Bellocchio’s latest lacks complexity and power
Cannes
‘Sweet Dreams’ sentimental drama on mother love
LOS ANGELES, May 12, (RTRS):
Italy’s famed devotion to the ideal
of “mamma” is one of the peninsula’s notable characteristics, yet
one would expect veteran director
Marco Bellocchio to make something more of this national fixation
than the teetering sentimentality of
“Sweet Dreams.” Based on Massimo
Gramellini’s successful novel, the
film is composed of several exquisite
stand-alone sequences unsatisfactorily strung together on a thin cord of
mother love, in a story of a middleaged man unable to overcome the
loss of his mother when he was nine.
Shifting between childhood vignettes
suffused with a heart-warming glow
and adult scenes of shut-down emotions and retarded development,
“Sweet Dreams” will be Belloc-
chio’s most successful film at home
for some time, but international play,
despite probable sales, won’t be the
stuff dreams are made of.
Those who’ve followed the wideranging helmer’s career will be
surprised by the noticeable lack of
substantive reflexivity: there’s really
nothing underneath the sentiment but
sentiment. That’s not to say emotion
isn’t a good thing — on the contrary,
but neither the naturalistic warmth
of his understated duo “Sisters” and
“Sisters Never,” nor the complexity
and power of his recent “Blood of My
Blood” is anywhere in evidence. For
a director known for his nuanced portrayals of family life, he seems frustratingly disarmed by the all-powerful
pedestal-placing model of Mother.
Things start well: the opening
five minutes will instantly sweep
the audience up in a honeyed glow,
as little Massimo (Nicolo Cabras) is
coaxed into dancing the Twist with
his joyful mother (Barbara Ronchi).
Next they’re watching the 1965
“Belphegor” on TV, with Massimo
huddling for protective reassurance
in his mother’s arms. In the scene
that follows however, something is
wrong: mamma is preoccupied, and
shortly thereafter Massimo is told
by a thick-headed priest (Roberto Di
Francesco) that his mother is with
her guardian angel.
Massimo’s father (Guido Caprino) hasn’t the warmth of his late
spouse, and Mita, the woman he
brings in to look after his boy, has
a slight physical resemblance to the
deceased, but the similarities end
there. As a young teen, Massimo
(Dario Dal Pero) continues to feel
the pang of loss, especially when he
sees super-rich friend Enrico (Dylan
Ferrario) in rather too-physical embrace with his mother (Emanuelle
Devos in a small role).
Covering
Such scenes from childhood
are interlaced with Massimo as an
adult (Valerio Mastrandrea) in the
1990s, shuttling between the moment he needs to empty out his father’s apartment to earlier incidents
as a young journalist first covering
sports, then the conflict in Bosnia,
and finally as a sort of philosophical
agony aunt. Given the adult Massimo’s permanent state of hang-doggedness, it’s hard to quite believe
his career track — why promote a
reporter who seems barely to have
the courage to formulate a question?
Instead, he remains fixated on the
loss of his mother, which everyone
is aware of, yet no one bothers to
suggest that perhaps, just perhaps, a
shrink might be of some help.
One of Bellocchio’s strengths
has always been his ability to juggle
disparate elements and successfully
put them into the service of developing character: they acknowledge
life’s messiness yet don’t feel messy
themselves. Unfortunately, the same
can’t be said here, which could possibly come from wanting to stick too
closely to the novel. The Sarajevo sequences feel especially out of place;
presumably they’re included to show
Massimo’s disgust at a certain kind
of sensationalized war reportage, but
the section leaves no residue and adds
nothing to the protagonist’s character.
Really the only time he exits from
his shell of trauma is when he’s
with doctor Elisa (Berenice Bejo),
a woman who exudes the kind of
unaffected kind-heartedness that his
mother once had. Every second Bejo
is on screen, the atmosphere lights
up (hers is one of the great smiles on
contemporary screens), yet why on
earth is Elisa romantically interested
in this schlub? Though Mastandrea
long ago mastered that unmade bed
look, he can be exceptionally effective in the right role — here his ability to convey depth in depression is
hampered by the script’s unsatisfying lack of focus. His scenes with his
father (Caprino in bad aging makeup) are especially ill-conceived.
FRIDAY, MAY 13, 2016
Features
Variety
Chinese actress and singer Li Bingbing poses as she arrives on May 11, for the opening ceremony of the 69th Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, southern France. (AFP)
Cannes
Allen’s golden-age H’wood love story kicks off
LOS ANGELES: The Hollywood star system is shrinking.
As the movie business forges
deeper into the comic book
canon, it matters less and less
whose face is behind the mask.
There remain a few exceptions.
Robert Downey Jr, Jennifer Lawrence, Will Smith,
Melissa McCarthy and Ben
Affleck still guarantee a certain
level of box office success in
the right kind of project. They
still have the clout to guarantee
that movies — even smaller,
more challenging projects that
give bottom-line-oriented executives agita — actually make
it to screens.
But with true stars becoming
an endangered species, there’s
a talent grab taking place that’s
causing heartache and delays
for companies hoping to package films at this year’s Cannes
Film Festival.
“A lot scripts are all going
out to the same list of actors,”
said Peter Kujawski, Focus
Features managing director.
“You need to give them a
chance to read the material and
engage in the process, and it
takes time.”
The problem has been exacerbated by scheduling difficulties. Downey, for example, has
appeared in an Avengers movie
or a spinoff in four of the last
five years, and he has three
more stints as Iron Man slated
in 2017 and 2018. And now
that Affleck’s joined the Justice
League as Batman, donning the
cape and cowl will become essentially an annual occurrence
for the actor. As these comic
book universes expand, so do
the demands on the time of toptier actors.
“Those big Marvel type
movies all come with big multipicture commitments and promotional commitments,” said
Marc Schaberg, co-president
and COO of Sierra/Affinity. “It
adds up to a lot of time.”
Television is exacerbating
the problem. It used to be that
the small screen was the last
stop for movie stars whose careers were in a death spiral. No
more. Ever since Matthew Mc-
Biting Turkish satire scores at Cannes
CANNES, France, May 12, (AFP): There
is an almost unbearable moment early
in the biting Turkish black comedy “Album” — which premieres at the Cannes
Film Festival Thursday — when a childless couple visit an orphanage to choose a
baby to adopt.
As they look the child over, it’s clear
they are not overjoyed that she’s a girl.
When the baby gurgles and smiles,
desperate to be picked up, one says: “She
looks a bit Syrian.”
“A Kurd I’d say,” the other replies, and
they make their excuses and leave.
“Album”, one of the highlight of
Cannes Critics’ Week section, holds up
the mores of provincial Turkey to the
light and finds them sorely wanting.
“It is not that this couple are horrible
or nasty,” director Mehmet Can Mertoglu
told AFP. “They are not. They are just
ordinary civil servants, with all the usual
racism and prejudices you find.”
Modern
They are “totally typical” of modern
Turkey under the increasingly heavy hand
of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who
has urged all Turkish women to have at
least three children.
Couples are under huge pressure from
their employers and families to have children, not just the government, the firsttime director said.
“All they want is to be respectable...
and they can kill for their respectability,”
said Mertoglu. “What they do in the film
is not normal but nobody (in Turkey) discusses that it is not normal,” he said.
Despite attempts to lift the taboo over
adoption, it is still seen as something
“shameful, to be hidden”, he said.
In the film, the couple compile a fake
family photo album of the pregnancy with
the help of their family and friends.
The chain-smoking adoptive mother-tobe, played by Turkish soap star Sebnem
Bozoklu, wears a false bump, posing on
the beach and in bed as the glowing expectant mum.
Mertoglu said that when researching
the film he found it was “common practice in Turkey for parents to create proof
of a biological tie to the baby to cast away
any doubt about their fertility.”
“All families that adopted a child had a
strong impulse to hide it,” he said he was
told by professionals in the sector. “Making
fake photo albums is relatively common. I
even heard stories of fake delivery videos.
“And it has nothing to do with social
status,” he added, revealing “academics and highly educated people” as being
known to have the same hang-ups.
Both religious and secular Turks share
the prejudice, Mertoglu said, with religious people “believing that, while it’s
good to give a home to an orphan, it is a
sin to make out that you are the parent.”
Turkey’s bitter divisions between its religious and secular halves has also made
reproduction a hot political potato, with
secular Turks suspecting conservatives of
trying to outbreed them, he added.
The film follows the couple from life
in the liberal resort of Antalya to the conservative Anatolian city of Konya, where
their carefully crafted plans begin to un-
Conaughey and Woody Harrelson’s star wattage intensified
thanks to stints in HBO’s “True
Detective,” top shelf actors
have been flocking to limited
series and shows. (RTRS)
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LOS ANGELES: Kirk
D’Amico’s Myriad Pictures
and Peter Goldwyn’s Samuel
Affleck
Smith
Goldwyn Films will partner
for the US distribution of
“Finding Altamira,” a drama
starring Antonio Banderas
and Golshifteh Farahani
(“Exodus: God and Kings).
Lead producer on the picture is
Spain’s Morena Films. Fox Intl
Prods is an associate producer.
Myriad has also confirmed
first international sales on
ravel.
A deft comedy of modern Turkish manners, it has the teacher husband (Murat
Kilic) moving from a school on the coast
which looks like something from “Beverly Hills 90210” to one in Konya which
would not look out of place in Iran.
Insights
The film also gently skewers the crushing dullness of provincial life, which
27-year-old Mertoglu knows well, having been brought up in the small western
Anatolian city of Akhisar.
And there are several ironic insights into
Turkey’s new order, with the self-serving
director of an orphanage displaying a portrait of Erdogan that dwarfs that of the Turkish republic’s founder, Kemal Ataturk.
The terrible thing they end up doing, he
said, starts out in “a very innocent way...
they are also doing it for the child as well
because it is hard for a child to grow up
(in Turkey) with the fact that it is adopted” hanging over it.
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Hollywood decamped to Cannes
Wednesday where Woody Allen’s romantic yarn set in cinema’s golden age
received mixed reviews from critics as it
launched the world’s top film festival.
The biggest praise for “Cafe Society”
came for performances by “Twilight”
megastar turned indie darling Kristen
Stewart and Jesse Eisenberg of “The Social Network” fame, who are set to walk
the red carpet Wednesday night in one of
the starriest Cannes of recent times.
Shot in dreamy technicolor hues, Al“Altamira,” plus a novel virtual
reality tie-in that could be used
for the US release.
Myriad and Samuel Goldwyn are looking toward a
late September/early October
theatrical release in at least 15
markets, said D’Amico, Myriad
Pictures president-CEO.
Fox distributed “Altamira”
in Spain, where it was released
len’s latest movie highlights what one critic called “the selfishness of being happy”
as Stewart and Eisenberg voyage through
infidelity and heartbreak from 1930s Hollywood to bohemian New York.
The film follows Bobby (Eisenberg) as
he heads to Hollywood to score a job with
his big-shot agent uncle Phil -- played by
Steve Carell -- and falls in love with his
winsome secretary and mistress Vonnie
(Stewart).
After much wavering from all characters, Vonnie chooses the rich uncle and a
heartbroken Bobby returns to New York
where he works for his gangster brother,
prone to killing off his enemies and burying them in cement, and marries a divorcee played by Blake Lively.
Vonnie later makes her way to a New
York where, to a backdrop of jazz and
gorgeous period dress, she lures Bobby
back into her arms.
A spate of self-deprecating jokes steeped
in Allen’s Jewish heritage drew the most
laughs from the audience, but critics complained that the film lacked depth.
“Woody Allen’s Cafe Society is a sweet,
sad, insubstantial jeu d’esprit, watchable, charming and beautifully shot,”
wrote Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw, praising Stewart and Eisenberg for
“charming and intelligent” performances.
Toronto Star movie critic Peter Howell however wrote on Twitter: “Woody’s
golden lens plumbs shallows of NY/LA
celeb swirl, lacks depth. Stewart & Eisenberg sparkless this time.”
See Page 21
April 1 and has taken in $1.3
million through May 1, and will
handle the pic in Latin America
and Germany.
Myriad Pictures has closed
Canada (Pacific Northwest
Pictures), China (HGC Entertainment), Poland (Sonovision),
Portugal (Cinemundo), the
Middle East (Eagle Films), Turkey (Filmarti Films) and former
Yugoslavia (Dexin Films). PNP
is in talks for a day-and-date
North American release. Myriad
is in discussions for a sale to
France, he added.
Directed by Hugh Hudson,
and based on true events,
“Altamira” stars Banderas as
Marcelino Santuola, a well-off
amateur archaeologist in Cantabria, Northern Spain. (RTRS)