On location in the French Riviera, GAUTAMAN BHASKARAN reports from the 60th Festival de Cannes.

SOMETIMES, I am struck by the power of Bollywood. Imagine watching an eminently French movie at the ongoing Cannes Film Festival, and having it remind you of Bollywood cinema, replete with songs and even dances, at least of sorts. Yes, the characters in the French movie, Christophe Honore’s Love Songs (Les Chansons d’Amour), do not run around trees and across picturesque meadows, but Ludivine Sagnier, Chiara Mastroianni (that Italian legend’s daughter) and Louis Garrel skip, hop and play around to lilting music, melody and some great songs across the breathtaking boulevards of Paris, and often by night, when the city is asleep and the glow from the street bulbs cast a soft, romantic radiance. Add a dash of rain and you have a prefect mood for love and songs.

The musical genre, inflected by realism, has survived in modern France, and directors/producers have returned to it at fairly regular intervals ever since Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg kick started it. Even French masters like Godard and Rivette have dabbled in musicals now and then.

Divided into three chapters, Love Songs (a la Lars Von Trier) has fine performances and all the actors use their own voice to great effect. The narrative is simply put essentially French with wit and unabashed sexuality taking over as a fine art that only the Gallic are capable of.

Ismael (Garrel) lives with his girlfriend, Julie (Sagnier), but when his colleague Alice (Clotilde Hesme), predominantly lesbian, moves in with them to pump in a bit of excitement in the couple’s life, problems begin to creep. Through 13 tunes, helmer Honore manages a splendid work that weaves in and out of genuine grief and tragedy that the characters, including Julie’s parents and sisters (Mastroianni is one), overcome in a variety of ways. It is, however, interesting, to watch the path Ismael adopts, while shrugging off the comfort of Julie’s family.

Love Songs may at first glance appear dissimilar to the director’s earlier Dan Paris, but on closer inspection one can easily see how alike the two films really are. Honore’s breeziness reflects abundantly in Love Songs as well, and made as a tribute to a dead friend, the movie has the power to tug at the heartstrings. When Ismael sings, “Every minute is like a sob”, walking down a lonely Paris street, the gravity of loss is conveyed in an utterly poignant way.

In Competition, Love Songs may not walk away with a prize, but it is a film that moves you. And who cares about the Palm d’Or then?


Russia’s entry The Banishment by Andrei Zvyagintsev begins like a thriller: a car zipping by, its long shots adding to the mystery, a bullet in a man’s arm being removed in a clandestine manner and the pregnant pauses. But it turns out to be a film about a family that moves into a secluded countryside to grapple with boredom, adultery, guilt and finally death. We really have no explanation for many of the things that happen there. Why must an abortion be carried out in such secrecy, when does all this happen? In short, The Banishment is hardly competition material. And I saw many a shuteye in the audience. At nearly two-and-a-half hours, this was trying work.


Remember Audrey Tautou who played Tom Hanks’ sidekick in The Da Vinci Code that caused such a bang at the last Cannes Film Festival. (The movie was panned, ripped apart and thrown back into the cans, and nobody talks about it any more.) Well, Tautou – whom I felt was a bad actress at least in the Code – will now play Coco Chanel, the French designer who gave fashion and fragrance a new meaning, blending style and substance with such finesse that French designing began to ride the skies. Anne Fontaine will helm the yet to be titled movie, which will focus on Chanel’s childhood and early adult years. Fontaine said that she had conceived the idea with Tautou in mind.

Chanel was born into degrading poverty, and was the daughter of a traveling salesman. That was 1883. When her mother died, her father abandoned her, and little Coco spent seven years in an orphanage, where she learnt to sew. But fashion was not her first dream. She wanted to be a singer, and she did sing in “Who’s Seen Coco in Trocadero”. She was then nicknamed Coco. It was during her years as a cabaret dancer that she began making clothes for stars that eventually led her to become one of the greatest names in the world of style. But she was also an enigma. Will Tautou be able to create that?


This year’s Cannes Competition appears to have ignored Old Europe. There are no films from Britain or Italy or Spain. Indeed there is one German title, Fatih Akin’s The Edge of Heaven, but this is a co-production with 60% of it in the Turkish language.

There is one Austrian movie to cause a little envy in Germany, but Berlin is not bothered as long as the market for its cinema is good. Last summer, Florian Henckel’s The Lives of Others premiered at Cannes market, and went on to win an Oscar and conquer the world.

But Cannes’ love affair with Asian cinema is getting more intense. Maybe even passionate. With Wong Kar-wai’s opening film, My Blueberry Nights giving a great shot, Asian cinema is flying high at the Riviera.

This year’s Festival will see Breath by Kim Ki-duk, a big name in South Korea. The movie narrates a stirring story of a man on the death row falling for the wife who betrayed him in the first place. Secret Sunshine, also from South Korea, comes from Lee Chang-don, a highly regarded name in the country’s cinema. Here, Lee takes on a social challenge – of a widow who travels to her husband’s home to find another tragedy befalling her and taunting her new religious hope.

Naomi Kawase’s Japanese entry The Mourning Forest underlines the pain and pathos of a caregiver and an elderly widower in a mountain resort. Kawase is a young woman director, who at 27, won Canne’s Camera d’Or a few years ago.

Some of the films in A Certain Regard, an important sidebar at Cannes, are Red Balloon from Taiwan and China’s Blind Mountain and Night Train.

One hopes these Chinese movies have had proper official sanction to be at Cannes. Last year, Lou Ye brought his Summer Palace to the Riviera without Beijing’s nod. He was summarily blacklisted and banned from making films for five years. Summer Palace touched on the Tinanmen Square massacre, and after all these years, the subject is sill taboo in China.