You will, no doubt, want to hear about the Francis Ford Coppola sighting at the U.S. pavilion, or maybe find out how the new film from Jane Campion played…. perhaps even the blow-by-blow commentary about the ramp up to the red carpet. All in due time, my friend, all in due time.
But before moving on, we should dwell on an issue that is at the heart of this cinematic beast. With generosity, we might call it Canne’s artificial, economic heart: the marche du film: the marketing tradeshow that takes up a majority of the main pavilion.
Think of it as a Turkish bazaar with flatscreen TVs, DVD players, plastic swag and slick posters. Row after row of booths from different countries: Hong Kong, Turkey, Korea (at least that’s how South Korea was positioning itself), several Japan distributors, and the list goes on; Michael Phillips has a more serious treatment of the marche than what you’re about to read here – with an added bonus that he talks to one of Chicago’s cinematic treasures, Milos Stehlik, http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/arts/chi-0517-milos-stehlik-cannesmay17,0,6122775.story.
My initial thought – looking at the dozens, nay, hundreds of films that are completed, “in the can” and simply looking for distribution to pay back investors – is: You don’t EVER want to direct a feature length film.
There is an old saw that seeing how sausage is made will cure you of ever eating sausages, I have to say that seeing what completed films go through to get foreign distribution (i.e. seen!) I felt a queasiness in my stomach as I passed the fifth booth that had a choreographed Kung Fun fight scene on it. I thought: Here they’re selling Quarter Pounders, Royales with cheese, not those artsy-fartsy, character-driven investigations into existential questions of being. And even these are tough to move…. Oh, wait a sec… there’s StudioCanal! They’re pretty artsy-fartsy. Everyone is selling.
Just when you think your head is going to explode from all the backlit translates of movies I’ll probably never see, the writer in me takes a moment to peruse the copy:
A GUN FOR JENNIFER. The tagline on this poster was: “Dead Mean Don’t Rape.” At first, given some badly reversed type, I missed the “e” on the end of the last word and thought it a statement about music. Jennifer, a classical music scholar, has had it with cars booming bass beats on her quiet suburban street and takes out a vendetta on Rap music. But it turns out this movie is up to something else….
“A Gun For Jennifer combines ultraviolence and explicit feminism.”
Thank God it doesn’t combine explicit violence and ultrafeminism – I can’t watch that shit.
But the description goes on (as these descriptions often do) to work redundancy like a sticky wad of gum: “It is merciless action from a very feminist point of view….” Um: didn’t the earlier use of “ultrafeminism” cover it? Now you’ve got me worried.
And because someone heard you had to be able to summarize a film with one sentence that positions it among other films, it concludes: “It is Thelma and Louise crossed with Taxi Driver!.” (Yes, the exclamation point AND period are in the actual materials.)
Just imagine the dialog:
“You talkin’ to me?”
“Thelma! Of course, I’m talking to—“
“You talkin’ to me?”
“Yes! God! Thelma! Put the gun down.”
“Well, I’m the only one here and you must be talkin’ to me…” u.s.w.
If you thought that closing bit was just a wiseass German flourish… it’s actually a sneaky segway to the next feature we’ll be covering:
FINNISH TANGO. Don’t let the title fool you; this film was made in Germany. The film, in fact, is a “warm-hearted tragicomedy [which] unfolds without false melodramatic moments and pathos.”
The minute someone tells me there is not a single false, melodramatic moment OR pathos – I’m pretty certain there’s at least one.
This film is featured next to:
CALL GIRL.
I don’t know why – maybe it’s the capitalization – but the tagline is one of my favorites: “She is a Killer, so beautiful!” Almost haiku it is.
TANDOORI LOVE contained one of the most frustrating descriptions I’ve seen: “Tandoori Love is a spicy comedy with romance and a [sic] homage to Bollywood and Indian cuisine.” [For those of you with a weak stomach, brace yourselves….] “Slapstick and subtly caricatured figures are combined with profoundly human characters and the agonizingly existential and emotional decisions challenging them.”
a) If you lost the subject of that last sentence, you’re not alone; apparently these “figures are combined with” the “characters” and “the decisions challenging them.” (And those decisions are both “existential” and “emotional”, dammit.)
b) How in the hell, do you have “slapstick” and “subtlety” as two descriptors for the same strange word: Figures? Isn’t slapstick the very antithesis of subtlety? How does one DO subtle slapstick?
c) Any sentence with three or more adverbs should be pulled over and given a breathalyzer test. Immediately.
I will close our look at the Selections du Jour with two observations followed by my final, favorite selection:
a) ALL of the aforementioned films are from one flyer for one film company. Honest. Imagine this multiplied over dozens of booths where the hard work of entire film crews are reduced to these astonishingly bad pitches.
b) Any one of these films might actually be damn good, but the egregious descriptions would never let you know that.
Now, on to the winner…. I must admit to a completely juvenile fascination with both the title of the movie and the title’s relation to its description which is taken verbatim from the sell sheet. (Note to filmmakers: since this isn’t a comedy (or zombie movie), you guys may have a hard time marketing this in the U.S.)
COXLESS PAIR
Tagline: “Friends in Trouble!” (Enough with the Capitalizations and Exclamations!)
Description: “Jobst Oetzmann’s COXLESS PAIR is an intense drama about a very special and excessive friendship between two young rowers. They fanatically want to reach a level of being like twins to have the same rhythm in the boat, but at the same time they lose control about their friendship and their lives.”
I was just going to let this one go, but I have to ask:
a) “intense drama” as opposed to “lukewarm drama”?
b) For a moment, you might have been fooled that the existential reference to “a level of being” meant that this would be a French film – but when you add in a friendship that is both “excessive” and “fanatical” you know darn well, it’s gotta be German.
c) By the way, I don’t know what “very special” friendship means in Germany but I don’t think that means what you think it means in English….
Certainly the blood, sweat and tears of the cast and crew deserves some better copy, doesn’t it?
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