'Ocean's 13' Cannes review

Geoff Andrew checks out Clooney, Pitt and Damon in action and reviews Gael Garcia Bernal's directorial debut.

May 25 2007

As the Cannes film festival draws slowly to a close, it's apparent that the line-up for the official selection of this year's 60th edition is probably the strongest in years; maybe ever. It's not so much that the festival is packed with masterpieces; indeed, they're a little short on the ground. It's more that there are so few outright duds (in the main competition only Kim Ki-Duk's 'Breath' really vies for that distinction), and that the general standard is so high: impressive movies just keep on coming.

So even Steven Soderbergh's 'Ocean's 13', while not as fresh as 'Ocean's 11', is slick and funny and fast enough to keep you happily entertained for a couple of hours; certainly it's a tad mechanical in places, but Al Pacino's turn as the Mr Big the posse are trying to rip off in order to avenge his humiliating of Elliott Gould is a delight, and some pleasingly absurdist gags involving Oprah reassure us (if reassurance were needed) that Soderbergh isn't taking all this hokum too seriously.

Also not one to take himself – or, indeed, the catastrophic state of life on earth today – too seriously is Sweden's Roy Andersson, whose 'You, the Living' echoes his earlier Cannes hit 'Songs from the Second Floor' in consisting of a series of tenuously linked sketches set in a slightly surreal northern European city populated by wan grey-blue citizens blighted by loneliness, boredom, fear, anxiety, climate change, alcoholism, and nightmares about the apocalypse. Andersson is a genuine one-off, and to be treasured, not least for the precision of his pacing and his studio-shot compositions, which together contrive to make the very bleakest of scenarios at once affecting and hilarious.

Making his debut as director in the Critics' Week with 'Déficit', Gael Garcia Bernal shows almost as much promise behind the camera as he has already as an actor. He plays the resolutely hedonist son of a wealthy but corrupt politician, entertaining his buddies at the family's country villa and trying to cheat on his girlfriend while keeping an eye on his sister's own drug-fuelled pranks. In short, it's a variation on the country-weekend movie for slackers, astute in its dissection of a certain sector of Mexican middle-class youth, and genuinely engrossing in the last half-hour. If there's a little too much macho larking around in the earlier scenes, at least Garcia Bernal shows that he can direct actors and knows where to put the camera; the movie slides down as smoothly as tequila, with an impressive (if not exactly unsurprising) sting in its tail as a bonus.

Altogether different, 'The Man from London' is the long-awaited adaptation of a Georges Simenon novel from Hungarian maestro Béla Tarr. As anyone who knows his work will expect, the accent isn't on suspense or mystery – at least in the conventional crime-novel sense. If there's something mysterious in Tarr's account of a port signalman tempted to take possession of a money-laden suitcase dumped during a murder he's witnessed, it's more existential: this is film noir as metaphysical poetry, with the long, meticulously choreographed tracking shots lending the movie an almost symphonic resonance. Not a lot is said (and when it is said, it's done so slowly, as if in a bizarre litany), and there's not a great deal of plot. But the film oozes a murkily nocturnal mood, helped no end by Fred Kelemen's extraordinary black and white camerawork, some ominously dirge-like music from Mihaly Vig, and a sound design as rewarding as anything in the new Gus Van Sant.

If anything has proved more mesmerising than Tarr's mythic foray into 'Quai des Brumes' territory, it's been 'Back to Normandy', Nicolas Philibert's follow-up to 'Etre et Avoir'. Thirty years ago, Philibert worked as an assistant to René Allio on his film 'Moi, Pierre Rivière…', adapted from Michel Foucault's book about a famous parricide case of the 1830s. It was a formative experience for the future documentarist, and here he goes to visit the locals who acted in Allio's film. The film's no wallow in nostalgia, but a warm, funny, lively exploration of all manner of interlinked themes: history, documentation, madness, memory, family life, and so on. It's an amazingly subtle film, and possibly a bit too tough for those who found little Jojo the most interesting element in 'Etre et Avoir'; but it's also a treasure trove, with rich pickings galore.

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