cannes film festival 2014

The Best and Worst of Cannes 2014

After subsisting for 11 days on a steady diet of Champagne and passed appetizers, your Vulture correspondents are back from the Cannes Film Festival and ready to sum up what they’ve seen for you. Which performances scored most highly on the Croisette, and which formerly promising titles crashed and burned? Here are the winners, losers, and notable trends that emerged from this year’s Cannes Film Festival, with some fun Chastain and Lohan anecdotes thrown in for good measure.

For a brief moment, we allowed ourselves to imagine a future where Channing Tatum might take home the Best Actor prize at Cannes. Sure, it was only a dream … but it was a nice dream! Certainly, the trophy would have been warranted: Tatum goes deeper than he ever has onscreen in Foxcatcher, where he heartbreakingly essays a self-loathing wrestler under the insidious influence of wealthy, psychotic benefactor John DuPont (played by an equally marvelous Steve Carell). Let’s hope Tatum can eventually grapple his way to an Oscar nod.
Joyous, sweet Jessica Chastain was at Cannes to promote her breakup drama The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby, but every minute she wasn’t working, she spent as the world’s most enthusiastic fan. Just after the Foxcatcher premiere, she went up to Steve Carell — whom she’d never met — and told him they should do a Broadway play together. At the after-party for the amFAR benefit for AIDS research, we found her on a couch with Drive director Nicolas Winding Refn, convincing him to write a movie with a female protagonist that she could star in. Before that, she was spotted at an 8:30 a.m. screening of Xavier Dolan’s Mommy. “I just got goose-bumps thinking about it,” she told us later at amFAR. “I’m really excited to work with that filmmaker!” Photo: Gareth Cattermole/2014 Getty Images
How would you feel if, on the night of your big Cannes premiere, an idiot prankster jumped out from the paparazzi line and crawled under your gorgeous tulle dress? America Ferrera was clearly in shock when that nightmare situation happened to her on the How to Train Your Dragon 2 red carpet, but she shook it off and went on to have a fantastic night. As she sat on the beach for the movie’s after-party, she chose to remember how beautiful the whole experience had been instead. “It felt like a crazy, weird dream,” she said, almost wistfully. “It was like, ‘I was at Cannes in my dream. I was on the red carpet and Cate Blanchett was next to me — and then some guy jumped under my dress!’” Photo: Traverso/L’Oreal/2014 Traverso/L’Oreal
Is Clouds of Sils Maria secretly about Kristen Stewart? She’s cast in the film as the loyal assistant to French movie-star Juliette Binoche, but she’s clad in clothes that might have come from her own wardrobe (hoodies, black-framed glasses, and slouchy tees) and handed several wink-wink things to say about the pernicious paparazzi and Hollywood’s overreliance on supernatural franchises. What’s more, Chloë Moretz co-stars in the film as a controversial young starlet who projects a defiant DGAF attitude in press conferences (as is Stewart’s wont) and is in the middle of a scandalous affair with a married man. These are situations Stewart knows all too well, and perhaps that’s why she delivers her most engaged performance in years. Photo: IFC Films
The most impressive soiree had to be the party thrown for The Hunger Games: Mockingjay and held in a Russian oligarch’s Antibes villa overlooking massive, beautiful seaside cliffs: It may have seemed more Capitol than Katniss, but that’s Cannes for you, darling. Still, those in the know were even more bowled over by Resolution’s daytime shindig on a faraway French mountain accessible only by helicopter. (Take that, shuttle buses!) If you were lucky enough to be flown over, you got to mingle with insiders like Bill Bromiley and Ness Saban from brand-new distributor Saban Films, who were waxing rhapsodic about the Tommy Lee Jones Western The Homesman days before the news broke that they’d bought it. On the way back to Cannes, one of your Vulture correspondents was somehow shepherded into a helicopter with party guest Lindsay Lohan, an uneventful ride until, upon landing, Lohan and her posse commandeered the group van waiting at the helipad and refused to let your trusty correspondent in. You’ll find our Cannes memoir, And Then Lindsay Lohan Stranded Me and I Was the Only One From Our Helicopter Who Had to Walk Back to Civilization, in stores soon.  Photo: David M. Benett/2014 David M. Benett
Xavier Dolan is only 25 years old, but he’s already directed five feature-length films in as many years. The downside to all that precocious output? Not a one of them has received significant U.S. distribution, but that’s likely to change with his Cannes crowd-pleaser Mommy, an audacious story about a white-trash Quebec mother trying in vain to tame her juvenile-delinquent son. Mommy was a delicious jolt in the last few days of a very staid festival, so exhilarating and propulsive that the audience applauded (and one of your Vulture correspondents cried) upon an aspect-ratio change halfway through the film. We’re not surprised that Jane Campion and her jury awarded it the fest’s jury prize, the equivalent of a third-place finish. Said Campion afterwards: “I love Mommy so much. It’s such a great, brilliant, modern film, and such a young director. He’s really kind of like a genius, I think.” Photo: Metafilms
Nearly every night we went out, we ran into jury member Gael García Bernal at some party, doing a little salsa shuffle, laughing like crazy, and generally seeming like the most fun person in the room. The first few nights, he had good friend Alfonso Cuarón to keep him company. By the end of the festival, he couldn’t be seen anywhere without new jury-bestie Nicolas Winding Refn. The secret, he said, was knowing his limits. Because he has kids, he’s used to getting up early, so he went to the 8:30 a.m. screenings and skipped the ones after sunset because he knew he’d sleep through them. (Or because that freed up his nighttime schedule for socializing.) When we saw him last, he was enthusiastically congratulating all the winners and giving each of them an extra prize: “Hugs and all my admiration.”   Photo: LOIC VENANCE
Take your pick! The risible Ryan Reynolds kidnap drama The Captive earned some boos, but the jeers that followed war movie The Search — director Michel Hazanavicius’s first movie since his Oscar-winning The Artist — had to have stung even more. Still, the press really dug into two other bafflements: the campy Grace of Monaco, starring Nicole Kidman, and Ryan Gosling’s wannabe-auteur flick Lost River. The tweets on each were positively vicious. Photo: The Weinstein Company
The funniest movie we saw in Cannes was Un Certain Regard jury prize winner Forces Majeure, in which a beautiful young couple’s perfect ski vacation goes horribly, hilariously awry. Ebba, the wife, and Thomas, her workaholic husband, are eating lunch on an outdoor deck with their two young kids when a controlled avalanche starts thundering towards them and threatens to engulf the deck. Ebba grabs her kids and shields them with her body while Thomas grabs his iPhone and gloves and runs the other way. No one’s hurt, but seconds later, when Thomas comes bounding back like nothing’s happened, everything has changed. What follows are the couple’s very public attempts to work through their trust issues, with a wealth of awkward situations that soon drive wedges into all the other couples around them.
Could the next Paranormal Activity have been tucked away in a Cannes sidebar? The lushly shot American film It Follows has an ingenious horror premise: After losing her virginity, a teenage girl is informed by her lover that he has passed on a curse to her, and she will now be patiently stalked by a supernatural killer. Her only recourse is to have sex with someone else, passing the curse onto that person, and hopefully onwards still — but if the entity kills those people and works its way back up the chain, she’ll be in danger once more. Director David Robert Mitchell told Vulture he already has an idea for the sequel, so let’s hope some forward-thinking studio (Lionsgate, maybe?) picks up on the film’s potential. Photo: Animal Kingdom
Jennifer Lawrence treated us to a demonstration of her bizarre hiccup cure, which requires arms raised high and Josh Hutcherson pouring water down her throat. Best Actor winner Timothy Spall gave us gems involving “a toilet roll, a spoon, and a bucket of grease,” then talked about being too drunk to talk anymore. It’s an ingenue-curmudgeon best friendship waiting to happen! Get these two treasures of cinema into a room together, and make sure they’re on every party list! Spall will be on the Oscar campaign trail for Mr. Turner, and if J.Law isn’t yet in the mix, well, we’re sure she can whip something up. If those two aren’t raising beer steins and singing English drinking songs at a pub after-party this year, there is something very wrong with showbiz as we know it. Photo: Ian Gavan/Getty Images; Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images/2014 Getty Images
You wouldn’t expect many moments of levity in a Russian epic, loosely based on the Book of Job, about an alcoholic auto mechanic fighting a corrupt mayor. But Leviathan, from director Andrey Zvyagintsev, is secretly a very, very dark comedy. Our favorite scene came when the hero and his friends go to a beach for target practice, where they pull out portraits of former Russian presidents. One guy aims his old Kalashnikov rifle at the portraits and another man pulls out a machine gun, but the guy who brought the portraits says he won’t include modern Russian presidents until he has “more historical perspective.” Ha!
Neither the critics nor your Vulture correspondents could agree on whether to love or loathe Maps to the Stars, David Cronenberg’s trip to the dark side of Hollywood. Some found it to be a delicious Hollywood satire, while others found it to be deeply out of touch. (The kid characters, in particular, sound like they were written by a 55-year-old: Are hip Hollywood tykes really discussing “that famous seducer David Cassidy,” and gossiping romantically with phrases like, “She digs you!”) Surely, though, we could all agree on Julianne Moore, who won the Best Actress prize at Cannes? Nope! One of us thought she was back to her batshit-unhinged Magnolia form, and the other thought she was a little too off the charts. Photo: eOne Entertainment
The charms of Party Girl, a low-budget French indie about a 60-year-old lifelong cabaret girl, went a long way at this year’s festival, which was otherwise dominated by masterfully directed but emotionally cold epics. Party Girl, on the other hand, has an abundance of affection for its protagonist, Angelique, her face weathered by years of chain smoking and hard living. The movie’s backstory is even more endearing: One of the movie’s three directors, Samuel Theis, plays Angelique’s son in the film, and it turns out that Party Girl is the semi-fictionalized telling of his mother’s real, shocking decision to get married at 60 after a life as a cabaret girl. (Angelique Litzenburger, who plays the lead? That’s his real-life mother.) Let’s just hope Party Girl can snag U.S. distribution now that it won Best Ensemble in its competition category and the Camera d’Or for best first film. Photo: Elzévir Films
Festgoers flipped over the Dardennes’ Two Days, One Night, with some predicting a historic third Palme d’Or for the filmmakers and an acting prize at last for star Marion Cotillard, who plays a woman with one weekend to persuade her co-workers to let her keep her job. And yet Team Two Days went home empty-handed! Perhaps the jury agreed with your Vulture correspondents, who have loved other Dardennes films (The Kid With the Bike especially) but found this one more facile and not nearly as substantial. Photo: Sundance Selects
Even Cannes Jury President Jane Campion admitted she was “scared” by the three-hour, 16-minute running time for Turkish director Nuri Bilge Cylan’s Winter Sleep. “I said, ‘Oh my God, I’m gonna need a toilet break!’” laughed Campion, who went on to hand the film the Palme d’Or. Never fear: Set in a gorgeous, cliffside Anatolia hotel, Winter Sleep is punctuated with arresting images that wake you up every time your mind might wander. It follows an arrogant landlord who spends most of his time ignoring his tenants and getting into lengthy, brutally honest arguments with his much younger wife and divorced sister, who tell him, “You are an unbearable man” and “I wish my threshold for self-deception was as low as yours.” One of your Vulture correspondents had a meeting to get to afterwards and had planned to leave after two hours, then couldn’t wrench herself away. Photo: Memento Films
The Best and Worst of Cannes 2014