Festival in Cannes

I really enjoyed this movie.

It simultaneously captures the feel of a glitzy French film festival and the deal making that go into getting a movie made.

The entire cast is superb, and Mr. Jaglom's technique of allowing the actors to do a lot of improvising makes for scenes that feel like real interaction between people, as opposed to a couple of actors reciting lines from a screenplay. The French pop ditties within the score was also a nice touch.

Do yourself a favor and see this film.

Henry Jaglom, who knows his way around movie deal-making from the inside, made a vicious thrust at the film industry, located at Cannes with an all-star cast and a wealth of cameos. Critics who panned this brilliant non-lampoon missed the point. If movie nuts (like myself) ever entertained fantasies of making a big time film, Henry Jaglom's satire will cure them.

I saw this at a preview given by Talk Cinema at the local SUNY college. As with all Jaglom movies, there is some good dialogue and moments, but it really doesn't hold together well for its entire length. I wouldn't recommend it, but I doubt it will get a wide distribution.

This is a fun movie, and a good behind-the-scenes-look at moviemaking, both indie and "big studio" productions. The plot is very simple and all of the players move in and out of "the deal" at different times. The "deal" even begins to take on a life of its own with most of the characters compromising their interests to be a part of it. Very good character studies. I think this movie should have used all of the actors real names, as it seemed contrived to have a fictional name for Anouk Aimee.

As a long-time fan of Henry Jaglom, I'd have to put Festival in Cannes slightly behind his last couple of films, the wonderful "Deja Vu" and "Last Summer in the Hamptons." His work is definitely not to everyone's taste -- none of his characters is free of either self-absorption or self-destructiveness -- but those who don't need clear heroes and villains are well-rewarded with psychologically complex and often highly comic portrayals.

This is more in the spirit of "Venice/Venice" and his earlier, more confessional films with the difference being that Henry's not onscreen. Still, his longtime collaborator Zack Norman gives his best performance ever, Anouk Aimee and Maximilian Schell fully embody both the mystery and deluded romanticism they're meant to evoke and a fine array of new faces (especially Alex Craig Mann and the two female writer/producers) step up to Jaglom's "process" and execute it more seamlessly than ever before. Henry's somewhat distracting habit of arhythmic cross-cutting within dialogue scenes has been almost completely cured -- "Festival" has gorgeous long takes that allow the scenes to completely develop their internal tensions. The production values are also the best ever for one of his films; he and his crew really conveyed the spirit of a festival that is really a market.

My main quibble is that his ending is not as satisfying as those of his last films; it, too, harks back to the looser wrap-ups of his earlier work -- even a bit more certainty about the resolution of a couple of the storylines would have helped this feel a little grander in conception.