In Contention

Tag: Potiche

  • VENICE: ‘Potiche,’ ‘A Letter to Elia,’ ‘Robinson in Ruins’

    Hey, did you miss me yesterday? Don’t answer that. Sorry for the radio silence, but Saturday proved to be both my busiest and most rewarding day at Venice, serving up five films — none of them stinkers, and one of them perhaps my favourite of the fest so far.

    After capping the day’s viewing with a delightful pasta dinner in the company of two of Variety’s finest, I took the water-bus back to my San Marco hotel room in a pleasant fog of good feeling and red wine, only to find the wi-fi in my hotel room had taken the night off.

    As it turned out, it was just as well: today’s festival schedule being a lean and mostly unappetizing one, I rewarded myself with my first lie-in of the week (sorry, Tsui Hark) and began afresh in the morning. Late-night reviewing is fraught with hazard, anyway, as I’d learned the night before when I nodded off in the middle of writing up “The Sleeping Beauty.” (Before you say, “How apt,” let me remind you that there is no beauty in waking up at 5 a.m. with keyboard-face.)

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  • 11 days in Venice

    In a few hours’ time, a shiny and sensibly priced orange plane will whisk me off to the city of water, romance and the most expensive fleapit hotels this side of, well, anywhere for my second consecutive dive into the Venice Film Festival. Truth be told, I’m not quite ready for it… a surfeit of pre-travel errands has meant I’m still leafing through the fest’s vast 62-page press screening schedule, still trying to cobble out some semblance of an itinerary.

    A neat, contained festival preview, therefore, wasn’t really on the cards: I tried to narrow things down to a “10 most anticipated” list, but I’m far too hungry for the entire buffet to limit myself to that.

    In its place, then, I offer an indication of what the festival is serving up on a day-by-day basis; not only will you get an idea of when, in the next fortnight, your own horse in this race will come to attention, but you can also see some of the cineaste’s Sophie’s choices that lie ahead of me.

    My scribbly Venice calendar after the cut.

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  • Gérard vs. Juliette

    A couple of weeks ago, Emma Thompson ruffled a few feathers when she dismissed the talents of one Audrey Hepburn, so it’s apparently open season on knocking gamine screen beauties off their perch. Today serves up another actor-on-actor fight, this time between two living legends of French cinema. It may be a fairer fight — in this case, the victim is alive to defend herself — but it’s a considerably less polite one.

    In short, if you’ve ever wondered why Gérard Depardieu and Juliette Binoche, arguably the two most ubiquitous French stars of the past quarter-century, have never worked together, we now have our answer. Depardieu, to put it mildly, doesn’t think much of his beloved, Oscar-winning compatriot.

    Never the most discreet of interviewees — as those who recall his self-sabotaging remarks during his 1990 Oscar campaign will know — he has now taken it upon himself to share this opinion with the world.

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  • Coppola, Schnabel, Reichardt in Venice competition lineup

    UPDATE: The festival website has a list of out-of-competition selections, which include two directorial efforts from the Brothers Affleck: Ben’s “The Town” and Casey’s Joaquin Phoenix doc “I’m Still Here.”

    EARLIER: Before you ask: no, “The Tree of Life” is nowhere to be seen. Not that that’s a surprise by this point. There is a “but,” however — Venice festival organisers announced that there will be one surprise competition entry added at the festival’s halfway mark. I wouldn’t bet the house (or even the garden shed, frankly) on it being the Malick film, but hope is being kept alive nonetheless. (Last year, the fest had two surprise films: one from Werner Herzog and one from Brillante Mendoza.)

    Shifting the focus to what did make it, the 22-title lineup looks much as we expected — we’d effectively been promised Sofia Coppola’s “Somewhere” and Julian Schnabel’s “Miral” since they failed to show up at Cannes, while Tuesday’s Toronto announcement tipped us off to the presence of Francois Ozon’s “Potiche,” the Paul Giamatti-Dustin Hoffman starrer “Barney’s Version” and the Haruki Murakami adaptation “Norwegian Wood.”

    (More commentary, and the full competition lineup, after the cut.)

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  • Aronofsky’s ‘Black Swan’ to open Venice

    [FURTHER UPDATE: Focus has confirmed that “The American” will not, in fact, be appearing at Venice.]

    [UPDATE: “Black Swan” has indeed been confirmed as the Venice opener, and will play in Competition. More soon.]

    I’ve been saying for some time that this year’s Venice Film Festival looks to be a very good vintage, capitalizing on the number of highly anticipated auteur works that weren’t quite ready in time for Cannes. Even with Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life” still a major question mark — some are even suggesting it won’t surface this year — there’s plenty to get quivery about besides, as is clear from this tasty Variety piece.

    Nick Vivarelli’s article reiterates the titles — including Sofia Coppola’s “Somewhere” and Julian Schnabel’s “Miral” — that have long been all-but-guaranteed to show up at Venice, but adds some tantalizing new ones. Chief among them is Darren Aronofsky’s ballet psycho-thriller “Black Swan,” which will premiere as the festival’s opening film on September 1.

    The press release breaking the news, and more Venice possibilities, after the cut.

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