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Articles: 'I feel like a puppet master': Almodovar

Posted by admin on Thursday, May 13, 2004 - 06:24 AM

CANNES, FRANCE -- A Spanish director opened the Cannes Film Festival for the first time ever with the screening last night of Pedro Almodovar's Bad Education, which is being shown out of competition. Unlike his upscale dramas of recent years, Bad Education is a deliberate throwback to a kind of vintage film noir. It retains the filmmaker's favourite themes of theatrical performance, transvestites and fraternal relationships, but unlike his recent work, there are almost no women in sight.
Set in 1980, with a flashback to 15 years earlier, it weaves a tale of two men, a director and an actor, who knew each other when they were schoolboys, and one of them was victim of a pedophile priest. The 52-year-old Almodovar's hair has gone grey in the five years since he won the directing prize at Cannes with All About My Mother. Now that he's older, he says, he feels more comfortable visiting the kind of film noir subjects he enjoyed in his youth. His film, he said, is based on his fascination with Catholicism, and religious rituals are use to illustrate the relationships between the characters. Although the film presents priests as pedophiles and murderers, he says he does not view the film as "anti-clerical" because "it is not necessary to be anti-clerical, because the Church is destroying itself every time it speaks to the press. In Spain, at any rate, the Church's worst enemy is the Church." Asked how he felt about opening the Cannes event, instead of competing in it, Almodovar said he was filled with a sense of vertigo: "I feel like a puppet master who, with a sly grin, is about to draw back the curtains for the hundreds of emotions that we are going to feel during this festival." This year's jury president, director Quentin Tarantino, is film royalty - a Hollywood director with a raw passion for cinema history who also makes popular films. To cite one of the famous bits of dialogue in his movie Pulp Fiction, though, the intractably American director might best be described as "Royale with cheese." Unlike some of the more intellectual jury chiefs of recent years, from Francis Coppola to David Cronenberg, Tarantino shoots from the lip, as he showed yesterday at the ritual meet-the-jury press conference. Tarantino, dressed in a black jacket, jeans and a white T-shirt, looked physically huge beside several of the other eight jurors, an effect emphasized by his modified Frankenstein haircut, and exaggerated by the petite, delicate French beauty, Emmanuelle Béart, who sat next to him. Tarantino is also loud, demonstrative and forceful. (At one point, Belgian actor and jury member Benoît Poelvoorde began mimicking Tarantino's emphatic gestures.) Cannes, said Tarantino, "is just heaven, all right? It's heaven. And we all dream of going to heaven." For him, he added, it's a place where "dreams come true." It started when his 1992 film Reservoir Dogs was entered into the official selection, and was realized when Pulp Fiction won the Palme d'or two years later. Coming back as jury president was even better: "If there's another level beyond heaven, that's where I'm at." Not everything Tarantino said was likely to be in synch with the French sensibility. The French embrace political matters with a passion, but Tarantino apparently disdains them. Asked how he felt the jury would be affected by the "politics" of Michael Moore's Farenheit 9/11 and its distribution problems, he shrugged off the question: "I think it's going to fall down on whether or not we like the movie - politics be damned, if that's possible." In a similar fashion, he brushed off the impending protests by part-time arts workers: "Where I'm coming from is this: Since I don't really understand the issue and since I'm not a French citizen, I really don't have to understand it. My job is to watch films." He was much more excited talking about his first visit to Cannes in 1992, when he saw a poster for the Belgian film Man Bites Dog, starring Benoît Poelvoorde. Tarantino saw an image of a gun from a low angle, blood and a pacifier, and said to himself at the time, and now relates in a booming voice: "That movie looks cool!" Tarantino watched the movie once without subtitles "and didn't understand a word but completely understood it," and then attempted to sneak into a second screening when he was stopped with a shove to his chest by one of the red bow-tied security guards. "Hey, I'm from L.A." said Tarantino. "So I took a swing at the guy, all right? And about five red bow-tied guys jump on top of me - all right? . . . And I'm swinging at them, and they're swinging at me, and they bring in the head of security, . . . all right? When it was reported that a fight broke out at the second screening of Man Bites Dog, well, that was me. Man Bites Dog is a film that causes people to be violent." Things took a slightly more serious turn when a Taiwanese journalist, who noted that Tarantino was known as a champion of Asian cinema, wanted to know how he felt about big Hollywood movies such as Kill Bill knocking Asian films out of competition in their own market. Tarantino responded that it was "easy, popular and fun" to demonize Hollywood, but the truth is, national cinemas depend on national star systems, and audiences wouldn't go to see simply auteur films. A film industry depends on "action, horror, auteur, comedies, bad comedies, the whole range. Everything else is just a boutique." A couple of times, Tarantino was challenged by a fellow juror, the English actress Tilda Swinton (The Deep End, Orlando), formerly a juror at the short-film program at Cannes and a Sundance Film Festival judge. No national film culture, she said, could consist only of Hollywood imports either, because audiences, critics and filmmakers would lose their ability to believe in an alternative. She also challenged Tarantino's idea of Cannes as "heaven." "It's the world, which is better than heaven," she said. Reporters will be listening for the sounds of breaking crockery coming from the jurors' quarters. Rain clouds rolled in, but otherwise tension lifted last night when a last-minute deal between festival organizers and protesting French arts workers averted disruptions of the opening ceremony. The protesters, who are opposed to the French government's unemployment cuts to actors, dancers and stagehands, agreed not to upstage the film festival in exchange for a chance to walk up the red carpet with the bejewelled celebrities, and make their case before the world's television cameras. The conflict had become increasingly tense in the past few days, as Cannes added another 1,000 policemen to its usual security roster, with word that hundreds of protesters had boarded buses headed for the Riviera. Farm workers and other unions announced they would back the arts groups. From the other side, earlier this week, the mayor of Cannes, Bernard Brochant, led a demonstration by shopkeepers, hoteliers and restaurant owners opposed to the arts protests. The two-week festival represents about 10 per cent of the total annual earnings of local businesses, with the central site, the Palais des Festivals, employing 12,000 and bringing about $700-million (U.S.) into the local economy each year. In the 11 months since the conflict started, French part-time entertainers have taken over studios during live television broadcasts and closed down arts festivals in Avignon and Arles.

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