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Indy’s going to Cannes – but where are all the Brits?
By Nick Roddick, Evening Standard 29.04.08
Cracking the whip: Harrison Ford is back in the fourth Indiana Jones film
Short-supply: artist Sam Taylor-Wood
Snubbed: Keira Knightley and Mathew Rhys in The Edge Of Love
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The veteran Terence Davies and the artistturned-short film-maker Sam Taylor-Wood will be the only two directors flying Union Jacks on the Cannes Croisette next month. It's hardly a proud return for the UK Film Council.
Among the 19 names revealed yesterday for the 62nd Cannes Film Festival were Clint Eastwood (Changeling), Wim Wenders (The Palermo Shooting), Atom Egoyan (Adoration) and former winners the Dardennes brothers (Le Silence de Lorna). For the second year running, no Brits will be competing for the prestigious Palme d'Or.
Davies, who has twice before competed at Cannes (with The Long Day Closes and The Neon Bible), is showing his new film, Of Time and the City, out of competition in a “special screening”. Described as “a poetic journey” through the 62-year-old director's native Liverpool, the film was made on a shoestring as part of a programme to promote the city's stint as European Capital of Culture.
Taylor-Wood, meanwhile, competes in the short film category with Love You More, which is based on a story by Patrick Marber, and was produced by the late Anthony Minghella. It stars the rising British stars Andrea Riseborough and Harry Treadaway.
Davies's return to the director's chair after almost a decade is welcome but not likely to set the festival alight, and Taylor-Wood's film is an intriguing mix of talent — but it's still just a short. There is no denying the fact that 2008 is a disappointing year for Britain.
Of the major homegrown films of the summer, it was hoped that John Maybury's The Edge of Love, about the relationship between Dylan Thomas and his muse, Caitlin, which stars Matthew Rhys, Sienna Miller and Keira Knightley, would make it to Cannes. Instead, that film will now open this year's Edinburgh Film Festival in its new mid-June slot.
Disappointingly, there's no sign of Hunger, the controversial story of IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands, which marks the directorial debut of the Turner Prize-winning artist Steve McQueen. It could yet show up in the Director's Fortnight, the edgier sidebar which last year proved an ideal platform for another British directorial debut, the Joy Division movie Control.
Brideshead Revisited, starring Ben Whishaw as Sebastian Flyte, is expected to take a page out of Atonement's book and go for a Venice unveiling.
Cannes 2008 will continue the tradition of giving the summer's first big Hollywood blockbuster the full red-carpet treatment. Steven Spielberg (61) and Harrison Ford (65) will be climbing the steps of the Palais des Festivals next month to mark their return after almost two decades to the hit series of their youth with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the fourth film in the franchise.
Indy gets an out-of-competition screening, as does Vicky Cristina Barcelona, the latest from another veteran moviemaker, Woody Allen.
Steven Soderbergh's two-part Che Guevara biopic will be screening as a work-in-progress, with Benicio Del Toro playing the revolutionary icon. But it will be hard for most Brits to get too excited.
The 62nd Cannes Film Festival opens on 14 May
www.festival-cannes.fr
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