Cannes 06: Massive Preview V

Following up on a Screen Daily piece written moments after the Berlin film festival, we’ve decided to go with that list and make a full breakdown of the pictures that we might find at this year’s Cannes film festival. At this point its just speculation – but hell its fun to speculate and after what many consider a long wait for quality projects – I think that buyers and sellers might find themselves in a real frenzy at the Croisette.

With the opening of what will be a massive blockbuster hit (hear those cash registers ring) in Ron Howard’s The Da Vinci Code, and by the looks of the names there might be plenty of items to look forward to in the Autumn and be sure there will be plenty of leftovers for both Venice & Toronto (remember: Ang Lee avoided traffic and showcased Brokeback Mountain at Venice. Without further ado, here’s what Cannes 2006 and Jury president Wong Kar-wai may possibly be watching this coming May. Here is part IV of our 5-day preview.

Ten Canoes
Dir: Rolf de Heer
Gist: Coming off the success of Alexandra’s Project, Australia’s Rolf de Heer’s newest will be an aboriginal-language feature. It is the distant past, tribal times. Dayindi (played by Jamie Gulpilil, son of the great David Gulpilil) covets one of the wives of his older brother. To teach him the proper way, he is told a story from the mythical past, a story of wrong love, kidnapping, sorcery, bungling mayhem and revenge gone wrong.

This Is England
Dir: Shane Meadows
Gist: U.K filmmaker (Dead Man’s Shoes) goes romper stomper style – set in the Midlands in the summer of 1983, and tell the tale of an 11-year-old boy who loses his father, shaves his head and falls in with the local division of the National Front. The uncompromising story will revolve around the race riots that were tearing Thatcher’s Britain apart at the time, and Meadows admits that much of it is inspired by his own experiences growing up in Uttoxeter in the early 1980s.

Time
Dir: Kim Ki-duk
Gist: If you still don’t know who is Kim Ki-Duk then you go back to eating popcorn and watching studio remakes. While his last film The Bow didn’t see many screens (even a mediocore Ki-Duk film is better than most of the films that get released) we are still impressed by 3-Iron. This is about a woman in a long-term relationship who keeps going under the plastic surgeon’s knife in order to save the relationship.

The Three Musketeers
Dir: Janis Cimermanis
Gist: This energetic, humorous and adventurous interpretation of the classic novel by Alexander Dumas tells us about the righteous young D’Artagnan who after being taught the art of fencing from his father leaves Gascogne for Paris to become one of King Louis 13th, musketeers. Oh…and I almost forgot to mention – the whole thing is done with puppets.

Unknown
Dir: Simon Brand
Gist: Simon Brand. Remember this name. Written by Matt Waynee, this is likened to Memento in that participants and viewers don’t know until the end who the bad guy is. This follows five men who wake up with no memory in a locked warehouse. Together they are forced to figure out who’s good and who’s evil in order to stay alive. Caviezel will play a dark mystery man.

The Unforgiven
Dir: Yoon Jong-bin
Gist: This young director has already picked up a couple of prizes for the film – which is about the authoritarian climate of psychological and physical violence during the 26 months of Korea’s mandatory military service. Yoon’s film, however, eschews easy sensationalism by adopting a dry presentation close to a documentary approach, while the narrative parallels events in the present and recent past, keeping the viewer’s interest vigilant.

Venus
Dir: Roger Michell
Gist: After his most recent films of Enduring Love and
The Mother, Michell brings some older talent for a coming of very-old-age story featuring Peter O’Toole, Vanessa Redgrave and Forrest Whitaker. The tale sees Maurice is taken with the girl, and proceeds to show her the cultural sights of the capital and tries to teach Jessie something about life, but in the process he is surprised to discover how very little he actually knows now that his own life is drawing to a close.

The Very Big Apartment
Dir: Pascal Thomas
Gist: The French comedy sees Martin Cigalone and his wife Francesa live a carefree life, without realising that they are surrounded by a hostile and cold universe that is closing in around them. They are not in line with the times, in an era whre bistrots are replaced by banks, bookshops by clothes shops… a tim where bankers want to teach children stock-market speculation instead of Latin.

Volver
Dir: Pedro Almodovar
Gist: A practical shoe-in for a place at Cannes, the film, which stars Penelope Cruz and Carmen Maura is a meeting of “Mildred Pierce” (Michael Curtiz) and “Arsenic and Old Lace” (Frank Capra), combined with the surrealistic naturalism of Amodovar’s fourth film, “¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto!!” (“What Have I Done to Deserve This?”) The backdrop is Madrid and its lively working-class neighbourhoods, where the immigrants from the various Spanish provinces share dreams, lives and fortune with a multitude of ethnic groups, and other races. At the heart of this social framework, three generations of women who survive wind, fire and even death, thanks to audacity, goodness and a limitless vitality.

Waiter
Dir: Alex Van Warmerdam
Gist: This comedy from the Nederlands is about a fifty year old waiter named Edgar whose has had enough of his miserable existence and he literally demands a rewrite from the man that writes his lifestory. No more difficult customers. No more wife. He wants a new girlfriend. He wants new neighbours. He wants to be happy.

The Wedding Director
Dir: Marco Bellochio
Gist: The veteran helmer (Good Morning, Night) brings Cannes a drama starring (Sergio Castellitto.

The Wind That Shakes The Barley
Dir: Ken Loach
Gist: Written by Paul Laverty, this is named after a 19th century political song, the film revolves around a family and one of the so-called flying columns, the Irish guerrilla units that lived rough as they fought the British on the run, between 1919 and the early 1920s. Through their eyes, we see the effect of the Anglo-Irish war and the subsequent Civil War that shaped the country. Padraic Delaney plays Teddy, the brother to Cillian Murphy’s Damien – both brothers who join the guerilla armies formed to do battle with the British Black and Tan squads trying to block Ireland’s bid for independence in 1919. The director of Sweet Sixteen and Ae Fond Kiss should not have trouble finding a spot.

Wu Qingyuan
Dir: Tian Zhuangzhuang
Gist: Theaged director will bring to the screen a film which is expected to expose to the public the life stories and unique philosophy of the Chinese go saint Wu Qingyuan. In Wu’s philosophy, the two players holding black or white pieces of the go game don’t aim at fighting, but to establish their own kingdoms on the game board. Fights only occur when one of the players destroys the harmony of both by invasion into his rival’s territory.

Youth Without Youth
Dir: Francis Ford Coppola
Gist: Megalopolis was a long-gestating project that never came along, now Coppola brings us a war drama based on the novella by Romanian author and intellectual Mircea Eliade. The story centers on a professor whose life changes after a cataclysmic incident during the dark years before WWII. Becoming a fugitive, he is pursued through far-flung locations including Romania, Switzerland, Malta and India.