Cannes 2005: Carlos Reygadas, George Lucas, Lars von Trier, Aishwarya Rai
The Parisian daily Le Monde calls Mexican filmmaker Carlos Reygadas‘ Batalla en el cielo / Battle in Heaven — no, this is not the Mexican version of Stars Wars — "a magnificent film about the mystical erotic pleasure of lost souls in the megalopolis of Mexico City." The controversial (for its explicit sex scenes) Batalla en el cielo is the first Mexican film in fifty years to take part in the official competition, and, along with Michael Haneke’s Caché / Hidden, is the odds-on favorite for the Palme d’Or.
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American filmmaker George Lucas, whose eagerly awaited (especially by desperate U.S. theater owners) Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith was shown at Cannes, explains that parallels between his film’s inter-galactic wars of the future and the earthbound wars of the present are mostly a coincidence. "When I wrote it, Iraq didn’t exist," Lucas said at a press conference. "We were just funding Saddam Hussein and giving him weapons of mass destruction. We didn’t think of him as an enemy at that time. We were going after Iran and using him as our surrogate, just as we were doing in Vietnam. . . . . The parallels between what we did in Vietnam and what we’re doing in Iraq now are unbelievable." Source: Associated Press.
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At Télérama, you’ll find some harsh words (in French) for Lars von Trier’s Manderlay, which reviewer Frédéric Strauss accuses of being both pretentious and simple-minded. Manderlay features Bryce Dallas Howard as a kind-hearted woman (played by Nicole Kidman in von Trier’s Dogville) who arrives at a plantation in 1933 Alabama only to discover that slavery is alive and well at the place.
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Bollywood actress Aishwarya Rai is set to star in Provoked, the story of a British woman who was convicted of murder in 1989 for setting her abusive husband on fire. Naveen Andrews will play the husband.
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"I think that Japan is sick," said Japanese director Masahiro Kobayashi at Cannes. "There is a tendency to try and take revenge, to attack the weakest." Kobayashi’s film Bashing depicts the social ostracism faced by a former hostage in Iraq upon her return to Japan. Kobayashi also had harsh words for the Japanese government of prime minister Junichiro Koizumi and for the "conservative Japanese media." Bashing is one of the 21 feature films competing at Cannes.
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