Thursday Movie Picks - Cannes Favorites

Written as part of the weekly blogathon hosted by Wandering Through The Shelves. Join in the fun by picking three movies that fit the week's theme and writing a bit about them!

Ah, France! I've never been, but my Dad was a French teacher for many years, so I grew up learning the language. Somewhere along the way, the country kind of took on a mythic quality for me. And when I started becoming a cinephile, well, it became very near the center of the universe! The Cannes Film Festival, held every year in May in the south of France, is the most prestigious film festival in the world, and the Golden Palm (or Palme d'or) the most prestigious prize. Not that the various festival juries are completely infallible, but looking at a list of Palme d'or winners is to look at a list of some of the greatest films of all time. Hell, even looking at a list of films that have played in competition for the Palme is pretty damn impressive! So it's REALLY HARD to pick only three favorites out of the bunch. But that is the assignment, and complete it I shall!

Marty (Delbert Mann, 1955) Yes, the very first film to win the Palme d'Or (prior to this the festival's top prize was the far more unwieldy Grand Prix du Festival International du Film) is also one of my favorites. Marty is a wonderfully humanist portrait of a middle-aged single man who falls in love with a mousy schoolteacher one night. That's it. That's the whole thing. But Paddy Chayefsky's beautiful script gets at that feeling we've all had when you've resigned yourself to never being truly happy for a hundred different reasons, and puts it into the persons of Ernest Borgnine and Betsy Blair, looking decidedly far from the movie star glamour we're used to seeing on screen. It's a touching tale of two lost souls improbably finding each other, even when they thought they would never find anyone, small-scale and quiet, but all the more impactful for that. Marty is also one of only two films to win the top prize at both Cannes and the Oscars, and the only one to win the Palme and the Best Picture Oscar (The Lost Weekend won before Cannes changed its top prize to the Palme).

All That Jazz (Bob Fosse, 1979) Three musicals have won the Palme d'Or, and they couldn't possibly be more different from each other (the other two are the candy-colored melodrama The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and the realist tragedy Dancer in the Dark). They're all visionary works, but for my money this is the most visionary of them all. The crowning achievement of the legendary Bob Fosse's career, All That Jazz takes a kaleidoscopic look at what it's like to be a super-talented, egotistical, drug-addicted artist. Roy Scheider gives a searing performance as the Fosse character (named Joe Gideon), and Fosse surrounds him with some of the most brilliant dance numbers ever set on film. All That Jazz is, simply put, a marvel - it should be too much, but that turns out to be just the right amount.

Amour (Michael Haneke, 2012) Love. What does that word mean? At what point does love go from being selfless to selfish? These are the questions at the heart of Haneke's unsparing Amour, one of the most grueling films I've ever seen. But there is so much truth in this film. Hard, brutal truth, to be sure, but truth. You can only feel for Georges and Anne as she suffers one stroke, and then another, and then basically starts dying in painfully slow motion in front of him. Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva are so in touch with their characters that it never feels as though we are watching actors playing parts, but instead watching these people actually go through these horrible things. I've never been so emotionally wrecked by a movie as this, and that's why I love it so. We need films like this, to see humanity in all its beauty and pain, to understand every horrible decision that we may eventually have to make, to prepare ourselves for the end, because it comes for all of us.