All shook up as Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis opens at the Cannes film festival
Big-budget movies blew audiences away at the world’s premier film festival but there’s no clear winner ahead of the awards ceremony this weekend.
The Australians have been out in force in Cannes during the 75th anniversary year of the film festival that leads them all.
The crowd went wild over Elvis from Baz Luhrmann, from thunderous applause during the musical numbers to an ovation lasting 10 to 12 minutes (estimates vary, but it was long).
While early reviews have diverged (The Guardian slams it as “incurious but frantic” while The Times insists it’s Luhrmann’s best film since Romeo + Juliet), I overheard one American critic after the premiere on Wednesday night declare the film “will make a billion dollars”.
Luhrmann certainly could have a huge mainstream hit on his hands. Elvis features Austin Butler as the King of Rock ’n’ Roll and Tom Hanks as his sometimes exploitative kingmaker and manager, Colonel Tom Parker. The hyperkinetic movie about a superstar performer with an independent spirit should appeal to just about everyone.
Earlier in the program, George Miller’s Three Thousand Years of Longing was generating early Oscar buzz and there’s no doubting that the Australian director brought his filmmaking prowess to the story of a genie (Idris Elba) who finally finds love with a British scholar (Tilda Swinton). Miller and his daughter Augusta Gore adapted the screenplay from a short story, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye, by AS Byatt.
The beauty of the film, though, is in how the Mad Max director traces the genie’s history in colourful, beautifully realised scenes. The film was edited by Miller’s wife and usual collaborator Margaret Sixel from 6000 hours of footage, so it was a mammoth undertaking, and all shot in Sydney. At 77 Miller still looks remarkably fit and of course he is readying his Mad Max spin-off, Furiosa.
Neither Elvis nor Three Thousand Years of Longing is actually up for awards as part of the festival’s official competition, nor is The Stranger – an immersive cinematic venture about a child murderer told from the unusual perspective of a detective (Joel Edgerton, also a producer) who pretends to be a crook to trick the suspect (Sean Harris).
“We’re here for a true crime, not a good time,” the Playlist writes as the lead to its review, referring to the fact the film is a fictionalised account of the police operation outlined in Kate Kyriacou’s book The Sting: The Undercover Operation that Caught Daniel Morcombe’s Killer, and that at times it is forbidding.
The acting by the two bushy-bearded leads and the original music by Oliver Coates are exceptional. It’s the second film from Australian actor turned director Thomas M. Wright (Acute Misfortune), who has earned praise for his filmmaking. This one will be embraced by cinema buffs.
The documentary Jane Campion: The Cinema Woman was tucked away in Cannes Classics but it is one of my favourite films so far. By French director Julie Bertuccelli (Since Otar Left), the film spans 40 years and while it is unapologetic in its adoration of the New Zealand-born, Sydney-based director, it deftly captures Campion’s offbeat nature and way of storytelling. Campion did not attend the Cannes world premiere but was there in spirit, having attended the festival so many times, most notably when she became the first woman to win the Palme d’Or for The Piano. In the film she talks about the past two years being a boon for female filmmakers, with Julia Ducournau joining her as a new Cannes winner for Titane last year and Chloe Zhao (Nomadland) and Audrey Diwan (Happening) both winning in Venice. Zhao went on to take the best picture Oscar.
Tom Cruise has been the behemoth of this year’s Cannes with his universally loved Top Gun update that is expected to go gangbusters at the box office this week.
During his days with Nicole Kidman Australians claimed him as our own. Yet during his onstage chat in Cannes there was no mention of his ex-wife, even though they premiered Far and Away at the festival in 1992. And while Eyes Wide Shut was part of a career highlight reel there was no mention of Kidman there either.
Still, you’ve got to hand it to the actor-producer for sticking to his guns and making quality wide-screen cinema.
Rob Reiner, who was in town for a screening of 1984’s This is Spinal Tap in Cinema de la Plage, had directed Cruise in A Few Good Men. “I love Tom Cruise and I had the biggest pleasure working with him,” Reiner says.
“He is a consummate actor and for a director you couldn’t get better. He’s so focused, dedicated and totally professional.”
Why has Cruise endured when others have not?
“He’s turning 60 in July and I just think he’s smart in how he’s managed his career,” Reiner says. “He’s done a lot of really great work. He’s got the Mission Impossible franchise and the Top Gun sequel, but I would love to see him do some other types of movies because he’s a great actor.”
The festival’s opening film Final Cut – directed by The Artist’s Oscar-winning Michel Hazanavicius – was a welcome surprise. People arriving in Cannes for the festival had endured significant problems with incoming trains, and also the collapse of the festival’s ticketing system, so everyone was ready for a laugh. One of two Cannes comedies about filmmaking, together with HBO’s Irma Vep, Final Cut is more a rollercoaster ride.
The film starts by unleashing a low-budget, 30-minute movie about zombies attacking a film set that was shot in one take. Then we see how the film was made, including all the stuff-ups along the way. What Final Cut shares with Irma Vep is a sense of surprise, though I can’t quite remember seeing so many bodily fluids in a French film.
Hazanavicius says his film is inspired by the 2017 Japanese hit One Cut of the Dead, which also has a high volume of on-screen fluids. The filmmaker doesn’t hold back. He also had his beautiful wife and constant collaborator, Berenice Bejo, wield an axe in the film.
“I first saw this character as a more violent person and Berenice is not violent,” he says. “But at the end of the day I think it’s more interesting. She’s not violent, but she becomes really crazy. And she’s so funny. She did it really well. She really jumped into the role and she always surprises me.”
Two more horror films followed in the program, Alex Garland’s Men which releases here next month, and David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future, which has emerged as a major awards contender in the competition.
Crimes of the Future harks back to the body horror of Cronenberg’s early films including Videodrome and Existenz. It stars his regular collaborator Viggo Mortensen and French actor Lea Seydoux (from the last two Bond films) as a couple who, in a future world, perform operations and remove spontaneously generated organs as a kind of performance art – and in lieu of sex when she is operating on him. Kristen Stewart’s Timlin works at the ministry that monitors this kind of thing and is starstruck by their presence. Even if she is not meant to be watching, she can’t help herself.
“The first movie of David’s that I watched was Crash and I was probably too young to watch it,” Stewart says at the film’s press conference. “But I’m really glad that I did. I felt like I was gonna get in trouble, which is why I loved it, and I didn’t understand it at all. That was a really formative experience. People talk about some of his movies as difficult to watch and people talk about the walkouts at Cannes screenings.
“Every pulsing, weird image, every bit of hurt, every bruise in his movies – it makes my mouth open, like you want to lean towards it. It just never repulses me, ever.
“I think that everything he does is really about visceral desire. That’s the only reason we’re alive really, the pleasure of sex. He’s so honest and allows you to zoom out from the world that we live in. And that’s hard to do sometimes, especially in this one. I have no idea what this movie is about, but I’m so curious and thought maybe while making this movie we could figure it out. I’m sure he knows what it’s about but after work every day all the actors were doing that. Then I watched the movie last night – it was so crystal clear to me.”
Garland (Ex Machina, Annihilation) was not in town to talk about Men at the film’s Director’s Fortnight screening, although he did say a brief hello from Britain. The film’s stars, Jessie Buckley and Rory Kinnear, were on hand to discuss their roles.
Kinnear plays all of them apart from Buckley’s Harper, a woman reeling from a failed relationship and who has rented a country house as a kind of retreat. But then she is hounded by an unusual stalker who comes in many guises, including mild-mannered eccentric Geoffrey, a nudist in the garden and even the local vicar.
“I hope you don’t get too terrified to book a trip to the countryside,” Buckley quipped to the crowd as she explained how she became involved in the film from indie producer A24.
“It was the kind of immediately provocative script that asked me lots of questions and that still asks me lots of questions,” she says. “That’s always an exciting place to jump off from. Alex is a punk filmmaker who makes bold, provocative strokes and we shared a common sensibility.”
Essentially the film is a two-hander with Kinnear. “I don’t think you ever really act alone as there’s always so much available,” she says. “There were not only Rory’s characters, but the house was a character, the environment was a character. You use everything around you, so I never really felt alone.”
The awards of the 75th Cannes film festival are announced on Saturday.
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