 by a group of Christian film professionals to reward expressions of faith and/or humanism in Competition. How was the true-life tragedy of monk massacre in Algeria not going to win?

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  • CANNES: Machinists, masochists and monkey ghosts

    “Are you eating at all? Are you sleeping? You don’t look like you are,” observed our good friend Anne Thompson yesterday afternoon, her face etched with motherly concern, before whisking me off for a hearty al fresco meal.

    I wanted to tell Anne that I tend to cut a pretty gaunt figure even on my best days — but having just read someone on AwardsDaily noting my allegedly striking resemblance to Christian Bale in “The Machinist,” I had to concede that festival fatigue may have hit me pretty hard.

    But hey, the Mayor of Cannes is holding a Provençal lunch for the festival press tomorrow afternoon in the old town quarter, so I won’t keel over just yet. If there’s one lesson I’ve learnt at the festival, it’s that there’s always such a thing as a free lunch.

    If you weren’t tipped off by the fact that I’ve spent 150 words musing on matters of alimentation rather than movies, Cannes 2010 is beginning to wind down. Much of the U.S. press contingent (including Anne, Jeff Wells and Sasha Stone) have gone home, the hot movies — such as they were — have been unveiled and the crowds have thinned out to the extent that even a lowly yellow-badger like me can rock up two minutes before a screening and enter without hassle.

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  • CANNES: ‘Certified Copy’ and other adventures

    By the halfway-mark of the festival, Cannes can do irrational and frankly cruel things to your head. Having slunk back to my apartment at 3am after a merry night of wine and pizza some fellow bloggers — only to find myself locked out of said apartment in a cheap sitcom twist — I planned to treat myself to a lie-in while my roommates, Slant’s Matt Noller and the A.V. Club’s Mike D’Angelo, dutifully rose for the 8.30 press screening of Xavier Beauvois’s Competition title “Of Gods and Men.”

    Minutes after the door clicked shut behind them, however, I found myself sitting bolt upright in bed: what if was making a terrible mistake? What if “Of Gods and Men” turned out to be the unforeseen “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days”-style masterwork of the festival, and I the one dumb schlub who missed it? What if I was forever frozen out of Film Dweeb Nation for not having an opinion on “the Beauvois?” What if?

    Suitably panicked, I leaped out of bed, tore through a breakneck shower-and-dress routine and ran — ran — down to the Palais so I could settle into a nosebleed seat, panting and bleary-eyed, with one minute to spare.

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  • CANNES PREVIEW: Sizing up the Competition, part one

    (This is the first of three Cannes preview pieces we’re running before my festival coverage begins on Wednesday. The first two will break down the 18 films in the running for this year’s Palme d’Or; the third will comb through potential highlights that lie outside the Competition, as well as listing my own most anticipated titles of the festival.)

    The groans were almost audible from across the Atlantic as Cannes festival director Thierry Frémaux unveiled this year’s Competition lineup, unusually trim at 16 (eventually 18) titles, and shorter than expected on big-ticket auteurs. Where was Terrence Malick, journos wailed. (Not yet ready, ran the simple answer.) Where were Julian Schnabel, Olivier Assayas, Darren Aronofsky? (Not wanted, not eligible, and not ready, respectively.)

    As they looked down the very global-flavored list — only two English-language films, only one of them American — more than one blogger suggested that Cannes may not be worth the trip this year.

    I say it’s too soon to be disappointed. Frémaux and his team have hardly been obscure in their choices: the list abounds with esteemed critical pets ranging from Mike Leigh to Abbas Kiarostami, Alejandro González Iñárritu to Apichatpong Weereasethakul. It is perhaps a more granola selection than last year’s all-star lineup of Almodóvar, Haneke, Campion, Von Trier, et al, but that one drew just as many accusations (justified, I think) of being too insular and unadventurous — 19 of the 20 directors chosen had been in Competition before. Frémaux, it seems, can’t win.

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