c'est l'amour

Michael Haneke, right, with (from left) Jean-Louis Trintignant, Adrien Brody and Emmanuelle Riva after Amour won the Palme d'Or at Cannes. Photograph: Yves Herman/Reuters

The 65th Cannes film festival drew to a close with the director Michael Haneke being awarded the Palme d'Or for Amour.

His victory was greeted with acclaim but an understandable lack of surprise: Amour had been hotly tipped ever since it unspooled on the fifth day of the festival.

The jury, presided over by former Palme d'Or winner Nanni Moretti, gave the chief award to Haneke, saying the jury was not unanimous on any of the awards, but that many of the contending films were "more in love with their style than their characters"; this, presumably, was where Haneke differed.

Amour, which stars French veterans Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva as well as Isabelle Huppert, describes the relationship between an elderly married couple when one of them is incapacitated by a stroke.

The Palme d'Or is Haneke's second; his last was only three years ago for The White Ribbon. In this he joins a select company, including Emir Kusturica and the Dardenne brothers.

The Austrian director accepted the award in his characteristically low-key way, saying: "It's a harsh thing to have to contend with. It's something I had to contend with in my own family, and that's why I started to make this film."

Haneke also mentioned his own wife: "This film is an illustration of the promise we made to each other, if either one of us finds ourselves in the situation that is described in the film."

The Grand Jury prize, Cannes' second most prestigious award, was given to Matteo Garrone, the Italian director whose film Reality explored the effect of reality TV. Garrone's award was genuinely unexpected, perhaps reflecting the common cultural ground between him and the jury president.

British cinema scored a pleasant surprise as the bronze-medal Jury Prize went to Ken Loach's The Angels' Share, a whisky heist comedy set in Scotland. Loach, who is held in high esteem on the European festival circuit, took the opportunity to affirm his opposition to Europe-wide austerity economic policies when accepting his award; he elaborated on the issue afterwards in the winners' press conference.

"The characters in the film have no work, and the world tells them they have no worth," Loach said. "We are reminded of the situation in Europe where people are told they have to stay out of work, and stay of no value. So we are in solidarity with those against austerity – another world is possible."

A rare moment of levity was provided by Mexican director Carlos Reygadas, whose best director award was probably the biggest surprise of the night, after a string of negative reviews for his film Post Tenebras Lux. Reygadas bounced into the winners' press conference, punching the air, and stood balancing his award certificate on his head. British jury member Andrea Arnold had earlier defended his film to the hilt, saying it had "dared to fail".

Probably the most disappointed director on the night was Leos Carax, whose Holy Motors looked likely to scoop at least one award. Moretti said: "Opinions were divided within the jury over several films; some won awards, some did not."

But one popular winner was the young American, Benh Zeitlin, whose surreal coming of age film Beasts of the Southern Wild won the Camera d'Or for best first film. Zeitlin, the only American to win a major prize, explained that nearly all his cast and crew were first-timers too: "We were a lot of inexperienced people running fast into the unknown."

Former Bond villain Mads Mikkelsen also drew loud cheers when his best actor award was announced for the child-abuse-accusation drama The Hunt. Jury member Ewan McGregor said: "The wonder was in the subtlety."

@Guardian

Haneke Presents: "Amour"

 By Sunday morning the 65th Cannes Film Festival had its first masterwork and an overwhelming critical favorite in Michael Haneke’s “Amour.” A tender, wrenching, impeccably directed story of love and death, the French-language film stars Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant as a Parisian couple in their 80s — named Georges and Anne, as are most of Mr. Haneke’s middle-class couples — struggling with an increasingly debilitating illness and the specter of what comes next. One day over breakfast she suffers a frightening episode that leaves her briefly locked in a mute, seemingly unaware blankness. She’s there, but not, and then just as suddenly she returns.

A hospital stay follows along with an operation, a grim prognosis, a slide into helplessness, the expected accumulation of humiliations, natural and not, and swells of emotion. Half-frozen by a stroke, Anne’s body has begun to betray her, but Georges holds her so very close: he brushes her hair, bathes and dresses her. Somewhat stooped, with a shaky, hitchy walk, he trembles when he lifts her from the bed or a chair, but he keeps holding on. The first time he has to help her move from her wheelchair, she tells him how to grasp her properly, as if in a hug, a gesture that’s poignant in its literalness — they press into each other — and reverberant of an erotic life shared and still remembered.

Mr. Haneke has often turned his cool gaze toward power and violence, and in some respects he has done so again in “Amour,” one difference being that he’s also made room here for tenderness. Part of the film’s emotional force is due to the actors, both superb, and to the poignancy of watching these two familiar, now frail bodies of cinema, as it were, performing in a pantomime of sickness and death. This very real fragility makes a sharp contrast with the bodies cinema immortalizes — eternally young — and it seems telling that Mr. Haneke, who likes to pick at screen illusion, cast actors who starred in two of the most famous French films of all time: Mr. Trintignant was the titular man from “A Man and a Woman” and Ms. Riva played the nameless woman in “Hiroshima Mon Amour.”

“Amour” sent a charge through the packed, rapt 2,300-seat theater, and immediately suggested that there was more to the official lineup than the first few days had suggested. The competition had gotten off toa terrific start with Wes Anderson’s “Moonrise Kingdom,” even if not everyone was equally convinced. A similar critical ambivalence greeted another strong competition entry, “Beyond the Hills,” from the Romanian director Cristian Mungiu, who won the Palme in 2007 for “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.” His new film centers on two young women who, after a reunion, are slowly and forcibly separated by different faiths: Alina (Cristina Flutur) believes in their friendship while Voichita (Cosmina Stratan) has turned to God and become a nun in a tiny Christian Orthodox sect.

Set largely in Voichita’s monastery, a windswept outcropping of buildings in the deep countryside, the story unfolds in atmospheric bits and narrative pieces. Alina and Voichita are lifelong friends, having grown up in the same orphanage. Alina, the stronger, more stubbornly independent of the two, has returned home after a stint working in Germany and thinking that she and Voichita will go off together. Mr. Mungiu, who prefers that viewers come to their own conclusions, never makes it clear if the women are lovers — “You will think whatever you will think,” he said during the party for his film Saturday — though a scene in which Voichita massages Alina’s back, then looks away when Alina turns over, baring her breasts, suggests private worlds of complication.

Shot on film and running two-and-a-half engrossing hours, “Beyond the Hills” explores the push and pull between the collective and the individual, between faith and free will. Voichita insists that she wants to stay at the monastery, where she and some dozen other nuns — along with chickens, boxes of bees and a kind of Greek chorus of incessantly barking dogs — live without electricity under the strict religious supervision of a priest. With mounting desperation and increasingly violent outbursts, Alina tries to change Voichita’s mind. Believing in a world of absolute good and evil, and confused by Alina’s passion, the nuns and priest respond by trying to ritualistically drive out the Devil, an ordeal that effectively pits one woman against a millennium of religious orthodoxy.

At his party, a typical Cannes beach affair with pounding beats and revelers swarming the open bar, Mr. Mungiu talked about his film, the difficulties of shooting in winter and working with a young, untested cast. He based the screenplay (originally 245 pages!) on a pair of fact-based books by Tatiana Niculescu Bran about a real nun who died after being gagged and tied to a cross for days in a Romanian monastery during an exorcism. (Ms. Bran turned her first book into a play, “Deadly Confession,” which was staged at La MaMa in 2008.) It’s a shocker of a story, yet while Mr. Mungiu’s sympathies are transparently with Alina he neither sentimentalizes her — he keeps her at both an emotional and visual distance — nor does he demonize the priest or, especially, the nuns.

“The film should be watched and judged from each character’s perspective,” he explained, giving the larger, suggestively political view. “This is how you will discover that it is difficult to say who is guilty, because the people who are really guilty are not in the film. They are the people who created this kind of society, the people who created education that completely lacks the very important moral values that people should have.”


@NYTIMES

Polemic

"My films are intended as polemical statements against the American 'barrel down' cinema and its dis-empowerment of the spectator. They are an appeal for a cinema of insistent questions instead of false (because too quick) answers, for clarifying distance in place of violating closeness, for provocation and dialogue instead of consumption and consensus."


From "Film as catharsis"
@Wikipedia

One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

Godfather's Marlon Brando,Forrest Gump's Tom Hanks, Scent of A Woman's Al Pacino,The Piano Teacher Isabelle Huppert, The Dark Knight's Heath Ledger and now Jack Nicholson in Milos Forman's masterpiece :

i got the whole story this way: a kind of border line personality guy is sent to mental institution with a nurse not far from dogmatic manner, in charge

Randle McMurphy (Nicholson) shows his discomfort and tries to break the routines;but he's not well supported by other patients;as it's shown McMurphy's demands are far ahead of other patients thoughts.But after a while he finds other patients' assistance,confronting the wards staff specially cotquean head-nurse...

The squence McMurphy broadcasts Baseball across the TV showing a serial( pretending to watch World Series on TV) This is the saddest scene i have ever seen;a five star Nicholson could make it a memorable and everlasting picture;a mixture of innocence and waggery;how fantastic !

I don't get the concept of the movie;i can make some assumptions;Forman shows the role of elite and genious people demolished in the cast of democracy,or regular bureaucracy

Another angle shows the head nurse didnt really respect the votes as they reach the quorom for watching baseball she refuses to accept the vote.Isn't it a similar story we have with some democracies.(how about Afganistan elections as a recent example.)

It also shows McMurphy as a loser :in the end ; he's not the one who can escape,he's the one who gets caught and sink deeper,brainwashed by harsh treatment ; it seems they blurred his sight offreedom;

eventhough he finds ample oppurtunity to run away he misses them because of his inconssistent manner based on hedonism,and sometime due to his sense of compassion for other patients.He could really find his way out of sanitarium in the interview with psychiatrist but he finds kind of entertainment living there playing a superior role . He's not a must be admitted type at the begining.

I haven't watched any other Forman's film but as i read in IMDB he's got obssessed with this rebellious type personalities .

Final Words : Jack Nicholson realy deserved Oscar prize,also; credit to Sydney Lassick

I give it a 9/10

Movies added to my Archive

Unfortunately i've lost some of my prolific connections (to whom i referred for movies) guys used to be my friends and they have dazzling knowledge about their business.

The acessable options are really hard to deal with;they don't understand any thing but the green language! But that was the only way and i was in the real need.

so on wednesday after 2 days of checking the list (and i have to say their archive didnt cover many of my priorities) i selected these six movies and ordered them:

1-Awakenings---Penny Marshall 1990

2-Andrei Rublyov---Andrei Tarkovsky 1966

3-The Basketball Diaries---Scott Kalvert 1996

4-One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest---Milos Forman 1975

5-The Nightmare Before Christmas---Tim Burton/Henry Selick 1994

6-Red-Beard(Akahige)---Akira Kurosawa 1965

>>>these movies still remain in my Thank-List:

1-The Invention of Lying---Ricky Gravis/Matthew Robinson 2009

2-The Panic in Needle Park---Jerry Scalzberg 1971

3-Code Unknown---Michael Haneke 2000

4-Process de Jeanne D'aRc---Robert Bresson 1962

5-The WAges of Fear(Le salaire de la peur)---Henry-Georges Clouzot 1953

6-Mother and Son(Mat i Syn)---Aleksandr Sokurov 1999