Cannes checks in to 'Mekong Hotel'
Film festival taps Apichatpong's latest work for special screening
Apichatpong Weerasethakul will make his return to the Cannes Film Festival next month with a new work, “Mekong Hotel”, which will be featured in an out-of-competition special screening.
It was among the more than 50 titles announced yesterday for the prestigious French festival’s 65th edition.
“Mekong Hotel” has been a long-gestating project by Apichatpong.
“It’s definitely not going to be a film that will just have a foreign movie star for the sake of it,” Apichatpong told UK newspaper The Guardian in February 2011. “It’s going to be an exchange of ideas, of images, of ... I don’t know. It’s like a game for me: the river, the pigs and Tilda Swinton.”
Earlier this year the filmmaker collaborated with British actress Swinton in curating the quirky Film on the Rocks festival in Phuket. He has a long history at Cannes, going back to 2002, when he won the Un Certain Regard prize with “Blissfully Yours”. He won the Palme d’Or top prize in 2010 with “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives” and took the Jury Prize in 2004 with “Tropical Malady”. He served on the Cannes main jury in 2008.
Among the competition this year will be films by Canadian director David Cronenberg, Briton Ken Loach and Austrian Michael Haneke.
Cronenberg was tipped for “Cosmopolis”, a thriller starring Robert Pattinson as a billionaire asset manager, Loach for “The Angel’s Share” about an ex-offender on the mend and Haneke for “Amour” about a woman hit by a stroke.
“Moonrise Kingdom”, directed by Wes Anderson and starring Bruce Willis, will also compete for the top prize and open the festival on May 16.
Cannes’ general delegate Thierry Fremaux selected the line-up from among some 1,700 submissions, from the biggest names in film right down to first-time directors from North America, Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa.
Star-wise, Nicole Kidman is tipped to make a double appearance after Fremaux warned the Australian actress was “going to surprise us”.
Kidman holds lead roles this year in two very different thrillers: “Stoker” by South Korea’s Park Chan-wook, and the 1960s-set “The Paperboy” by US director Lee Daniels.
The French press is betting on Marion Cotillard, star of three Cannes-tipped films: “Of Rust and Bone” by Frenchman Jacques Audiard, “Low Life” by US director James Gray about an immigrant woman tricked into a life of burlesque, and Christopher Nolan’s new Batman movie, “The Dark Knight Rises”.
“On the Road” by the Brazilian Walter Salles is also in competition. Based on the Jack Kerouac novel, it stars Kirsten Dunst, Kristen Stewart and Viggo Mortensen.
Other strong contenders are Australia’s Andrew Dominik with the gangster flick “Killing Them Softly” starring Brad Pitt.
Veteran Frenchman Alain Resnais, who will shortly turn 90, is expected to bring his new film “Vous n’avez encore rien vu” (“You Haven’t Seen Nothing Yet”).
The Palme d’Or jury is headed by Italian director Nanni Moretti, who scooped a Palme d’Or for “La stanza del figlio” (“The Son’s Room”) in 2001. He said he would be “looking for films that are still able to surprise me”.
The jury for Un Certain Regard category for new talent is to be chaired by the British actor and director Tim Roth.
Berenice Bejo, co-star of the hit French silent movie “The Artist”, is to host the festival’s opening and closing ceremonies.
And the closer is Claude Miller’s “Therese Desqueyroux” – a tribute to the French filmmaker who had barely finished editing the movie when he died this month aged 70.
