In Contention

Tag: The Concert

  • CANNES CHECK: ‘The Source’

    The director: Radu Mihăileanu (France)

    The talent: Two hotly-tipped young French actresses head up proceedings: Leïla Bekhti, who made an eye-catching breakthrough in “A Prophet,” and Hafsia Herzi, who won a slew of newcomer awards in 2007 for “The Secret of the Grain.” (Herzi looks to be one of the faces of this year’s Competition — she also has a prominent role in Bertrand Bonello’s brothel-set drama “House of Tolerance.”) Also in the cast, and perhaps a more familiar face to US viewers, is Hiam Abbass (“The Visitor”). The film’s army of producers, meanwhile, includes none other than Euro-blockbuster merchant Luc Besson.

    The pitch: With his cutesy 2010 crossover hit “The Concert” still fresh in our memories, Romanian-born Frenchman Mihăileanu returns with a comedy that appears cut from similar feelgood-sentimental cloth. Set in the present day, in parched North African village, the story centers on the community’s put-upon womenfolk: weary of daily treks to and from a mountaintop spring, the ladies declare a no-sex strike until their husbands bring running water to the village. Bekhti plays the group’s Norma Rae ringleader. The synopsis suggests a blend of farce and Up With People sincerity, though the line between feminism and sexism in such material can be a fine one.

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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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  • Just say no

    Last week, Tom O’Neil reported on a horrifying unacceptable interesting potential development in this year’s Oscar race, and as much as I’ve tried to push it to the recesses of my mind, the thought won’t leave me alone — not least because it provides a depressingly neat answer to one of the question marks I had over the predictions I made last week.

    As I struggled to cobble together a list of 10 plausible Best Picture nominees, I kept searching for the annual middlebrow specialty wild card that is neither too populist nor too outré for the bluehair voting contingent — the film that will make voters feel artistically discriminating, without making them want to slit their wrists. A film for those voters who, to filch a quote from Nick Davis, “like the arthouse best when there’s no real art in it.”

    “The Kids Are All Right” kind of fits the bill, though it’s actually good, and its fun factor is a little too high. “Winter’s Bone” is suitably low on fun, but it’s also as chilly as its title. “The King’s Speech?” Well, it has corsets and cut-glass British accents a go-go, as well as Harvey Weinstein — a man who, as “The Reader” reminded us only 18 months ago, knows this voting contingent inside out. But it’s also a small-scale story of one man overcoming a stutter: mightn’t that prove a little slight for voters who like their awards bait capital-I Important?

    According to O’Neil, it seems this thought might have crossed Weinstein’s mind, and he’s already forming a back-up plan. Ladies and gentlemen, enter “The Concert.”

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