The Mysteries of Cannes, #2, updated

By day, Le Petit Majestic is about as unpre­pos­sess­ing as a corner bis­tro can get:

By night, it’s a spilling-into-the-street mad­house! The below shot was snapped on a slow night!

“But Glenn,” you ask, “what of les films?” Well, right now I’m wrest­ling with Charlie Kaufman’s almost-epic Synedoche, New York for a second Critic’s Notebook for indieWIRE. Did I like it? “Like” is kind of not applic­able. Questions per­sist as to wheth­er dens­ity equals pro­fund­ity. Just what is the state of the film’s prot­ag­on­ist? Is sol­ipsism all there is? I’m grap­pling, grappling.

Easier times were had with Philippe Garrel’s Frontier of Dawn, a nice soak for those who love the indol­ent ango­isse and tristesse of the Garrel mood, some­thing the dir­ect­or is able to con­jure, a friend noted, just by turn­ing on the cam­era. Or so it seems. The more some folks osten­ta­tiously laughed at the intro­duc­tion of a super­nat­ur­al angle into the plot (achieved via effects that date back to Cocteau if not Melies), the more I loved the film.

Atom Egoyan’s Adoration, com­ing on the heels of the largely dis­astrous Where the Truth Lies, returns the writer/director to the unstuck-in-time, jigsaw-puzzle-assembling struc­tures of his earli­er pic­tures; here, the top­ics are life fic­tions, dis­em­min­a­tion of inform­a­tion on the inter­net (this is in a sense the longest MacBook com­mer­cial ever), cul­tur­al dif­fer­ence, bigotry, and ter­ror­ism. At the heart of the pic­ture, though, is a sim­per­ing sanc­ti­mony that could well bring out the neo-con you nev­er knew you had in you. The “oh no, the nice old man is really a racist” theme is fairly tire­some, while a bit with fig­ures from a crèche is just, well, weak. Perhaps oth­ers less dam­aged than myself will be right­eously stirred.

I may or may not get into the new Cantet in any minute, and after that, more wrest­ling with Kaufman, and after that, Wenders’ The Palermo Shooting. Wenders, Hopper, Jovavich…and Lou Reed and Patti Smith as them­selves. Because when you think “Palermo,” you think Lou Reed and Patti Smith. Although, in fair­ness I have to note that I’ve heard that Palermo is a fairly hap­pen­ing gig for rock­ers of this undergound/post-underground ilk. So there’s a rationale for their pres­ence. We shall see…

UPDATE: At indieWIRE you can see what my grap­plings with Synedoche, New York, yiel­ded. Click here.