The Croisette has a false air of Hollywood on Friday: Emma Stone climbed the steps, crowned with a second Oscar, Francis Ford Coppola sees himself still in the place in twenty years and Richard Gere and Uma Thurman return to the spotlight.
After the success of “Poor Creatures” which strengthened his aura in Hollywood, the Greek Yorgos Lanthimos reunites with his favorite actress, Emma Stone, for “Kinds of Kindness”.
This sketch film, in the running for the Palme d’Or, also brings together veteran Willem Dafoe and actors Jesse Plemons and Margaret Qualley and will offer a very Hollywood red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival.
The next generation will also be represented with Jacob Elordi, 26, in the spotlight since he played Elvis in “Priscilla.” He plays in “Oh, Canada”, a film by Paul Schrader which marks his reunion with Richard Gere forty years after “American Gigolo”.
It promises to be twilight: adapted from one of the last novels by Russell Banks, who died last year, it tells the story of an opponent of the Vietnam War who fled the United States for Canada and who, at the end of his life, reveals himself to a journalist.
Schrader succeeds another eminent representative of the New Hollywood, the cinema legend Francis Ford Coppola, who came to defend his “Megalopolis”, a testamentary work screened the day before, at a press conference. The film, in the running for the Palme d’Or, deeply divided critics, with many journalists deeming it catastrophic.
No reason to be discouraged: Coppola announced that, at the age of 85, he was preparing a new film.
“I have already started writing,” he confided at a press conference. “I promise you, I will still be here in 20 years!”, he even said.
“Do what I wanted”
The director who invested his personal fortune to the tune of 120 million dollars to finance “Megalopolis”, a pharaonic project, estimated that his children had “very good careers” and that they therefore had “no need to inherit of fortunes.”
Obtaining a third Palme d’Or would be a first in the history of Cannes. For Coppola, there are analogies between his return to the Croisette this year and his arrival to defend “Apocalypse Now” in 1979, which earned him his second Palme, and was initially poorly received.
In the first reviews of “Megalopolis”, the specialist site Deadline hailed it “a true modern masterpiece of the genre that scandalizes with its sheer audacity”, but The Guardian described the film as “bloated, boring and disconcerting superficiality.
The Hollywood Reporter said the film was “a stunning, ambitious big swing, to say the least”, while the Times of London criticized its “cookie-cutter performances, cookie-cutter dialogue and its ugly images.
“The film is seriously disconcerting, especially if we expect from Coppola an ultimate masterpiece like in the great era,” said Le Monde. Telerama described the film as a “catastrophe” and Libération called it “an unbeatable and foggy retrofuturist peplum” which left its special correspondents “stunned”.
“That’s how I wanted to make the film,” Coppola defended, adding: “Since I financed it, I told myself that I could do what I wanted.”
In a nod to Hollywood history, Sawyer Spielberg, son of Steven, gave interviews with his feet in the sand after playing in a small independent film, “Christmas Eve In Miller’s Point”, presented at the Quinzaine des filmmakers, where he plays alongside… Francesca Scorsese.
This article was automatically published. Sources: ats / afp
