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The Cannes Film Festival just passed the halfway mark and the race for its top prize only began heating up. Three frontrunners were believed to be David Cronenberg, Lars von Trier, and Michael Haneke.
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David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence tells a story about a middle-aged storeowner living in a small Indiana town. His murder of two intruders leads to a revelation of his secret past. Judging by the applause in the cinema house, Viggo Mortensen from the Lord of the Rings trilogy received one of the festival’s best responses for acting. |
Viggo Mortensen |
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Aviophobic Las von Trier returned to Cannes with Manderlay, the second installment of his trilogy entitled “ USA – Land of Opportunities.” The first installment, also competed for Palm d’Or in 2003, was Dogville, starring Nicole Kidman as Grace Mulligan. In Manderlay, Bryce Dallas Howard played the role of Grace, who helped free the slaves in the American south. Once again, Lars von Trier shot the entire film inside a studio and in a minimalist style with segments that test the viewers’ patience.
Austrian director Michael Haneke’s French-language film, Hidden, starred Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche as husband and wife who unexpectedly received hidden video recordings of their daily activities and strange drawings, all of which led to a dark revelation of a terrible secret. Apart from excellent performances of the two leading actors, Hidden was also tightly scripted and quickly paced.
Closely behind these frontrunners were Gus van Sant’s experimental film, Last Days, about a Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain-styled grunge rock musician’s last days leading to his suicide, and Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers about a middle-aged man searching for a son he never knew he had with his former lover.
Among the six films that were scheduled to be screened in the next four days, only Wim Wenders’s Don’t Come Knocking and Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Three Times seemed to have the best chance.
The Jury Prize, which Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Tropical Malady won last year, went to Wang Xiaoshuai’s Shanghai Dreams this year. This film was something of an underdog because it was only screened twice—one for the press and another for the general public. Unlike other films from China , Shanghai Dreams explored conflicts between modern-day progressive thinking and the Communist Party’s manifesto. The film moved at such a slow pace that its second half seemed to drag on.
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