CANNES, France (AP) — There was Brad Pitt and Nicole Kidman, red carpet glamour and a crop of new Academy Award contenders — but this was also the year the global financial crisis exploded onto movie screens at Cannes.
“La Crise” — as the French call it — bedeviled Robert Pattinson’s disaster-bound billionaire in David Cronenberg’s “Cosmopolis,” the unemployed Glasgow youth in Ken Loach’s “The Angels’ Share,” the bare-knuckle boxer in Jacques Audiard’s “Rust and Bone” and the worried mobsters in Andrew Dominik’s “Killing Them Softly.”
We live in anxious times, and that feeling was reflected at the French Riviera film festival that’s a byword for frocks and froth, as well as for serious cinema.
The mood seemed to be mirrored by the weather. Several days were unseasonably cold and stormy, turning red-carpet photocalls into rain-lashed ordeals.
In the face of this angst, the jury rewarded love, giving Cannes’ top prize, the Palme d’Or, to Austrian director Michael Haneke for “Amour,” a starkly powerful film about an elderly couple coping with the wife’s worsening health.
Second and third prizes went to Matteo Garrone’s Italian satire “Reality” and Ken Loach’s whiskey-tasting comedy “The Angels’ Share,” and there were acting honors for Denmark’s Mads Mikkelsen for “The Hunt” and Romania’s Cristina Flutur and Cosmina Stratan for “Beyond the Hills.”
Although the festival had a strong American flavor, there were no prizes for a batch of films that examined the United States, past and present — often through the lens of non-American directors.
Australia’s John Hillcoat depicted Prohibition-era bootleggers in “Lawless” and Brazil’s Walter Salles crossed the country in his adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s Beat classic “On the Road.” New Zealand-born Dominik set “Killing Them Softly,” a thriller starring Brad Pitt as a worldly Mob enforcer, against the backdrop of the 2008 U.S. presidential election, while Canada’s Cronenberg sent Pattinson’s stretch limo across a Manhattan of security threats and Occupy-style protests.
Cronenberg said that “it seemed at points that we were working more on a documentary.”
American directors also looked long and hard at their country. Lee Daniels stirred the sexual and racial politics of the 1960s South into a death-row thriller in “The Paperboy,” while Jeff Nichols’ “Mud” spun a modern-day “Huckleberry Finn” story among Mississippi River fishing families whose way of life is threatened.
It would not be the Cannes Film Festival without moments of controversy — and craziness.
The former was provided by the absence of any female directors from the 22 films in the festival’s main competition. The situation drew letters and petitions in France and the United States, and even a small protest by feminist group La Barbe in front of Cannes’ famous red carpet.
Cannes director Thierry Fremaux responded that he chose films solely on merit, but the festival promised to make a greater effort to hunt down films by women.
The baffling and bizarre were provided by the surreal appearance of the devil in a Mexican family home in Carlos Reygadas’ “Post Tenebras Lux” — which won the directing prize — and by pretty much everything, including a parking lot full of talking stretch limos, in Leos Carax’s “Holy Motors.”
While Carax’s mysterious meditation on performance and reality is unlikely to tempt Hollywood’s Academy, there was plenty at Cannes that will.
There was no film this year with the obvious mainstream crossover appeal of last year’s breakout Cannes movie, “The Artist,” which went on to win five Oscars.
That film was acquired by The Weinstein Co., which this year has picked up “The Sapphires,” a buoyant musical about an Australian Aboriginal girl group that played out of competition at Cannes. It plans a fall release in the U.S.
The likeliest candidate for an Oscars boost may be “Mud,” an assured and moving third feature from 33-year-old director Nichol. The film gives Matthew McConaughey a standout role as a mystic-minded fugitive holed up on an island in the Mississippi, and also draws powerfully natural performances from child actors Tye Sheridan and Jacob Lofland.
McConaughey also appears in “The Paperboy,” which features an attention-grabbing performance from Kidman as a sultry femme fatale. It could win her an Oscar nomination, and there could also be one for Marion Cotillard’s intense performance as a killer whale trainer who has a tragic workplace accident in “Rust and Bone.”
And there’s likely to be a solid audience for “Killing Them Softly,” a taut, 1970s-style crime thriller that sees Pitt play cynical straight man to some outstanding character acting from the likes of James Gandolfini and Ray Liotta.
Cannes is a strange blend of high-art seriousness and Hollywood chutzpah, where the latest Haneke masterwork coexists with Sacha Baron Cohen riding a camel down the seaside Croisette as “The Dictator.”
Even for showbiz veterans, it can be a remarkable experience, as McConaughey discovered at the gala premiere of “The Paperboy.”
“It got a wonderful ovation and I’ve never experienced that,” he said. “I’ve never done stage, and so I’ve never really experienced an immediate response live like that. It was nice to take a breath and say, ‘Feel this. Feel this, McConaughey. This is a special, once-in-a-lifetime thing.’”
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Associated Press Writer Thomas Adamson contributed to this report.
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Jill Lawless can be reached at http://Twitter.com/JillLawless
CANNES, France (AP) — To have one film competing at the Cannes Film Festival is a privilege. To have two, Matthew McConaughey says, is wonderful good fortune — and the reward for a spell of hard labor in the trenches of independent cinema.
In Lee Daniels’ steamy Southern noir “The Paperboy,” McConaughey plays a journalist who returns to his Florida hometown to investigate a murder.
In Jeff Nichols’ “Mud,” which screened Saturday as the festival’s final competition entry, he is a story-spinning fugitive holed up on an island in the Mississippi who is befriended by two local boys.
McConaughey laughs when asked if having two movies competing for the Palme d’Or gives him divided loyalties.
“That would be a high-class problem,” he said. “I’m really, really endeared to both of them for different reasons — and they’re very, very different from each other.
“I’m very honored. I’ve got two films that I’m proud of, two experiences that I really loved, and I’ve got two characters that I really care about.”
The two films take the Texas-born actor on a tour of the U.S. South — and of men on society’s margins.
In “The Paperboy,” McConaughey’s Ward James is a crusading reporter with dark depths to his psyche that imperil his quest for the truth.
His title character in “Mud” is being hunted as a dangerous fugitive, but may be a wild innocent driven by love.
Critics have hailed McConaughey’s turn in “Mud,” and director Daniels said he was wowed by McConaughey’s nuanced performance in “The Paperboy.”
“I’m so happy that he’s so understated in the film,” Daniels said. “There were moments when I didn’t recognize Matthew.”
McConaughey said the roles were the result of a decision to “shake things up” in a career that has seen him take leads in a mixed bag of romcoms (“Failure to Launch,” ”Fool’s Gold”) — and, as he noted at Cannes, play lots of lawyers, in films from “A Time to Kill” to “The Lincoln Lawyer.”
“I was looking for some characters that didn’t necessarily pander to convention, or even didn’t pander to plot,” he said, long legs stretched out on a sofa in a Cannes hotel. “They’re all kind of characters that live on the fringe, on the outskirts of society. But they’re really human characters.
“What I was really looking for is some things where I could hang my hat and be the architect of my man, and it’s based on humanity and reality. It’s not based on morality or on good or bad or right and wrong.”
That’s where the similarities end between his two Cannes films. “The Paperboy” takes a Pete Dexter crime novel and mixes in director Daniels’ fascination with shifting sexual and racial allegiances.
In “Mud,” Arkansas-born director Nichols creates an affecting coming-of-age story with echoes of Mark Twain, rooted in the landscape of his home state.
“Lee is very different from Jeff Nichols,” McConaughey said. “Lee’s not a linear thinker at all. Jeff Nichols was very linear — he wrote the script, wrote each word on purpose, and would be editing in his head after he thought he’d got his take.
“Lee grabbed this book but created his own world.”
McConaughey’s Cannes double-header is the product of remarkable year of work that saw him shoot five independent films with strikingly different directors.
As well as “The Paperboy” and “Mud,” he was a sheriff in Richard Linklater’s dark comedy “Bernie,” a club owner in Steven Soderbergh’s male-stripper movie “Magic Mike” and a hitman in William Friedkin’s thriller “Killer Joe.”
The 42-year-old actor has never been busier — or, it seems, happier.
“I fired out of bed every morning so excited, and a little scared about going to work, but excited to go and get into it,” he said. “I love the energy of an independent film. Time is so precious. There’s no go-back-to-the-trailer time. It’s a very vital experience, and I like that.”
It was also an education in modern American cinema from five filmmakers with strong personal styles.
“Friedkin, you’d do one take, maybe two,” McConaughey said. “Usually one. Soderbergh: minimalist. He’s more of a shaper.
“With Linklater — this was our third time working together. We do all this character work together. … We have a shorthand together.”
McConaughey will find out Sunday, when the film festival wraps up, whether either of his Cannes films has taken a prize.
Next up, he hopes, is “The Dallas Buyers’ Club,” a drama based on a true story about illegal AIDS drugs in the 1980s that he’s long sought to make with director Jean-Marc Vallee.
“I never had a rule on what to do, just keep trying to do different things,” he said. “But it’s got to be more than that. I was instinctually drawn to this kind of material where I was not necessarily drawn to some other comedies or things that I’ve done in the past.
“I’m more fulfilled with the work probably than I’ve ever been, and more turned on by it, and I hope that continues.”
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Jill Lawless can be reached at ttp://Twitter.com/JillLawless
CANNES, France (AP) — The ripples of the Arab Spring are being felt in summery Cannes, where films from Egypt and Syria, as well as a passionate documentary about the overthrow of Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi, are being screened alongside the latest features from the world’s heavyweight directors.
On Friday the festival lineup included “The Oath of Tobruk,” a highly personal insiders’ account of the uprising by writer and philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy, who was accompanied to a photo call by masked Libyan fighters.
In the film, made with photographer Marc Roussel, Levy gives a robust defense of Western military intervention in Libya — and calls for the world to do the same in Syria, where the regime of President Bashar Assad has been fighting an uprising for more than a year.Levy — often known simply as BHL — is a leading public intellectual in France, where he is known for his impassioned political interventions, dapper dress and mane of salt-and-pepper hair.
The movie is revealing about the background to the Libyan conflict, as Levy’s bulging contacts book delivers interviews with Nicolas Sarkozy, David Cameron and U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, as well as with members of Libya’s new political and military leadership.
Levy was pivotal in persuading Sarkozy, then France’s president, to back air strikes to aid the Libyan rebels, a decision taken up by Cameron, the British leader, and later by President Barack Obama.
Dismissed by critics as an egotist, Levy is not shy about extolling his place in history, explaining in the film’s voiceover his personal desire to overthrow a dictator and right a wrong that has been gnawing at him for 20 years — “the bleeding wound of Bosnia,” where he says intervention could have saved thousands of lives.
“I’ve borne the sorrow and the mourning of Bosnia for 20 years,” Levy told The Associated Press. “And this is what Sarkozy, Cameron and Clinton say (in the film)— we did this because of Bosnia. Nevermore Bosnia. Nevermore Srebrenica.”
The film, which has been picked up by the Weinstein Co. for distribution in the United States, is open to the criticism of self-centeredness. Some may prefer to see the Libyan story told by Libyans.
“I am sure the Libyans will themselves tell the story of their liberation and their revolution,” Levy said. “This is my version. It’s personal, subjective. I tell things I was part of and only this. I don’t pretend to any exhaustiveness. It is my part of truth.”
Levy used the platform of Cannes to urge the international community to take direct military action in support of the rebels in Syria — something for which there is, as yet, little appetite among governments.
“Syria is a scandal,” Levy said. “Syria is a shame. All those who say that situations are difficult are just trying to find excuses for their cowardice. If I had a wish today, it would be to make people understand that what was doable in Benghazi is doable in Homs, Aleppo and Deraa.”
Elsewhere at the festival, Arab filmmakers are telling stories — often against considerable odds.
Bassam Chekhes is the first Syrian director ever to be in competition at Cannes, with his short film “Waiting for P.O. Box.”
The director said coming to Cannes was “a dream” — and a vital link to other filmmakers around the world.
“The festival, when you are around you can fell the similarity of our humanity and the feeling that we are 30 year old men who have the same problem all round the world,” he said.
One of the 22 films competing for the Palme d’Or is “After the Battle,” by Egypt’s Yousry Nasrallah.
The story of the relationship between a wealthy Tahrir Square revolutionary and a poor horseman from the Pyramids who has been involved in an attack on protesters, it was filmed in the chaotic interval between the overthrow of Mubarak and this week’s presidential election in Egypt.
Nasrallah said the film crew members were worried about intimidation from supporters of the former regime or Islamists who condemn cinema as a sin. They filmed using a code name to make the movie sound like a romantic comedy.
The director said movie makers have a duty to be bold, despite political uncertainty and the rising influence of religious fundamentalists.
“Arab cinema is trying to liberate itself,” he told reporters. “It is trying to break censorship taboos and social taboos. Because this is the only way you can make movies.
“You don’t want to go watch a film where you feel the film itself is a prison. You want to feel the filmmaker is liberated and thus liberating you too.”
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Associated Press Writer Hilary Fox contributed to this report.
Jill Lawless can be reached at http://Twitter.com/JillLawless
CANNES, France (AP) — Move over, Brad Pitt and Nicole Kidman. The Cannes Film Festival’s four-legged stars are in the spotlight with the contest for the event’s best canine performance.
The Palm Dog prize was awarded Friday to Smurf and Ged, two terriers from twisted British comedy “Sightseers.” The runner-up was Billy Bob, companion of an aging punk rocker in French film “Le Grand Soir.”
The judges spurned several high-profile performances, including dogs who meet violent ends in Wes Anderson’s “Moonrise Kingdom” and Thomas Vinterberg’s “The Hunt.”
Organizer Toby Rose said the strong contest reflected the “high canine quotient” at Cannes.
Now in its 12th year, the unofficial award was founded as a homage to the festival’s main prize, the Palme d’Or.
Last year’s winner was Jack Russell terrier Uggle from “The Artist.”
CANNES, France (AP) — Kristen Stewart understands the lure of the open road. So do her “On The Road” co-stars, Garrett Hedlund and Sam Riley.
The three young actors play the central love triangle in Walter Salles’ adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s Beat Generation novel, an experience that has helped them appreciate why the book is considered a classic.
The tale of wannabe writer (and Kerouac surrogate) Sal Paradise and his friend Dean Moriarty crisscrossing the United States in search of freedom and the elusive “it” was published in 1957. But Stewart said the way it captures the heady feeling of young adulthood is timeless.
“You’re so filled with something that is hard to identify at this age,” said the “Twilight” star, who plays Dean’s teenage bride Marylou, a free spirit torn between the lure of adventure and desire for a more settled life.
“You’re just bursting, and (the characters) value that so much,” said Stewart, who is just 22 herself. “They don’t ignore it. That celebration of youth and exploration is just something that you envy.
“I read it right at the point when I was about to get my (driver’s) license, and I thought, wow, I want to meet people who push me the way people push each other. I wanted to be more like them.”
Minnesota-born Hedlund (“Troy,” ”Tron: Legacy”) plays the carnal, vital Moriarty, a character modeled on Kerouac’s friend Neal Cassady. He said some things have changed since Kerouac wrote his freewheeling, impressionistic story,
“Back then a car was 100 bucks and all you had to choose between was a radio and a heater, and things seemed a little freer,” said the 27-year-old actor. “The roads seemed more open than they are today, but a young person’s ambitions are still the same. Everybody between the ages of 17 and 21 or 22 still feels that they can achieve anything they want in life if they are ambitious enough.”
“On the Road,” which premiered this week at the Cannes Film Festival, has been a long time coming. Kerouac, who died in 1969, hoped to see his book filmed, and actors linked to an adaptation over the decades range from Marlon Brando to Brad Pitt.
Brazilian director Salles, who made the Che Guevara road movie “The Motorcycle Diaries,” has been involved since 2004, spending years interviewing surviving Beat Generation figures for an unreleased documentary on the book.
He finally got the go-ahead, with Francis Ford Coppola’s son Roman Coppola producing, to shoot a film whose fourth main character is the American landscape — though Salles had to travel far and wide to recreate the 1940s U.S. The movie was shot in Canada, Chile and Mexico as well as the United States.
The film opened in France this week and is due for a fall release in the U.S.
The actors felt the weight of expectation from the book’s millions of fans, but say it helped them form a bond — albeit one less erotically entangled than that of their characters.
“We were the only people there who really know and understand what it feels like to be gifted, or burdened, with the responsibility of playing these characters,” said Riley, whose breakthrough role was as Joy Division singer Ian Curtis in “Control.” ”So we really did have that sort of feeling that we’re separate from the others.
“Garrett and I particularly spent six months in one another’s pockets,” said the 32-year-old British actor. “I have friends where I don’t know if I could spend that much time with them. And for a Yorkshireman and a lad from Minnesota — two young actors who both have their own ambitions — it could have been an absolute disaster, a clash of egos. But Garrett was always there for me to lean on, and vice versa.”
Salles had firm ideas about the actors he wanted for the film. The cast includes Kirsten Dunst, “Mad Men”’s Elisabeth Moss, Amy Adams, Tom Sturridge and Viggo Mortensen as characters inspired by real-life Beat figures.
“I felt like it was cheating or something, that we had the best cast, in my mind, that’s ever been assembled,” Hedlund said. “Maybe there was something about each and every one of us that was similar to him in a way, to (explain) why we got along the way he did. There was no rotten egg within the bunch, and that’s so rare.”
The director said he was determined to cast Stewart even before “Twilight” made her a star, after he heard raves about her performance in the Sean Penn’s 2007 Alaskan drama “Into The Wild.”
“I remember writing down the name,” Salles said, “so I wouldn’t forget it.”
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Jill Lawless can be reached at http://Twitter.com/JillLawless
CANNES, France (AP) — Charles MacLean is out of his element in Cannes, a town consumed by cinema and celebrity. His element is Scotch whisky — “uisge beatha,” he says, giving it its Gaelic name. The water of life.
MacLean is on a mission: He has brought the world of single malts to the French Riviera through his role as whiskey adviser and actor in Ken Loach’s Cannes competition film, “The Angels’ Share.”
The movie centers on a troubled Glasgow youth who tries to turn a talent for whisky-tasting into a ticket out of his dead-end life. MacLean plays a dramatized version of himself, a member of a select band of whiskey experts known as Masters of the Quaich.
The film is an uncharacteristically sunny comedy from Loach, a director better known for gritty realism. An audience favorite at Cannes, it could do for Scotch what “Strictly Ballroom” did for ballroom dancing: make it cool.
“The awful thing is, a lot more vodka is drunk in Scotland than whiskey, especially amongst younger people,” MacLean said during a beachside interview in Cannes, where he is serving as an unofficial ambassador for Scotch, as well as for the film.
“It does have this sort of pipe and slippers by the fire, male image,” he said.
The film’s young central characters initially turn up their noses when offered a snifter. Yet Scotch is as central to Scotland’s image abroad as shortbread, “Braveheart” and tartans.
MacLean says it is part of Scotland’s heritage — “the blood of one small nation” — and has been distilled in the country since the 14th century.
“When you buy a bottle of whiskey, you buy a hell of a lot more than liquor in a bottle,” said the affable, mustached MacLean, who is passionate on the subject of his favorite beverage. “Whether you like it or not, you’re buying culture, you’re buying history, you’re buying craft, you’re buying tradition.”
MacLean was initially hired as a script consultant on the film — tutoring some of the actors on whiskey appreciation — before being asked to appear on-screen. He said he enjoyed the experience, but doesn’t plan to repeat it.
“I don’t think I have an acting career ahead of me,” he said with a laugh. “I don’t think I could play any other part.”
MacLean is well used to public speaking, but he found it daunting to film a scene in which he had to lead a tasting in front of an audience of extras.
“I started to sweat — it was a very hot day and I sweat very easily,” he said. “The editor told me yesterday that it had cost him 25,000 pounds ($40,000) to take out the sweat marks under my arms, frame by frame.”
As well as doing interviews and attending the film’s red-carpet premiere, MacLean led a whiskey-tasting session in Cannes, teaching film folk to tell their fruity Speysides from their peaty Islays. It slipped down smoothly with the cinema crowd.
Maclean said he would encourage anyone to give Scotch a try — in moderation, of course.
“It is the most complex of all spirits, and so therefore if and when you acquire the taste it is hugely rewarding,” he said. “But because of its complexity, it is not an easy drink. I have much sympathy with people who can’t stand it. My wife can’t stand it.”
And if “The Angels’ Share” — a full-bodied film with a tart edge and a sweet finish — were a whiskey, what type would it be?
“Bittersweet. Not as elemental as a smoky Islay whisky,” MacLean said, mulling it over before settling on: “Talisker.”
“It’s got a sort of chili pepper in the finish, which is the bitter part, the rough part,” he explained. “It’s a virile whisky, and yet the overall flavor profile is sweet but elemental.”
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Jill Lawless can be reached at http://Twitter.com/JillLawless
Ken Loach poses for photographers with the Jury's Prize for The Angels' Share during a photo call at the 65th international film festival, in Cannes, southern France, Sunday, May 27, 2012. (AP Photo/Joel Ryan)(Credit: Joel Ryan) 
during a press conference for The Paperboy at the 65th international film festival, in Cannes, southern France, Thursday, May 24, 2012. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo)(Credit: Virginia Mayo) 
during a photo call for The Oath of Tobruk at the 65th international film festival, in Cannes, southern France, Friday, May 25, 2012. (AP Photo/Lionel Cironneau)(Credit: Lionel Cironneau) 
Actress Kristen Stewart smiles as she arrives for the screening of On the Road at the 65th international film festival, in Cannes, southern France, Wednesday, May 23, 2012. (AP Photo/Joel Ryan)(Credit: Joel Ryan) 
Whisky expert, Charlie Maclean, for the film The Angels' Share poses for portraits at the 65th international film festival, in Cannes, southern France, Wednesday, May 23, 2012. (AP Photo/Jonathan Short)(Credit: Jonathan Short) 