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J'ai jamais fait de prono moi hein...

Quand je dis "represent", c'est que je suis content qu'elle y soit.

Au vu de la bande-annonce, ça a l'air d'aller.

Tkt, on verra bien.

Persepolis est en effet un film admirable à bien des égards. Ca a applaudi pendant 1/4 d'heure avec une Satrapi en larmes (avec des fleurs dans le soutif). Le film touche à l'intime de la réalisatrice mais reste un splendide témoignage d'une époque et de la situation d'un pays. Je trouve ça un peu désolant de s'interroger sur les motivations pour faire le film et de s'indigner de vouloir le diffuser assez largement.

Ca aurait largement sa place au palmarès et c'est parti pour être un succès public énorme.

La connerie du jour :

J'avais réussi à choper deux places pour Persepolis, mais comme l'autre personne à qui je devais filer l'autre place s'est pointé en retard devant le palais suite à une galère, bah, c'était trop tard quand elle est arrivée, et on s'est fait refouler à l'entrée.

Aïe, qui est le fautif? pointe du doigt!!

Dear France, Thanks for Being You. With Gratitude and Affection, the Rest of Us.
Pathé Renn Productions


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By A. O. SCOTT and MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: May 24, 2007

CANNES, France, May 23 — It may not seem surprising that the leading French film festival should feature a number of movies that show France in a flattering light, but the cinematic love letters to the country popping up on Cannes screens this year are not self-addressed billets-doux, even though high self-regard is a longstanding Gallic tradition. Given that a theme of the recent French presidential election was a perceived national identity crisis, it is possible to imagine the present cluster of pro-French movies by non-French directors as a kind of friendly reassurance. Hey, these filmmakers seem to be saying, don’t be so down on yourselves. We love you.
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T.T. Filmmühely

A scene from the Hungarian director Bela Tarr’s “Man From London,” based on a Georges Simenon novel.

And so Hou Hsiao-hsien, from Taiwan, paid tribute in “The Flight of the Red Balloon” both to a classic French children’s movie and to the everyday loveliness of Paris. And Michael Moore, as if saying merci for his Palme d’Or three years ago, turned a paean to the French welfare state into the comic centerpiece of “Sicko,” his indictment of the American health care system. So benevolent is the French government, in Mr. Moore’s knowingly wide-eyed account, that it not only treats its citizens’ maladies, but also does their laundry. (Not all the time, of course. Only when there’s a new baby in the house. But still.)

And if a Frenchman should undergo a paralyzing stroke, the government apparently will provide two beautiful women to sit at his bedside, one to help him communicate and the other, a physical therapist, to help him regain use of his mouth by blowing kisses and extending her tongue. (These women are supplementary to the mother of the man’s children, his mistress and the lovely amanuensis dispatched by his editor to help him write a book.)

Granted, state largess is not really the theme of “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” Julian Schnabel’s moving and gorgeously shot adaptation of the best-selling memoir by Jean-Dominique Bauby, who was editor in chief of Elle magazine in France before suffering a stroke at 42. What Mr. Bauby had to endure — full consciousness and complete immobility, apart from the ability to open and close one eye — is horrifying under any circumstances.

But the setting of “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” is not incidental to its spirit, which is exuberant as well as poignant, and remarkably unsentimental given the subject. Even in his frozen state Mr. Bauby (played by the kinetic French actor Mathieu Amalric) remains a sensualist, an ironist and a bon vivant: very much a Frenchman, you might say. And the matter-of-fact benevolence with which he is treated by most of the people around him also seems, in Mr. Schnabel’s rendering, to be a reflection of national character as much as individual temperament.

Nor does it seem incidental that France is the only place shown in color in Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud’s “Persepolis.” The film, with dialogue in French (some of it spoken by Catherine Deneuve) is an animated adaptation of Ms. Satrapi’s memoir, which deals with her and her family’s experiences in Iran before and after the 1979 revolution.

Tehran, where young Marjane struggles with the effects of war and political repression, and Vienna, where she dabbles in adolescent rebellion, are both drawn in black and white. France, where Ms. Satrapi has lived for much of her adult life, does not figure much in the narrative apart from a few framing scenes at a Paris airport. But the full palette of colors makes it clear that in France the heroine can at last be fully herself. A. O. SCOTT

And Now for Something Completely Meditative

One of the energizing and occasionally enervating consequences of attending an international film festival is that it forces you to face your own impatience. Much commercial cinema moves at a fairly accelerated clip, with anxious camerawork and nanosecond editing that verges on a flicker effect. Confronted with the longer takes and languorous pacing of some of the festival’s offerings, viewers hooked on speed cinema rush toward the exit, fall asleep in their seats or try to slow their biorhythms down, way down. Such was the case with “The Man From London,” by the Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr, making his first appearance in the main competition with this austere black-and-white work that had the press fleeing like panicked slaughterhouse cattle.

It isn’t bad, not at all. But it moves with Mr. Tarr’s characteristic deliberation, with leisurely shots that find the camera wending through confined interiors and a few exteriors for minutes at a time without interruption. Based on a novel by Georges Simenon and set in some undefined port town, it involves a night guard who watches over a shipping dock from inside a glassed-in tower. One evening he witnesses the accidental murder of a man holding a suitcase. He retrieves the case, which turns out to be stuffed with enough cash (£60,000) to make at least one Hungarian lose his bearings. An investigation ensues, but mostly there are long takes and long walks and the remarkable transformation of film space into a state of mind.

There are moments when watching one of Mr. Tarr’s films that it seems as if he doesn’t just want you to look at his images, but to somehow enter into them alongside the characters. The unhurried, at times somnolent movement of the camera as it prowls around the guard sitting at home in a pool of shimmering light or hunkered down in the moody shadows of his watchtower allows you to examine every mote of dust, nick in the wall, groove in his face. This experience with cinematic duration can be transporting, as in Mr. Tarr’s masterpiece “Satantango,” which after 420 trippy minutes makes you feel you have broken through to the other side and taken up residence inside the film with the mud and lyrical drear.

If anything, at 135 minutes “The Man From London” feels too short. The production began on a tragic note when Humbert Balsan, one of the producers, committed suicide after shooting commenced in 2005, leading to financial crises. It’s hard to know how his death or the money woes affected the film, but it feels unfinished, as if a reel or the inspiration for this specific story had gone missing. As always with this filmmaker, there are moments of crystalline beauty, but they remain isolated from one another. And, for all the time you spend with the guard, you never get inside his head. As his wife, the British actress Tilda Swinton (dubbed into Hungarian) proves distracting, but she certainly looks right at home amid the beautiful bleakness. MANOHLA DARGIS

Ca dit quoi en gros, pas le courage de tout lire.

Bah que la sélection cannoise a été taillée pour conforter la France dans son image de pays sympa.

C'est du délire total et une insulte aux comités de sélection, sans compter les artistes impliqués.

c'est intéressant, je trouve, de voir l'impression que ça peut donner depuis l'étranger.
je suis pas sûr qu'on ne dirait pas la même chose d'un festival international US, s'il s'y trouvait des signes similaires.

sur sicko, vous-mêmes parlez de pub pour la france...