2007 Cannes Film Festival Competitors

Climates: A dowdy university instructor Isa is an inattentive husband to his younger, TV-business wife Bahar. Self-absorbed and selfish, Isa only communicates in the most rudimentary way, while she, similarly, detaches into crying jags and juvenile behavior.

Marie Antoinette: “All eyes will be on you,” says the Austrian duchess, Maria Theresa to her youngest daughter Marie Antoinette. The film, marketed for a teen audience, is an impressionistic retelling of Marie’s life as a young queen in the opulent and eccentric court at Versailles. The film focuses on Marie Antoinette, as she matures from a teenage bride to a young woman and eventual queen of France.

Days of Glory: Algeria, 1943, through Italy and France, to Alsace in early 1945, with a coda years later. Arabs volunteer to fight Nazis to liberate France, their motherland. We follow Sad, dirt poor, an orderly for a grizzled sergeant, Martinez with some willingness to speak up for his Arab troops; Messaoud, a crack shot, who in Province falls in love with a French woman who loves him back; and Abdelkader, a corporal, a budding intellectual with a keen sense of injustice. The men fight with courage against a backdrop of small and large indignities: French soldiers get better food, time for leave, and promotions. Is the promise of liberty, equality, and fraternity hollow?

Colossal Youth: This is scrambled story telling in slow motion. Often I found myself thinking about Beckett. The dialogs appear irrelevant, having to do with mundane personal life experiences, friends and relatives. These are poorly educated people after all. In fact one better pay close attention to the prate. It is through small revelations and asides in conversations that we pick up the clues to the life of Ventura and those close to him. The quiet and unpretentious acting, the extended takes, the absence of broad movements, the occasional lengthy silence, all can be soporific. Yet one needs to listen carefully.

According to Charlie: A few days pass in the lives of very different characters in a small town on the scenic Atlantic coast. The town mayor, a teacher, a scientist, a crook, physiotherapist and their families all see their miserable lives cross paths with the others in almost two hours of tedious film. An unhappy portrait of a town which should know better, as the characters themselves refuse to take hold of their lives to make something of them. The scientist tries to convince the teacher to join his team, but the essential problem is shared by all – an incapacity to face their own lives, to care for those around them and themselves. A dull, badly worked out film which should have remained in the editing room considerably longer than it did. Do not let the enigmatic title seduce you into the darkness, there is not much to see.

Flanders: In a gray and un-charming part of France, these farming people live. Life is quiet. You start a relation with the girl in the neighbor house. Life would have remained quiet if it wasn’t for war. There’s a shocking contrast here, between the silent life and the brutal battles in Africa. It directly affects also life at home, in an almost as brutal way. Can the things we’ve done, those wounds, be healed? Maybe they can after all. A very tense drama, which is sometimes hard to watch. Well acted, and very far from mainstream action, especially when it comes to psychological violence.

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