Cannes: Day Five

Time Out finally hits a few parties, including those for 'Last Days' and 'Kung Fu Hustle'.

May 15 2005

A film festival can be a demoralising place. With each film that turns out to be a disappointment or a disaster (and they crop up far too regularly) you ache for a great film to renew your confidence in cinema, to refuel your optimism.

Unfortunately, Marco Tullio Giordana's 'Once You're Born You Can No Longer Hide' didn't deliver such relief or live up to his excellent last film, the epic and three-part 'The Best of Youth' (which won the Un Certain Regard prize in 2003, the year Time Out's Geoff Andrew sat on the jury).

This Italian film - playing in competition here - is based on a novel by Maria Pace Otteri and starts well by crafting a fine portrait of the monied Italian middle-classes, the Berlusconi-voting nouveau riche.

Twelve-year-old Sandro (Matteo Gadola) joins his father (Rodolfo Corsato) and uncle (Alessio Boni) on a boating holiday amid the Greek islands. The slick adults cheekily revert to their former bachelor ways, chatting up young English girls and harmlessly ribbing little Sandro.

Then, in the middle of the night, Sandro falls off the boat, disappearing long before his father is aware he is missing.

It's a powerful moment. Where will Giordana take it from here? Are we to expect a study of loss and grief in the vein of Nanni Moretti's 'The Son's Room'? Will the film take a non-literal turn, exploring life after death perhaps (we watch as Sandro hallucinates the images of two school friends in the water with him, suggesting that all is not what we think)?

But what we get - most unexpectedly - is a flabby, inert and rather obvious comment on refugees and immigration that sinks this film and rapidly destroys its early promise as an intimate drama about families.

What prompts this deflation? A boat-load of illegal immigrants appears to rescue Sandro just when he is about to drown. Before the boat is intercepted by the police, Sandro becomes close to two young Albanians, allowing Giordana to mine the obvious contrast between their lives and the comfortable background of Sandro.

The film never recovers from this sharp, dislocating change of theme - from the threat of grief to wider social concerns - and there are strong hints that this is an emaciated version of a more complex novel.

The first weekend of Cannes is traditionally very, very busy.

Screenings of the Official Selection continue to roll out with no regard for such niceties as days-off.

Many organisations scramble to throw parties and rubber-necking crowds pack out the town for a brief glimpse of glamour.

Friday night saw a party until dawn to celebrate the screening of Gus Van Sant's 'Last Days', a radical and experimental challenge to the rock biopic genre that explores the final days of a rock star's life.

It's the best film I've seen in Cannes so far (see Geoff Andrew's earlier review here) and the party lived up to the work. The star of 'Last Days', Mike Pitt ('The Dreamers'), took to the stage in a small hotel bar with his band, while in the wings stood Sonic Youth duo Kim Gordon (who appears briefly in the film as a record exec) and Thurston Moore (who consulted on the music).

It was a good start to a weekend of parties all over Cannes.

On Saturday night, MTV took over a villa high up in the hills above the town to celebrate the release of Hong Kong flick, 'Kung-Fu Hustle'. Soho House marked their tenth anniversary with a party at the Chateau de la Napoule. And the 'Star Wars' lot cracked open the champagne on Sunday to see off the final part of the trilogy in style.

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