LAST NIGHT, 23 years after Oliver Stone's Wall Streetdefined the red-braces era of capitalism, the same director unveiled a timely sequel to baying audience at the Cannes Film Festival. Wall Street: Money Never Sleepsfinds Gordon Gecko, the avaricious monster created by Michael Douglas, emerging from prison to discover that the world has learned nothing from the corporate decadence of the 1980s.
Allusions to Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs abound.
“It seems we got drunk,” Stone said, referring to the orgy of speculation that precipitated the current slump. “I thought that it would correct itself back in 1987. I was wrong. It got worse. The labour wages of the American worker flattened out, but production went up. There was this gap between those who made money and those who didn’t.”
Key members of the cast joined Stone for the premiere. Earlier, in a lively press conference, Carey Mulligan, who plays Gecko’s daughter; Shia LaBoeuf, starring as an idealistic ingenue; and Josh Brolin, who plays a character even greedier than Gecko, took questions in good-natured style.
Inevitably, the journalists tried to get Michael Douglas to blab about his private life, but he was predictably cautious. “Right now, I am happily married,” he said. “I work with the United Nations on the eliminations of nuclear weapons. Right now, when you look at the oils spills and the volcanic ash, the planet seems to be speaking back to us.”
But it was the famously opinionated Stone who dominated the megaphone. Despite the bludgeoning nature of films such as JFKand Born on the Fourth of July, Stone is still one of the most unapologetically left-wing directors in Hollywood and revels in any chance to reveal his old-school radical opinions.
“I wonder whether capitalism in its present form can work,” he said. “It seems that it’s excessive and unregulated. I would love to see serious reform. There is some being attempted in the US now. This applies to what’s happening in Spain, Portugal and so on. I really didn’t know where it was going to go.”
The other artists did get the odd chance to chip in. Asked whether any of the characters he had played had changed his life, Josh Brolin, star of Stone’s W, quipped: “I played George W Bush and I am still confused.” As the Wall Street team emerged from the Palais, they might have remarked on the unruly, bad-tempered scrum trying to make its way into the afternoon screening at the Salle Debussy.
"I didn't think this was anything special," a puzzled American punter said. "It's by the guy who directed Ringu," his friend replied as an elbow collided with his sternum. Irish cineastes might have been more likely to describe Hideo Nakata's Chatroom, an insidious, ingenious piece, as the new film from the guy who wrote Hunger.
Nakata, a Japanese horror specialist, has taken an experimental play by Enda Walsh, the well-known young Cork-born writer, and made of it something weird, confusing and undeniably cinematic. Dealing with the visitors to an online chat room, the picture blurs the virtual world with the actual to spread unease and make some genuinely serious points about self-harm and suicide. The picture, starring Aaron Johnson from the recent hit Kick Ass, will stir controversy on its commercial release.
