May 26, 2006
Kenny in Cannes, Update #4
PREMIERE's film critic is at the Cannes Film Festival, covering the Cote d'Azur in search of the fest's best. In this installment, he parses Juventude Em Marcha, The Singer, and more.

By Glenn Kenny

Post Cannes omni animale triste est… and that particularly holds true when it’s post-Cannes and Cannes isn’t even over yet. The first sign of the melancholy, sleep-deprived muddle of the Festival wind-down occurs on Thursday morning, when Daily Variety, each previous fest edition of which looked pretty much like a coffee-table book, shows up at your hotel door as whisper-thin as a broadside. The market guys are leaving (an explanation for the physical change in the trades), and the “there’s plenty of time to see lots of stuff” optimism one came with fades as one realizes there’s not much left to see, and that you should have sucked it up and checked out those late-night screenings of Duvivier’s 1929 Le Mystere de la Tour Eiffel and a digitally restored version of Ford’s The Searchers, because what you’ve got coming in the competition now is the likes of Pedro Costa’s ghastly Juventude Em Marcha, whose idea of an aesthetic involves making the audience suffer as much as the film’s characters do. Gak.

One hoped for deliverance with this morning’s screening of Xavier Giannoli’s The Singer, starring Gerard Depardieu as the title character, a dancehall crooner in a French seaside town who falls for a triste, troubled young real-estate agent. It’s got a lot going for it-Depardieu gives an engaging and intelligent performance, something he hasn’t been handed a lot of opportunities to do lately, and the world his character inhabits is worth visiting and examining. Still, early on in the picture I found myself praying to the cinema gods, “Please, don’t let this turn into Limelight,” and the film did not…but it concluded on a pretty unsatisfying note nonetheless. And this is going to be it (save for a Competition Jury post-mortem after the holiday weekend) until I file my full Cannes report for the September issue of PREMIERE. There’s a midnight screening of Kevin Smith’s Clerks II tonight, but I won’t know until later what I need more-laughs or sleep.