Saturday, August 14, 2010

2007 Cannes Film Festival Competitors

By Maddox Penner

Climates: A dowdy university instructor Isa is an inattentive husband to his younger, TV-business wife Bahar. Self-absorbed and selfish, Isa only communicates in the most rudimentary way, while she, similarly, detaches into crying jags and juvenile behavior.

The Crocodile: The film-in-the-film is centered on the figure of Italy's prime minister and media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi, a subject so controversial that even the public television refuse to produce it. While Bonomo's private life collapses piece by piece, as he's divorcing from his wife, and the bank is pressing him hard to pay back his long-standing debts, he finds out that struggling to get this movie filmed is the only thing that keeps him alive.

Chronicle of Escape: In 1977, the goalkeeper of the Almagro team is illegally kidnapped from his home, arrested by the government forces and sent blindfolded to Sere Mansion, a clandestine detention center. His acquaintance, who had been tortured for a long period, had falsely accused Claudio of being a revolutionary. Along the months, Claudio is kept nude and handcuffed together with other prisoners and submitted to all sort of humiliations and tortures, until the night they decide to escape from their imprisonment in the old mansion.

Colossal Youth: This is scrambled story telling in slow motion. Often I found myself thinking about Beckett. The dialogs appear irrelevant, having to do with mundane personal life experiences, friends and relatives. These are poorly educated people after all. In fact one better pay close attention to the prate. It is through small revelations and asides in conversations that we pick up the clues to the life of Ventura and those close to him. The quiet and unpretentious acting, the extended takes, the absence of broad movements, the occasional lengthy silence, all can be soporific. Yet one needs to listen carefully.

Friend of the Family: Geremia, an aging tailor/money lender, is a repulsive, mean, stingy man who lives alone in his shabby house with his scornful, bedridden mother. He has a morbid, obsessive relationship with money and he uses it to insinuate himself into other people's affairs, pretending to be the "family friend". One day he is asked by a man to lend him money for the wedding of Rosalba, his daughter. Geremia falls in love at first sight with the bewitching creature and and soon indulges in a "beauty and the beast" relationship.

Reason of the Weakest: In Lige, a group of men gathers every day in a cafe situated near the steel factory which once reigned supreme. They play cards in a warm atmosphere but that hardly masks their quiet desperation. All unemployed, either because they can't find work like Patrick or because they have been made redundant like Robert and Jean-Pierre, they try to forget their lot in the warm atmosphere of the place. One day, Marc, a newcomer, joins them. It soon appears that the man has just been released from prison and even if he is determined to go straight his presence suddenly inspires Robert : why not try criminality? - 40731

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