The 68th Cannes International Film Festival previewed its wares today with a press conference illuminated chiefly by jury heads Joel and Ethan Coen’s revelation that they, er, don’t watch television. If they’d made an exception for Fargo they weren’t saying, although they happily shared the festival eve limelight with fellow judging panelists Jake Gyllenhaal, Sienna Miller, Rossy De Palma, Xavier Dolan and Guillermo del Toro in a lively media opener.
Empire’s festival friends at Getty Images have extended some of their photographic skills for a peak behind the scenes as Cannes gets a last-minute dust and a quick once-over with the Mr Sheen. Click on the images below for a closer look. Screenings-wise, the opening night film – **La Tête Haute **(Standing Tall) – was a worthy, socially conscious affair by actor-director Emmanuelle Bercot that might have been better placed in Un Certain Regard than in such a high-profile, albeit Out Of Competition slot. Cannes regulars could have been forgiven for experiencing déjà vu, not simply because this tale of a delinquent teenager tells a very similar story to last year’s Mommy but because its focus on the social services (played by Catherine Deneuve and Benoît Magimel) makes it uncomfortably close to Maïwenn’s 2011 competition entry Polisse – which Bercot ought to know, since she was in it.
The first of the competition films to screen this year was solid but hardly rip-roaring. Directed by Cannes veteran Hirokazu Koreeda, Our Little Sister is the charming but somewhat slight story of three Japanese girls who take in their 15-year-old stepsister, the daughter of their father by his second or third marriage. Koreeda is a beautiful and subtle stylist, but this is a very gentle story that perhaps speaks more to Japanese culture than the west with its ruminations on family and parental abandonment. In some ways it is a companion piece to 2004’s extraordinary Nobody Knows, about a mother who leaves her four young children unattended in a housing block, which won the acting prize in Cannes that year. Our Little Sister doesn’t scale the same heights, but its cast will certainly be in the frame for awards come the prize-giving next Sunday.
Never the mind the quiet start, however; the festival proper gets underway tomorrow (Thursday) with a morning screening of George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road.
Empire, of course, will be on the spot for the next 11 days, delivering first-look critiques of all the must-see films and all the Croisette buzz, illustrated with Getty galleries.