The Black Isle

Cannes:

le apartement

le flea-infested Salle Debussy

le rue Moliere, near our le apartement

Klaus Eder, ze head of FIPRESCI, on ze final day

Cannes-not:

le absolutely brilliant video made by someone who had too much time on his le hands

Bathtub bacalao, made by our host Guy

Guy in his study

Lise in stairwell

cheap shot photo op at Montmartre cemetery

also at Montmartre

Stendhal sleeps here

“That Romanian abortion movie” won the Palme D’Or after all!

Am back and in jetlaggy haze. Personal notes on films seen to come once I retrieve my moleskine.

Also, while in Paris, I encountered in our hosts’ home an original set of those classic Serie Noir novels put out by Gallimard in the 1940s. I am freshly intrigued.

Trailer for “An Old Mistress,” Catherine Breillat’s Competition entry.

Cannes winds down today. It ends officially tomorrow with the Palmares (we bet it’s going to be Julian Schnabel’s “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” though the French seem not to like it — another guess is Faith Akin’s “The Edge of Heaven” which again deals with multicultural Germany). British critic Derek Malcolm’s still taking bets — he’s been bookmaker here for decades — but I’m not sure where we’ll put our 10E this year. Last year we bet on Richard Kelly’s “Southland Tales” out of perversity (the odds were 1,000 to 1).

It’s been a great year here — Competition entries so exciting we didn’t have to look elsewhere (first year I did not see a single thing at the Director’s Fortnight), even putting aside egregious movies like Ulrich Seidl’s cheap and exploitative East-West lecture “Import Export” and James Gray’s thuddingly awful brother/police melodrama “We Own the Night.”

My favorite movie by far has been Cristian Mungiu’s “4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days,” (bought up by IFC for US distrib) which unfortunately may become best known Stateside as “that Romanian abortion movie.” Yet, in truth, the abortion issue (or rather, the difficulty of getting one in Romania, where it is illegal) is only part of the shockingly well-written, directed and performed film — it’s really about love, friendship, society and the pressures a totalitarian society can put on love and friendship. The lead actress resembles greatly a younger Sandrine Bonnaire (who, incidentally, has a doc in the Director’s Fortnight section about her autistic sister Sabine, that is supposedly very fine). The film is pitch perfect on every level, and directed by Mungiu as if it was thriller or a horror movie — I have never squirmed as much in my seat at a movie theatre as during the scene where the sleazy abortionist opens up his briefcase like some backalley tout showing off his counterfeit cigarettes. Well, all right, I also squirmed plenty during the Coen brothers’ very effective adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s psychothriller “No Country For Old Men.” Theirs is a sleek, shock-generating machine of a movie that made me think the Coens were revisiting and retooling “Fargo,” their last really successful movie, in the same way that David Fincher was improving on “Se7en” with the more grownup, more accomplished “Zodiac.”

My favorite actress of the festival has got to be the crazed and fearless Italian actress-auteur Asia Argento, who appears in three movies in the main selection — Olivier Assayas’ “Boarding Gate” (her crazed, mumbly performance had J. Hoberman saying she was doing a Brando impression), Abel Ferrara’s “Go-Go Tales” (a comparatively innocent comedy set within a fading go-go bar, what I called “Abel Ferrara doing Wes Anderson,” in which Asia’s pole-dancing character tongue-kisses her dog) and Catherine Breillat’s “An Old Mistress,” a revisionist period drama (tame by Breillat’s standards) in which Asia plays a crazed and fearless Fatal Attraction-type Spanish mistress who screams, yells, drinks blood and is obsessed with her younger, full-lipped boyfriend (”she is part Moorish,” a fusty character says, by way of explanation). And to think I’d never seen her in any movie until last year’s “Marie-Antoinette,” though I did think she was by far the best thing in it.

Other excitements:
Scored a free paperback copy of “No Country of Old Men” for the plane ride home by bullying one kindly film critic into an unfair trade (I gave him my half-read hardback copy of Chuck Palaniuk’s “Rant”.)

Encountered, via a restaurant in Paris, a terrific and inexpensive wine from the Cotes-du-Roussillon called La Soif du Mal (A Touch of Evil, named for the film) but could not find it anywhere here in Cannes. It’s super delicious in the full, raisiny way that even a non-professional like myself can tell is very good. Anyhow, the new rule regarding No Liquids makes it impossible to bring wine home in the hand luggage. Drat. Because I also really wanted to bring this back (on sale at the Nicolas chain) for my ongoing research on smells.

No gifts for anyone this year.

Yesterday, here in Cannes, I saw the wonderfully tart and touching film version of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, about the outspoken Iranian girl (later, woman) making her way in the world. (Never read the book, was put off by the cutesy drawings of the little kid.) And I never thought I’d ever quote from that free paper Metro but here’s what Satrapi said in today’s issue that made her seem very sane and very likeable to me.

Metro: Marjane, you’re putting your own life on the screen. What do you think when you look back at what you’ve achieved so far?

M.S.: I was really bicultural at a time and I can finally tell you that all that crap about culture shock is a load of nonsense. As long as you understand someone, you shouldn’t care where that person comes from. A Frenchman told me that the most exotic part in Persepolis was the scene in Vienna, because he identified himself with me, as a little Iranian girl. That sums up the whole meaning of the film. The real division in the world isn’t between Asia and the West, the North and the South. It’s between the idiots and the non-idiots. And we can find idiots everywhere!

John was at the official Persepolis movie luncheon this afternoon and confirms that the gal is as feisty in person as she appears in print.

An excerpt from my recently-completed novel, THE GIRLS OF SANTA CLAUS LANE, is appearing in the May 17, 2007 issue of the LA WEEKLY. It’s called “THWACK!” and should be findable here, though the hard copy layout is way cooler.

I’ll be in France until May 27 so I look forward to seeing it when I get back.

Not sure when issue 7 of BLACK CLOCK comes out though. There’ll be another excerpt in there called “Ice Cream.”

One for the Plot Twist folder: William Morris supposedly made arsenic-laden green wallpaper. Or so it says here.

…Meharg says that arsenic green is a synthetic compound of copper and arsenic, and is either Scheele’s green, discovered in 1775 and named for Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele, or emerald green, which was first manufactured by a German company in 1814. The researchers says that thick areas of pigment could easily be scuffed forming a cloud of toxic dust, while fungi associated with damp conditions could convert the arsenic into a volatile form…

…The London Times had reported in the 1860s that children sleeping in bedrooms papered with materials containing arsenic green and other toxic pigments commonly died, overwhelmed by the fumes. And, according to legend, Napoleon Bonaparte died of arsenic poisoning because his rooms on St Helena exile were decorated with green-painted wallpaper…