16/04/2007

There is new gossip from the headquarters of the Cannes Film Festival in Paris’ rue Amélie, where the official programme will be disclosed next Thursday.

Lascia perdere Johnny, the debut feature by Italian actor-director Fabrizio Bentivoglio, will almost certainly be in a collateral section: Critics Week, Directors Fortnight or Un Certain Regard. Bentivoglio was on the Croisette last year as one of the stars of Paolo Sorrentino’s competition film The Family Friend. He is now returning as the director of a comedy set in the music world, featuring Valeria Golino and brothers Peppe and Tony Servillo.

A place in Un Certain Regard was supposedly offered to Valeria Bruni Tedeschi (It’s Easier for a Camel...) for her second film, Actress [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile]. However, the Italian actress-director, who for some time now has been living in her adopted France, would apparently rather be in official competition with the new title, which was shot last spring in Paris and stars Bruni Tedeschi along with Jean-Hugues Anglade, Louis Garrel, Noémie Lvosky and Maurice Garrel (see article on the film shoot). Sprinkled with autobiographical references, the film tells of the misadventures of a single, 40 year-old actress preparing the Turgenev play A Month in the Country, in which Bruni Tedeschi appeared onstage in 2000.

US titles secured a competition slot would appear to be festival darling Gus Van Sant’s highly anticipated Paranoid Park [+see also:
trailer
film profile], David Fincher’s Zodiac and James Gray’s We Own the Night, starring Mark Wahlberg and Joaquin Phoenix.

Another competition film will most probably be US painter-director Julian Schnabel’s Le scaphandre et le papillon [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), a wholly French production based on the novel by Jean Dominique Bauby (see article).

However, the French themselves seem to be having some difficulty getting into competition: Un secret [+see also:
trailer
film profile] by Claude Miller (see news) appears not to have enthused selectors, while in pole position is Après lui [+see also:
trailer
film profile] di Gaël Morel, starring French diva par excellence Catherine Deneuve as Camille, a woman whose life is shattered by her son’s fatal car accident.

However, the real surprise could come from newer names. First is Korean cult director Kim Ki-duk, for the first time in Cannes with his new film Breath, described as a love story between a prisoner and the woman who decorates his cell during visits. The second is Turkish-German filmmaker Fatih Akin (Head-On [+see also:
trailer
film profile]), who in Yasamin kiyisinda [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Fatih Akin
interview: Klaus Maeck
film profile] turns his gaze to the country of his parents, convinced that Turkey is more interesting right now, a place where “things are exploding". According to Akin, his Turkish-language film is "politically aware entertainment" made in the style of 1970s New Hollywood.

(Translated from Italian)