TWO CANNES favourites made returns to La Croisette at the weekend, with new features.
Mike Leigh, winner of the Palme d'Or in 1996 for Secrets and Lies, offered attendees another wry, improvised comedy, Another Year. Woody Allen, never a winner at the festival, but greatly loved in France, attended the premiere of his bulkily titled You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger.
Both men were in fine form at their respective conferences as they chewed over death, politics and personal enmity.
“I don’t want to reach 100 with an aluminium walker and dribbling,” Allen said, when reminded that Manoel de Oliveira, the Portuguese director, now 102, presented a film at the festival, “but if I could be like him I would love to do that. My relationship with death remains the same: I am strongly against it.”
You Will Meet a Tall Dark Strangerfinds Anthony Hopkins playing a man who, unable to face to ageing, takes up with a much younger woman. Obviously aware Allen himself is married to a woman 35 years his junior, journalists asked repeated questions about the director's feelings on growing old.
“I find it a lousy deal,” he said. “There is no advantage to getting older. I’m 74 now. You don’t get smarter. You don’t get wiser. You don’t get more mellow. You don’t get more kindly. Your back just hurts more. It’s a bad business getting older and I would advise you not to do it.”
Whereas the Allen film, playing out of competition, had a mixed response from critics, Another Yearwas greeted with enthusiastic applause and looks like a real contender for prizes.
Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen play a loveable middle-class couple who put up with all manner of aggravation from friends and family.
Leigh used the press conference to reignite his feud with a British journalist. The first question came from Richard Brooks of the Sunday Times.
“I thought it was a terrific film,” Brooks said. “I know in the past we have had our differences . . .” Before Brooks could finish, Leigh began growling at him.
“I don’t want to answer any of your questions and you know why. On to the next question. I don’t want to answer any questions from you, and you know why.”
The hangdog director was happy – or perhaps just willing – to discuss whether a Conservative prime minister might stimulate creative anger in British cinema.
“I don’t know the answer to that,” he said. “Certainly if there is any correlation between the anger we have felt as a result of what’s happened in the last few days and the anger that is a necessary ingredient for an artist, then that will add fuel to the fire.”
Elsewhere at the weekend, tribute was paid to Michael Dwyer, the late Irish Timesfilm correspondent, who diligently covered the Cannes Film Festival for over a quarter of a century.
Simon Perry, chief executive of the Irish Film Board, recalled Dwyer fondly in his speech welcoming visitors to a reception, co-hosted by Culture Ireland, celebrating new Irish film.
“I looked around beforehand and realised somebody was missing,” Perry said afterwards.
