In Contention

Tag: The Purple Rose of Cairo

  • REVIEW: “Midnight in Paris” (**1/2)

    Cannes Film Festival
    Opening Night

    “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” Nobody actually quotes L.P. Hartley in “Midnight in Paris,” Woody Allen’s often charming if largely over-explicated ode to the healing and deceiving properties of nostalgia. If they don’t, however, that could just be because a spring breeze stole the last few pages of the script at some point on the shoot of this amiably unfinished choux-pastry film, and Allen didn’t feel much like rewriting them.

    Up until that point, Allen hasn’t exactly shied away from obvious references or externalized subtext — this is a film that trades in emphatic cultural and historical caricature, a picture-book approach that will delight some viewers even as it strikes others as aggravatingly twee, but one Allen commits to with the take-it-or-leave-it dispatch of a 75 year-old master working in quick-sketch mode.

    Either way, the tourist-style filmmaking that surfaced in such recent Allen films as “Match Point” and “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” feels more thematically motivated in “Midnight in Paris,” a study of a character not merely a traveller in his physical surroundings, but his generational ones too. I kept wondering if the film’s narrowness of perspective was that of Allen or Owen Wilson’s Allen-substitute protagonist, and what textual difference the distinction even makes.

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  • Will BAFTA stick by their own?

    I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with the BAFTA Awards. On the one hand, they can be far more daring and playful in their choices than the American Academy — this is an organisation, after all, that has handed their Best Film award to such enduring works as “The Purple Rose of Cairo,” “GoodFellas” and “Lacombe, Lucien,” while nominating the Oscar-snubbed likes of “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and “The Usual Suspects.”

    Their technical awards are invariably more imaginatively awarded, too — take a look at their Best Film Editing category, for example, which in recent years has crowned “Eternal Sunshine,” “City of God” and “Mulholland Drive” as winners. And they can often be counted upon for gratifying upsets, as when Pedro Almodovar pushed past Sam Mendes for Best Director in 2000, or when “Trainspotting” blindsided “Sense and Sensibility” in the 1996 screenwriting race.

    For an awards show that fancies itself world-class, however, BAFTA can be infuriatingly parochial in their selections, stubbornly rewarding their own in the face of bigger, bolder competition. I doubt most of the voters could say with a straight face that “Four Weddings and a Funeral” was the very best film of 1994, nor “The Full Monty” of 1997, but they cleaned up nonetheless.

    For the last two years running, that kind of provincialism has ruled the voting, with this year’s awards looking particularly suspect. I think “Atonement” is a fine film, but handing it their top award seemed tokenistic at best, not least when the only other gong it took was for Best Art Direction.

    It’s a trend that Variety thinks could continue this year. In an article previewing the British contenders in the acting categories, they point out that Limeys have taken 16 acting BAFTAs in the last decade, compared to seven Oscars. Needless to say, they are frequently justified. It’s fair to say that this year, several British names will be cropping up in awards lists on either side of the Atlantic, and deservedly so — particularly in the Best Actress category, where thesps like Kristin Scott Thomas, Sally Hawkins and the ubiquitous Kate Winslet are all likely to figure.

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