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      Chie Hayakawa Imagines a Japan Where the Elderly Volunteer to Die

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      The premise for Chie Hayakawa’s film, “Plan 75,” is shocking: a government push to euthanize the elderly. In a rapidly aging society, some also wonder: Is the movie prescient?TOKYO — The Japanese film director Chie Hayakawa was germinating the idea for a screenplay when she decided to test out her premise on elderly friends of her mother and other acquaintances. Her question: If the government sponsored a euthanasia program for people 75 and over, would you consent to it?“Most people were very positive about it,” Ms. Hayakawa said. “They didn’t want to be a burden on other people or their children.”To Ms. Hayakawa, the seemingly shocking response was a powerful reflection of Japan’s culture and demographics. In her first feature-length film, “Plan 75,” which won a special distinction at the Cannes Film Festival this month, the government of a near-future Japan promotes quiet institutionalized deaths and group burials for lonely older people, with cheerful salespeople pitching them on the idea as if hawking travel insurance.“The mind-set is that if the government tells you to do something, you must do it,” Ms. Hayakawa, 45, said in an interview in Tokyo before the film’s opening in Japan on Friday. Following the rules and not imposing on others, she said, are cultural imperatives “that make sure you don’t stick out in a group setting.”With a lyrical, understated touch, Ms. Hayakawa has taken on one of the biggest elephants in the room in Japan: the challenges of dealing with the world’s oldest society.Ms. Hayakawa with other winners at the Cannes Film Festival last month.Gareth Cattermole/Getty ImagesClose to one-third of the country’s population is 65 or older, and Japan has more centenarians per capita than any other nation. One out of five people over 65 in Japan live alone, and the country has the highest proportion of people suffering from dementia. With a rapidly declining population, the government faces potential pension shortfalls and questions about how the nation will care for its longest-living citizens.Aging politicians dominate government, and the Japanese media emphasizes rosy stories about happily aging fashion gurus or retail accommodations for older customers. But for Ms. Hayakawa, it was not a stretch to imagine a world in which the oldest citizens would be cast aside in a bureaucratic process — a strain of thought she said could already be found in Japan.Euthanasia is illegal in the country, but it occasionally arises in grisly criminal contexts. In 2016, a man killed 19 people in their sleep at a center for people with disabilities outside Tokyo, claiming that such people should be euthanized because they “have extreme difficulty living at home or being active in society.”The horrifying incident provided a seed of an idea for Ms. Hayakawa. “I don’t think that was an isolated incident or thought process within Japanese society,” she said. “It was already floating around. I was very afraid that Japan was turning into a very intolerant society.”To Kaori Shoji, who has written about film and the arts for The Japan Times and the BBC and saw an earlier version of “Plan 75,” the movie did not seem dystopian. “She’s just telling it like it is,” Ms. Shoji said. “She’s telling us: ‘This is where we’re headed, actually.’”That potential future is all the more believable in a society where some people are driven to death by overwork, said Yasunori Ando, an associate professor at Tottori University who studies spirituality and bioethics.“It is not impossible to think of a place where euthanasia is accepted,” he said.Chieko Baisho plays an elderly woman in “Plan 75.”Loaded FilmsMs. Hayakawa has spent the bulk of her adult years contemplating the end of life from a very personal vantage. When she was 10, she learned that her father had cancer, and he died a decade later. “That was during my formative years, so I think it had an influence on my perspective toward art,” she said.The daughter of civil servants, Ms. Hayakawa started drawing her own picture books and writing poems from a young age. In elementary school, she fell in love with “Muddy River,” a Japanese drama about a poor family living on a river barge. The movie, directed by Kohei Oguri, was nominated for best foreign language film at the Academy Awards in 1982.“The feelings I couldn’t put into words were expressed in that movie,” Ms. Hayakawa said. “And I thought, I want to make movies like that as well.”She eventually applied to the film program at the School of Visual Arts in New York, believing that she would get a better grounding in moviemaking in the United States. But given her modest English abilities, she decided within a week of arriving on campus to switch to the photography department, because she figured she could take pictures by herself.Her instructors were struck by her curiosity and work ethic. “If I mentioned a film offhandedly, she would go home and go rent it, and if I mentioned an artist or exhibition, she would go research it and have something to say about it,” said Tim Maul, a photographer and one of Ms. Hayakawa’s mentors. “Chie was someone who really had momentum and a singular drive.”After graduating in 2001, Ms. Hayakawa gave birth to her two children in New York. In 2008, she and her husband, the painter Katsumi Hayakawa, decided to return to Tokyo, where she began working at WOWOW, a satellite broadcaster, helping to prepare American films for Japanese viewing.“The mind-set is that if the government tells you to do something, you must do it,” Ms. Hayakawa said.Noriko Hayashi for The New York TimesAt 36, she enrolled in a one-year film program at a night school in Tokyo while continuing to work during the day. “I felt like I couldn’t put my full energy into child raising or filmmaking,” she said. Looking back, she said, “I would tell myself it’s OK, just enjoy raising your children. You can start filmmaking at a later time.”For her final project, she made “Niagara,” about a young woman who learns, as she is about to depart the orphanage where she grew up, that her grandfather had killed her parents, and that her grandmother, who she thought had died in a car accident with her parents, was alive.She submitted the movie to the Cannes Film Festival in a category for student works and was shocked when it was selected for screening in 2014. At the festival, Ms. Hayakawa met Eiko Mizuno-Gray, a film publicist, who subsequently invited Ms. Hayakawa to make a short film on the theme of Japan 10 years in the future. It would be part of an anthology produced by Hirokazu Kore-eda, the celebrated Japanese director.Ms. Hayakawa had already been developing the idea of “Plan 75” as a feature-length film but decided to make an abridged version for “Ten Years Japan.”While writing the script, she woke up every morning at 4 to watch movies. She cites the Taiwanese director Edward Yang, the South Korean director Lee Chang-dong and Krzysztof Kieslowski, the Polish art-house director, as important influences. After work, she would write for a couple of hours at a cafe while her husband cared for their children — relatively rare in Japan, where women still carry the disproportionate burden of housework and child care.After Ms. Hayakawa’s 18-minute contribution to the anthology came out, Ms. Mizuno-Gray and her husband, Jason Gray, worked with her to develop an extended script. By the time filming started, it was the middle of the pandemic. “There were countries with Covid where they were not prioritizing the life of the elderly,” Ms. Hayakawa said. “Reality surpassed fiction in a way.”Ms. Hayakawa at Cannes with two actors in “Plan 75,” Hayato Isomura, left, and Stefanie Arianne, who plays Maria.John Phillips/Getty ImagesMs. Hayakawa decided to adopt a subtler tone for the feature-length movie and inject more of a sense of hope. She also added several narrative strands, including one about an elderly woman and her tightknit group of friends, and another about a Filipina caregiver who takes a job at one of the euthanasia centers.She included scenes of the Filipino community in Japan, Ms. Hayakawa said, as a contrast to the dominant culture. “Their culture is that if somebody is in trouble, you help them right away,” Ms. Hayakawa said. “I think that is something Japan is losing.”Stefanie Arianne, the daughter of a Japanese father and a Filipina mother who plays Maria, the caregiver, said Ms. Hayakawa had urged her to show emotional restraint. In one scene, Ms. Arianne said, she had the instinct to shed tears, “but with Chie, she really challenged me to not cry.”Ms. Hayakawa said she did not want to make a film that simply deemed euthanasia right or wrong. “I think what kind of end to a life and what kind of death you want is a very personal decision,” she said. “I don’t think it’s something that is so black or white.”Hikari Hida More

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      ‘The Triangle of Sadness’ Wins Palme d’Or at Cannes

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      CANNES, France — The satire “Triangle of Sadness,” from the Swedish director Ruben Ostlund, won the Palme d’Or at the 75th Cannes Film Festival at a ceremony here on Saturday. A blunt, ugly sendup of class politics, the movie had sharply divided critics.The awards ceremony ran a relatively painless 90 or so minutes, another reminder that the emphasis at Cannes remains on the movies themselves, not the accompanying circus. Held inside the magnificent Grand Lumière Theater inside the festival’s headquarters — with the nine-person jury watching from the stage — the awards confer critical legitimation and generate much-needed public relations for movies that, years into the pandemic, are headed into a still-difficult world for art cinema.The Grand Prix — the festival’s second prize — was split between “Close,” from the Belgian director Lukas Dhont, and “Stars at Noon,” from the French auteur Claire Denis. “Stars at Noon” was brutalized by critics, but it wasn’t wholly a shock that it won an award: Vincent Lindon, the president of this year’s jury, has appeared in several of Denis’s movies. “Close,” a critical and audience favorite about two 13-year-old boys whose friendship is tragically tested, drew warm applause from the Lumière audience.The Jury Prize, the third prize, was split between two very different dramas: “EO,” a heartbreaker about a donkey from the Polish auteur Jerzy Skolimowski, and “The Eight Mountains,” a coming-of-age story from the Belgian filmmakers Felix Van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch. Skolimowski, 84, began his acceptance speech by thanking (and naming) all six of his donkeys — including a little beauty called Taco. For her part, Vandermeersch seemed to surprise her co-director and partner by repeatedly kissing him right before he started his acceptance speech.The South Korean director Park Chan-wook won the director prize for “Decision to Leave,” an entertainingly twisty thriller (which riffs on Hitchcock’s “Vertigo”), which was a critical favorite. “This is so cool,” Park said in English on taking the stage, though he also added an expletive.The screenplay award was given to the engrossing (and chatty) drama “Boy from Heaven,” from the Swedish director Tarik Saleh. The film traces the political intrigues swirling around a young Egyptian student, a Sunni Muslim, soon after he begins studying at a powerful religious university. After accepting his award, Saleh dedicated his prize to young Egyptian filmmakers: “Raise your voices, and tell your stories.”In one of the bigger surprises of the evening, the best actress went to Zar Amir Ebrahimi, the star of the widely disliked true-crime drama “Holy Spider,” from the Iranian-born director Ali Abbasi. She plays a journalist who faces the indifference and misogyny of the police as she tracks down a serial killer. The best actor prize was given to Song Kang-ho, the brilliant South Korean actor (“Parasite”), for his sensitive, soulful performance as a baby trafficker in “Broker,” the latest from the Japanese auteur Hirokazu Kore-eda.A special prize to commemorate the festival’s 75th anniversary was given to Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, who were in competition again with “Tori and Lokita,” about two undocumented African immigrants in a cruel, profoundly inhospitable Belgium. The Dardennes are among the most justly honored filmmakers in the history of Cannes, having won the Palme twice (for “Rosetta” in 1999 and “The Child” in 2005). This award was richly deserved. More

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      Which Cannes Films Have the Best Oscar Odds?

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      Movies from Park Chan-wook, Lukas Dhont and Hirokazu Kore-eda could be what academy voters are looking for. But don’t count out “Top Gun: Maverick.”CANNES, France — Last year at the Cannes Film Festival, there was one question on everybody’s lips: “What’s the next ‘Parasite’?” You can see why people wondered, since that Bong Joon Ho film had used its Palme d’Or win to jump-start a historic Oscar campaign.But if last year’s festival had an heir to “Parasite,” it proved to be a very unlikely one.Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s talky drama “Drive My Car” didn’t win the Palme d’Or (it settled for a best-screenplay honor) and wasn’t anyone’s idea of the biggest contender coming out of Cannes. Still, after year-end critics’ groups went for it in a major way, “Drive My Car” picked up huge Oscar nominations for picture, directing and adapted screenplay in addition to one for best international film, the category it won.So as this year’s Cannes nears its end with no one film standing head and shoulders above the rest, I think that rather than searching for the next “Parasite,” it would be wiser to ask: What’s the next “Drive My Car”? In other words, which movie from this year’s Cannes crop could keep on building buzz and capitalize on the academy’s growing international user base to snag major Oscar nominations?I see three notable contenders. Foremost among them is “Close,” which is hotly tipped to pick up a major award at the fest on Saturday. It’s the second feature from the Belgian director Lukas Dhont, and it follows two 13-year-old boys as their intense friendship begins to unravel. Some crucial reviews in Variety and IndieWire have been notably mixed, calling out one of the film’s melodramatic plot twists, but Oscar voters have never minded melodrama — in fact, they often crave it, and the most ardent fans of “Close” consider it to be the four-hankie entry of the festival. A24 bought the film on the eve of its premiere, so expect a robust fall push.The South Korean director Park Chan-wook deserved Oscar notice for his twisty 2016 masterpiece “The Handmaiden,” and though his new Cannes film “Decision to Leave” isn’t quite on that level, it’s still a well-directed affair that could see plenty of awards attention. A Hitchcockian romantic thriller, “Decision to Leave” stars Park Hae-il as a detective investigating a murdered man’s widow (Tang Wei) who, in her own femme fatale way, seems to welcome the stakeout. After the explicit sex scenes of “The Handmaiden,” it’s surprising how chaste the director’s follow-up is, but that may actually work to the movie’s favor with older Oscar voters.Our Coverage of the Cannes Film Festival 2022The Cannes Film Festival returns with its typical glitz, glamour and red-carpet looks, and with nearly 50 movies projected for the event.Politics and Grace: In Cannes, politics and polemics are always part of the movie mix. But there is still room for scenes of lyrical beauty.Oscar Odds: Which movie from the Cannes crop could capitalize on the academy’s growing international user base to snag major nominations? There are three top contenders.David Cronenberg: The body-horror auteur shared some thoughts on aging and his new film “Crimes of the Future,” which premiered at the festival.‘Elvis’: Baz Luhrmann brought the King to Cannes with a hyperventilated, fitfully entertaining and thoroughly deranged biopic.Ask a Cameraman: The festival is known for its elongated standing ovations. One of the men tasked with filming them explained what it takes to capture those moments.Hirokazu Kore-eda scored the Palme d’Or in 2018 for his sensitive drama “Shoplifters,” which went on to compete for the international-film Oscar; though it lost to the Netflix-funded juggernaut “Roma,” I suspect a film like “Shoplifters” would play better today and contend for more nominations across different categories. Keep an eye on Kore-eda’s “Broker,” then: This affectionate character study stars “Parasite” lead Song Kang Ho as one of two good-natured criminals who try to sell an abandoned baby. At times, the movie is so sweet that it verges on gooey, but I doubt the “CODA” wing of the academy will complain.Some other Cannes entries could pop up throughout awards season, including “Armageddon Time,” from the director James Gray, about a middle-class Jewish family whose progressive attitudes mask a willingness to climb a few rungs at the expense of those less privileged. Gray is well-liked in France and may pick up a trophy here, but Oscar voters have yet to break for him in any significant way. Stars Anne Hathaway, Jeremy Strong, and Anthony Hopkins will at least attract attention.Vicky Krieps should already have one Oscar nomination under her belt for “Phantom Thread”: since she was snubbed then, perhaps voters could make it up to her for “Corsage,” in which she’s fun and spiky as the Empress Elisabeth of Austria. I’d also be pleased if critics’ groups rally behind Léa Seydoux as a single mother attempting a tricky romance in Mia Hansen-Love’s “One Fine Morning,” my favorite entry of the festival.Seydoux is also quite good in David Cronenberg’s “Crimes of the Future,” where she stars opposite Viggo Mortensen and Kristen Stewart, but the film may prove too out-there for awards voters; ditto “Triangle of Sadness,” from “The Square” director Ruben Ostlund, though that class comedy does provide some of the most gonzo gross-out sequences of the year and contains a memorable supporting turn from Woody Harrelson.Léa Seydoux and Viggo Mortensen in “Crimes of the Future.”Nikos Nikolopoulos/NeonWhat about the expensive Hollywood movies that premiered at Cannes? “Elvis” hails from the director Baz Luhrmann, who managed an Oscar breakthrough with “Moulin Rouge” but whose last film, “The Great Gatsby,” earned nominations only for its costumes and production design. The glittery “Elvis” seems likely to continue that trend: Reviews have been polarizing, and though up-and-comer Austin Butler impresses as Elvis Presley, young hunks usually face an uphill battle in the lead-actor category. (And the less said about the misbegotten supporting performance from Tom Hanks as Elvis’s manager, the better.)The last time George Miller was at Cannes, he premiered “Mad Max: Fury Road,” which went on to earn 10 Oscar nominations (including picture and director) and ultimately picked up six statuettes. Action movies rarely fare that well with Oscar, but Miller broke the mold, and he’s made something else unique with “Three Thousand Years of Longing,” his new film about a djinn (Idris Elba), a scholar (Tilda Swinton) and the unique love that blooms between them. It’s got drama, fantasy, romance, comedy … and you’ll either thrill to all of that, or find it a bit overstuffed. The tech elements of the film deserve notice, but other categories could be a long shot.And then there’s “Top Gun: Maverick,” which launched on the Croisette with a flyby from fighter jets and an opaque conversation with star Tom Cruise. This long-in-the-making sequel is earning stellar reviews and it’s expertly directed. If the academy really wants to push well-done blockbuster material into the best picture race, this could be the summer’s strongest hope. “Drive My Fighter Jet,” anyone? More

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      Cannes 2022: ‘Elvis’ Iss Remixed by Baz Luhrmann

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      The super-splashy biopic presents the story of the King as told by a (fake) colonel, a narratively curious choice.CANNES, France — Close to the start of “Elvis,” Baz Luhrmann’s hyperventilated, fitfully entertaining and thoroughly deranged highlight reel of the life and times of Elvis Presley, I wondered what I was watching. I kept wondering as Luhrmann split the screen, chopped it to bits, slowed the motion, splashed the color and turned Elvis not just into a king, but also a savior, a martyr and a transformational American civil-rights figure who — through his innocence, decency, music and gyrating hips — helped heal a nation.In conventional terms, “Elvis,” which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday, can be classed as a biographical portrait, a cradle-to-grave (more or less) story of a little boy from Tupelo, Miss., who became a pop-culture sensation and sad cautionary tale — played as an adult by the appealing, hard-working Austin Butler — despite the evil man, a.k.a. Col. Tom Parker (Tom Hanks), who groomed him. But Luhrmann — whose films include “Moulin Rouge” and “The Great Gatsby” and, um, “Australia” — doesn’t do simple or ordinary. A visual maximalist, he likes to go big and then bigger, and he likes to go super-splashy. Most filmmakers just want to get the shot; the great ones strive for perfection. Luhrmann wants to bedazzle it.The movie’s narrative axis and, strangely, its most vividly realized character is Colonel Parker, whom Hanks embodies with an enormous, obviously false belly, flamboyant jowls, a nose that juts like the prow of a ship and a baffling accent. I would have loved to have listened in on Luhrmann and Hank’s conversations about their ideas for the character; if nothing else, it might have explained what in the world they were after here. I honestly haven’t a clue, although the image of Sydney Greenstreet looming menacingly in “The Maltese Falcon” repeatedly came to mind, with a dash of “Hogan’s Heroes.”Written by Luhrmann and several others, the movie traces Elvis’s trajectory through Parker, a curious choice given that the colonel is the villain of the piece. They meet when Elvis is a young unknown and still under the protective wing of his mother and father. As soon as the colonel sees Elvis perform — or rather, witnesses the euphoric reactions of the shrieking female audiences — he realizes that this kid is a gold mine. The colonel swoops in, seduces Elvis and puts him under his exploitative sway. The rest is history, one that Luhrmann tracks from obscurity to Graceland and finally Las Vegas.Even non-Elvis-ologists should recognize the outlines of this story, as it shifts from the beautiful boy to the sensational talent and the fallen idol. That said, those who don’t know much about the ugliness of Elvis’s life may be surprised by some of the ideas Luhrmann advances, particularly when it comes to the civil rights movement. A white musician who performed and helped popularize Black music for white America, Elvis was unquestionably a critically important crossover figure. What’s discomforting is the outsized role that Luhrmann gives Elvis in America’s excruciating racial history.In the gospel of Elvis that Luhrmann preaches here, the titular performer isn’t only an admirer or interpreter (much less exploiter) of Black music. He is instead a prophetic figure of change who — because of the time he spends in the Black church, Black juke joints and Black music clubs — will be able to bridge the divide between the races or at least make white people shake, rattle and roll. As a child, Elvis feels the spirit in the pulpit and beyond; later, he becomes an instrument for change by copying Black ecstasy and pumping his slim hips at white audiences, sending them into sexualized frenzy.As Elvis ascends and the colonel schemes, Luhrmann keeps the many parts whirring, pushing the story into overdrive. The 1950s give way to the ’60s and ’70s amid songs, pricey toys, assassinations, personal tragedies and the usual rest, though I don’t remember hearing the words Vietnam War. Family members enter and exit, tears are spilled, pills popped. There are significant gaps (no Ann-Margret or Richard M. Nixon), and, outside a nice scene in which the Las Vegas Elvis arranges a large ensemble of musicians, there’s also little about how Elvis actually made music. He listens to Black music and, almost by osmosis and sheer niceness, becomes the King of Rock ’n’ RollWhile Butler pouts, smolders and sweats, he has been tasked with what seems an impossible role. Elvis’s ravishing beauty, which remained intact even as his body turned to bloat, is one hurdle, and so too was his charisma and talent. Butler’s performance gains in power as Elvis ages, particularly when he hits Las Vegas. One insurmountable problem, though, is that Luhrmann never allows a single scene or song to play out without somehow fussing with it — cutting into it, tarting it up, turning the camera this way and that, pushing in and out — a frustrating, at times maddening habit that means he’s forever drawing attention to him him him and away from Butler, even when his willing young star is doing his very hardest to burn down the house. More

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      Cannes 2022: ‘Elvis’ Is Remixed by Baz Luhrmann

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      The super-splashy biopic presents the story of the King as told by a (fake) colonel, a narratively curious choice.CANNES, France — Close to the start of “Elvis,” Baz Luhrmann’s hyperventilated, fitfully entertaining and thoroughly deranged highlight reel of the life and times of Elvis Presley, I wondered what I was watching. I kept wondering as Luhrmann split the screen, chopped it to bits, slowed the motion, splashed the color and turned Elvis not just into a king, but also a savior, a martyr and a transformational American civil-rights figure who — through his innocence, decency, music and gyrating hips — helped heal a nation.In conventional terms, “Elvis,” which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday, can be classed as a biographical portrait, a cradle-to-grave (more or less) story of a little boy from Tupelo, Miss., who became a pop-culture sensation and sad cautionary tale — played as an adult by the appealing, hard-working Austin Butler — despite the evil man, a.k.a. Col. Tom Parker (Tom Hanks), who groomed him. But Luhrmann — whose films include “Moulin Rouge” and “The Great Gatsby” and, um, “Australia” — doesn’t do simple or ordinary. A visual maximalist, he likes to go big and then bigger, and he likes to go super-splashy. Most filmmakers just want to get the shot; the great ones strive for perfection. Luhrmann wants to bedazzle it.The movie’s narrative axis and, strangely, its most vividly realized character is Colonel Parker, whom Hanks embodies with an enormous, obviously false belly, flamboyant jowls, a nose that juts like the prow of a ship and a baffling accent. I would have loved to have listened in on Luhrmann and Hank’s conversations about their ideas for the character; if nothing else, it might have explained what in the world they were after here. I honestly haven’t a clue, although the image of Sydney Greenstreet looming menacingly in “The Maltese Falcon” repeatedly came to mind, with a dash of “Hogan’s Heroes.”Written by Luhrmann and several others, the movie traces Elvis’s trajectory through Parker, a curious choice given that the colonel is the villain of the piece. They meet when Elvis is a young unknown and still under the protective wing of his mother and father. As soon as the colonel sees Elvis perform — or rather, witnesses the euphoric reactions of the shrieking female audiences — he realizes that this kid is a gold mine. The colonel swoops in, seduces Elvis and puts him under his exploitative sway. The rest is history, one that Luhrmann tracks from obscurity to Graceland and finally Las Vegas.Even non-Elvis-ologists should recognize the outlines of this story, as it shifts from the beautiful boy to the sensational talent and the fallen idol. That said, those who don’t know much about the ugliness of Elvis’s life may be surprised by some of the ideas Luhrmann advances, particularly when it comes to the civil rights movement. A white musician who performed and helped popularize Black music for white America, Elvis was unquestionably a critically important crossover figure. What’s discomforting is the outsized role that Luhrmann gives Elvis in America’s excruciating racial history.In the gospel of Elvis that Luhrmann preaches here, the titular performer isn’t only an admirer or interpreter (much less exploiter) of Black music. He is instead a prophetic figure of change who — because of the time he spends in the Black church, Black juke joints and Black music clubs — will be able to bridge the divide between the races or at least make white people shake, rattle and roll. As a child, Elvis feels the spirit in the pulpit and beyond; later, he becomes an instrument for change by copying Black ecstasy and pumping his slim hips at white audiences, sending them into sexualized frenzy.As Elvis ascends and the colonel schemes, Luhrmann keeps the many parts whirring, pushing the story into overdrive. The 1950s give way to the ’60s and ’70s amid songs, pricey toys, assassinations, personal tragedies and the usual rest, though I don’t remember hearing the words Vietnam War. Family members enter and exit, tears are spilled, pills popped. There are significant gaps (no Ann-Margret or Richard M. Nixon), and, outside a nice scene in which the Las Vegas Elvis arranges a large ensemble of musicians, there’s also little about how Elvis actually made music. He listens to Black music and, almost by osmosis and sheer niceness, becomes the King of Rock ’n’ RollWhile Butler pouts, smolders and sweats, he has been tasked with what seems an impossible role. Elvis’s ravishing beauty, which remained intact even as his body turned to bloat, is one hurdle, and so too was his charisma and talent. Butler’s performance gains in power as Elvis ages, particularly when he hits Las Vegas. One insurmountable problem, though, is that Luhrmann never allows a single scene or song to play out without somehow fussing with it — cutting into it, tarting it up, turning the camera this way and that, pushing in and out — a frustrating, at times maddening habit that means he’s forever drawing attention to him him him and away from Butler, even when his willing young star is doing his very hardest to burn down the house. More

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      George Miller on ‘Furiosa’ and His New Cannes Film

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      In between screenings and interviews, the 77-year-old director is working on the next film in the “Mad Max” universe, and he seems to be having a ball.CANNES, France — On Tuesday, just a few days after the premiere of his latest movie, “Three Thousand Years of Longing,” at the Cannes Film Festival, the Australian director George Miller is heading home to direct “Furiosa,” the fourth installment in his phantasmagoric “Mad Max” series.“The cast is already out there,” he said when I interviewed him Saturday. “They’ve been shooting second unit.” Miller has been working on “Furiosa” in between screenings, interviews and having what looks like a very good time at the festival. “Nowadays, modern communication allows you to be there,” he said, obviously pleased with his multitasking. “It’s really great.”Miller is a Cannes veteran, but while he’s served on three of the festival’s juries in 30 years, only two of his movies have been presented here, both out of competition. The last time was for his masterpiece “Mad Max: Fury Road,” which set the festival afire in 2015. Audiences and critics alike gave the movie plenty of love, and it received a whopping 10 Oscar nominations, winning half a dozen statuettes. Predictably, though, it lost best picture to “Spotlight,” which encapsulates the kind of self-flattering, ostensibly serious work the academy has historically embraced.I suspect that “Fury Road” was simply too far out, too uncategorizable and narratively playful, to suit old-guard academy members. It was probably also too much fun. Fun is for kiddie movies, which presumably is why Miller did win an Oscar for “Happy Feet,” a fanciful yet classically Milleresque, technically flawless tale filled with deep feelings and great questions that tethers environmental catastrophe to the story of a cute tap-dancing penguin named Mumble. “When we congregate with strangers in the dark,” Miller once said, “it’s a kind of dreaming.” Sometimes those dreams are nightmares.Hugh Keays-Byrne, center, in “Mad Max: Fury Road,” Miller’s masterpiece.Jasin Boland/Warner Bros.It takes about a day to fly between Australia and France. Miller, who turned 77 in March, will be making the trip twice in less than a week, but if he was tired, he didn’t look it. To escape the din of the crowds, we met on the terrace at the office of FilmNation, which is handling the new movie’s international distribution and sales. A colleague had described Miller as professorial and alerted me that he was prone to digressions, a trait that the filmmaker cheerfully volunteered as he issued forth on movies, Einstein, the forces of the universe, Joseph Campbell and how cellphones use relativity to work.Einstein makes a special appearance in “Three Thousand Years,” which is as nearly unclassifiable as its director. As the title suggests, the movie spans millenniums to tell the sweeping story of an ancient djinn (Idris Elba) and a modern-day scholar, Alithea (Tilda Swinton). She’s traveled to Turkey for a conference — Alithea studies narratives, puzzling through them just like Miller does — but her plans take an unforeseen turn when she opens a peculiar blue-and-white-striped bottle that she’s bought, inadvertently releasing the djinn from a long captivity. What follows is a fantastical fable of love and suffering, imprisonment and release, mythology and the material world.The djinn tries to grant her three wishes, but it gets complicated. Instead, he starts recounting episodes from his long life, all involving women and intrigues that led to his repeat captivity. He tells stories, but so does Alithea, who also narrates. As the movie continues, it shifts between the C.G.I.-heavy past and the present, always returning to the djinn and Alithea, who grow progressively close. “Three Thousand Years” is essentially about storytelling, which means it’s about desire: The yearning expressed in the djinn’s tales, the longing awakened in Alithea and the craving the viewer has to find out what happens next.“Three Thousand Years” is based on “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye,” a story in a collection from the British writer A.S. Byatt. Miller doesn’t read fiction (he did as a kid), but someone rightly sussed that he might like the book. He was especially taken with “Nightingale” — “it kept playing in my mind as stories do” — and secured the rights. Miller said that Byatt was surprised he had singled out this story, which she’d written quickly. But it was also grounded in her own life history. She too had once gone to a conference in Istanbul. Everything in the story is true, she told him, except for the djinn.Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba in “Three Thousand Years of Longing,” the new Miller film that played at Cannes.MGMMiller wrote the script with his daughter, Augusta Gore; his wife, Margaret Sixel, edited the movie. She’s edited several of his other movies, winning an Oscar for “Mad Max: Fury Road.” Miller clearly likes creating in a familial setup and has worked with some crew members repeatedly, including the cinematographer John Seale, who shot “Three Thousand Years” and “Fury Road.” Miller has been with one of his collaborators, Guy Norris, for 41 years; Norris was the stunt coordinator on “The Road Warrior” (a.k.a. “Mad Max 2”) and is serving as the second-unit director on “Furiosa.”Norris holds a special place in the “Mad Max” history because of an accident he had while driving a stunt car for “The Road Warrior.” One of the signatures of the “Mad Max” series is the elegantly choreographed, seemingly gravity-defying practical stunts, and this one involved Norris driving into two other vehicles and then into a ditch. It didn’t go as planned and he flew through the air the wrong way, missing his high-tech cushioning (a pile of cardboard boxes) and badly hurting himself — ouch. In the video of the accident (it’s available online), you can see that Miller was among the first to race to Norris’s side. You might expect that from any decent person, except that in this case the visibly worried filmmaker was also a doctor.Miller, who grew up in a small town in Queensland, Australia, attended medical school with his fraternal brother, John. (They have two other brothers.) A movie lover since childhood, Miller made his first film, a short, while in school. By the time he made his first feature, a low-budget wonder called “Mad Max,” he was a doctor. His day job came in handy, he explained, because every time the production ran out of money, he worked as an emergency physician to make money. He practiced for about a decade, only finally quitting when he made “Road Warrior.” Filmmaking, he thought, “was a really interesting thing to do, but there was no real career.”He and his former producing partner Byron Kennedy (who died in 1983) had made “Mad Max” out of what Miller describes as “pure curiosity.” As Miller talks, it’s clear that curiosity remains a driving force for him. One particularly lovely story that he shares hinges on a lecture at school delivered by the architect and designer Buckminster Fuller. “He synthesized so much that was rumbling around loosely my mind,” said Miller, who was struck by Fuller’s remark that “I am not a noun, I seem to be a verb.” Suddenly, Miller wasn’t a medical student, he was simply studying medicine — which liberated him.Miller has been going and shooting and moving ever since. He too is a verb, I think, and not a noun, and shows no sign of stopping. Listening to him spin story after story, I suddenly thought I knew why he didn’t read fiction — or at least I thought I did, so I asked if his imagination crowded his head, leaving no room for other’s people’s stories. “Definitely,” he said. “If I’m walking down the street, there’s some story or something going in my head. As I’ve often said to my family, ‘If I’m the guy sitting in the nursing home in a wheelchair staring at the ceiling, probably there’s some sort of story going on.’”For now, though, it’s just go, go, go. More

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      Cannes Cameraman Explains How He Shoots Standing Ovations

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      Jean-Baptiste Cortet explains what he focuses on and why (partly to goad the audience) when he’s filming those premiere close-ups.CANNES, France — Imagine a cameraman pointing his camera directly at you.Now imagine it moving closer to your face. No, even closer than that. So close you could almost forget that this moment is shared not just between you and the cameraman, but 2,300 other people who surround you, applaud you and are hanging on your every gesture.That’s what it feels like when you’re caught in one of the Cannes Film Festival’s infamously elongated standing ovations, in which each twitch of your face — whether from pride, embarrassment or boredom — is captured by the cameraman and broadcast to the Grand Théâtre Lumière’s movie screen, where your supersized reactions play instead of the closing credits.Even for celebrities, the scrutiny of the Cannes cameraman can be a lot to withstand. This week, Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba teared up in front of the camera after the premiere of “Three Thousand Years of Longing”; last year, long into a sustained ovation for “Annette,” the cameraman panned to a cast member, a bored Adam Driver, as he lit a cigarette. In 2019, as the applause for “Parasite” refused to die down after several minutes, director Bong Joon Ho was even caught on camera leaning over to his lead actor and complaining, “I’m hungry.”We are on Minute 5 of the ANNETTE standing ovation and Adam Driver has begun smoking a cigarette pic.twitter.com/F56r0W0nGL— Kyle Buchanan (@kylebuchanan) July 6, 2021
      The mechanics of the Cannes standing ovation have long fascinated civilians, but as more clips from those moments go viral on social media, it’s the sustained close-ups that have begun to spur the most debate. “The Cannes standing ovation camera is simply too much to watch,” said one Twitter user, evidently suffering from secondhand embarrassment. “I would honestly just melt if it was on me.”According to Jean-Baptiste Cortet, it isn’t easy to be the one wielding the camera, either. “I can see how uncomfortable they are, and I feel it,” Cortet said. “I would not want to be in their spot in this moment!”Cortet, an excitable, apple-cheeked Parisian who met me on a Cannes terrace wearing a Jeff Koons T-shirt and cuffed bluejeans, has spent three decades working for Cannes and began filming the festival’s standing ovations seven years ago. And yes, he knows what people think. “I saw on the internet that people were making fun of it!” he said, ready to clear the air: He isn’t nearly as close to those celebrities as it looks.By way of demonstrating, Cortet positioned me against the terrace railing and backed a few paces away while brandishing an imaginary camera. “I make sure that I’m as far away as I can, and I zoom in to do the close-up,” he told me, speaking through a translator. He said he would never dare put his camera lens just inches from someone’s face: “Comedians hate that. Especially actresses!”In many ways, Cortet is the standing ovation’s secret weapon. The audience does not simply clap into a vacuum for several minutes: They are guided and goaded by Cortet, who continually searches for new things to shoot and broadcasts those close-ups onto the big screen behind him.“The cameraman has the responsibility to carry the emotion of the room,” Cortet said. And those emotions can run very high at Cannes, especially when the film ends and the lights first go up. “This is the time when I’m able to catch an embrace, a discussion between two people — I can navigate through these different moments,” Cortet said. “I like it more when it’s messy.”A few minutes into those candid moments, Cortet locks into a routine: He will go down the row of actors, filming each one for a surprisingly sustained amount of time, a phase he calls “the eye line.” This is the bit that often extends the standing ovation to record-breaking levels, especially if there’s a large ensemble cast and a famous director present. Then, once everyone has had a solo moment in front of Cortet’s camera, they can pair off in new combinations, a phase that pads the ovation stopwatch even more.And just over Cortet’s shoulder at most of the premieres is the festival director, Thierry Frémaux, who pushes the cameraman even closer to the stars while exclaiming, “Close-up! Close-up!” Shooting the eye line is “a mix of me feeling the emotion and knowing how to film it, and Thierry knowing who to aim at,” Cortet said, adding with a laugh, “I prefer when I’m alone.”Some Cannes regulars, like Spike Lee and David Lynch, are now familiar with Cortet and wink or nod when he goes in for the shot. “These directors, who are usually on the other side of the camera, they recognize the difficulty,” he said. “It’s a pleasure for me to see they have empathy for the situation.”But not every director can stand it. During the ovation for “The French Dispatch,” Cantet moved into the aisle to block Wes Anderson when he noticed the auteur eyeing the exits.“I have to refrain the directors from leaving!” he said. “They want to trespass past me.”Cortet doesn’t usually enter the theater until 10 minutes from the ending, so it’s sometimes difficult for him to pick up on how well the film has gone over until the crowd leaps from their seats. “I don’t feel the same emotions as the people in the room,” he said. “I don’t understand the why’s of this raw moment.”Still, he’s a quick learner. At the premiere of “Armageddon Time,” when the director James Gray burst into tears, Cortet got a little misty, too.“It happens many times: I feel such a strength of emotion carry to me that tears fall from my eyes,” he said. “And then I can’t see anything because it’s too blurry! More

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      A Cannes Faux Pas, as Tik Tok Comes to Town.

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      CANNES, France — Shorts made on TikTok haven’t been seen on the big screen in the Grand Théâtre Lumière just yet, but last week the video app was still accused of a Cannes faux pas: attempting to influence a jury’s decisions.In March, TikTok announced that it would be an official partner of the Cannes Film Festival this year. Thierry Frémaux, the festival’s artistic director, was quoted saying that the collaboration was “part of a desire to diversify the audience” of the festival. Billboards that read “ceci n’est pas un film, c’est un vidéo TikTok” loom over the awnings across the street from one of the main movie theaters here.TikTok also announced a competition for short films shot on its app. Although not an official festival event, the competition had a jury headed by the Cambodian-born filmmaker Rithy Panh, a survivor of the Khmer Rouge regime who has been a regular presence at Cannes with films like “The Missing Picture” and “Exile.”But Panh quit as the jury’s president on Wednesday, he said, two days before the awards were to be given out, only to return to his role on Friday morning, hours before the awards ceremony. Panh said by email that he had quit because TikTok had “seemed to want to influence our decision about prize winners,” and that he returned to his post when the company agreed to respect the jury’s verdict.“Their world, it’s not the art world,” Panh said in an interview later on Friday afternoon, sitting on a couch on the deck of the beachfront restaurant where he and his four fellow jurors had just given out the awards.While declining to name names, Panh said some employees at TikTok had wanted to select different winners from the jury’s short list. It was “multiple people from TikTok,” he said. “One or two were very aggressive, very stubborn, very closed minded.”TikTok issued a statement that seemed to attribute any trouble to ordinary disagreements in selecting winners. “As with any creative competition where the selection of a winner is open to subjective interpretation, there may be differences of artistic opinion from the independent panel of judges,” the statement said.Even after receiving a guarantee that the jury’s choices would be honored, Panh said his first instinct was not to return to the jury. But he said he ultimately came back for the filmmakers. Some, he added, had traveled to Cannes from as far away as Japan or New Zealand. “You just can’t break their dream, you know?”The ceremony on Friday was hosted by the social media personality Terry LTAM, who asked the jurors about their experiences watching the shorts. The Sudanese filmmaker Basma Khalifa said the judging process changed her perspective on the platform. “I didn’t give TikTok enough credit, I don’t think, for how much you can do with it,” she said.Filmmakers from 44 countries submitted films to the competition, all between 30 seconds and three minutes in length. The top prize was shared between two directors: Mabuta Motoki, from Japan, whose film showed a man meticulously building a wooden tub, and Matej Rimanic, a 21-year-old Slovenian director who submitted a comedic black and white short in which two people flirt using a paper airplane. Rimanic said that working on social media platforms had sparked his desire to make movies.“I started posting videos on Vine, then I went to Instagram and then TikTok came around, so I started posting on TikTok,” he said in an interview shortly after he received his award, a gold-colored statuette shaped like TikTok’s logo. “Now during this transition of me posting on videos on social media, I discovered my love for filmmaking.”It was his first time at Cannes, either to attend the festival, or to visit the city. “I hope that one day I can come here with my feature film,” he said. “I only make comedies because the world needs more laughter.” More