Three days into the Cannes film festival, Marion Cotillard is already being tipped for the Best Actress award for her performance in Jacques Audiard’s acclaimed “Rust & Bone,” which is based on characters in Craig Davidson’s eponymous short story collection. Cotillard plays a trainer of Orca whales at the Marineland Park who has both of her legs amputated after one of them attacks her. In her despair, she turns to a Belgian bouncer and bare-knuckle fighter (Matthias Schoenaerts) who earlier rescued her from a drunken brawl in a club. They become lovers, but she finds that he still wants sex outside their tentative relationship. “It’s a passionate and moving love story which surges out of the screen like a flood tide,” raves The Guardian’s film critic Peter Bradshaw.
The lunatics will take over the asylum again: actress Lily Rabe (“Mona Lisa Smile, “All Good Thing”) has been cast as “America’s sweetheart” Mary Pickford in a biopic that will incorporate her co-founding of United Artists in 1919 with Douglas Fairbanks (shortly to become her husband), Charlie Chaplin, and D.W.Griffith. Co-producers Julie Pacino and Jennifer DeLia, who announced the film in Cannes, are currently casting the other main parts, reports Variety. Maybe “The Artists”’s Jean Dujardin could play Fairbanks?
Quoth Eminem: “Where’s Kanye when you need him?” Actually, says Vulture, Kanye West is in Cannes preparing to premiere his short film-cum-installation on Wednesday. Titled “Cruel Summer,” it’s “an immersive seven-screen experience” that was inspired by the G.O.O.D. compilation album produced by Mannie Fresh. If you’re planning to be on the Croisette, you can get tickets here.
Robin Williams, Mila Kunis, Peter Dinklage, Melissa Leo, and James Earl Jones have been lined up for “The Angriest Man In Brooklyn,” which is being presold at the festival. According to Screen International, it’s about “a stand-in doctor who tells an obnoxious patient he has 90 minutes to live.” Phil Alden Robinson (“Field of Dreams”) will direct the comedy, which begins production in September. “The idea of being that nasty and funny is a gift,” Williams said.
The Weinstein Company has been on a spree at Cannes. Before the festival started, writes Anne Thompson, it bought John Hillcoat’s “Lawless,” a Depression-era crime drama about Virginian bootleggers; Andrew Dominik’s gangster film “Killing Me Softly,” starring Brad Pitt; and “Quartet,” first-time director Dustin Hoffman’s film about ageing opera stars (Michael Gambon, Maggie Smith, and Billy Connolly) living in a retirement home.
On the eve of the festival, the Weinsteins picked up the Australian film “The Sapphires,” directed by Wayne Blair, which tells the factual story of four Aboriginal girls whose pop group entertained American troops in Vietnam in 1968. It was written by Keith Thompson and the dramatist Tony Briggs, whose mother and other family members performed with the band.
TWC has also bought “The Oath of Tobruk,” Bernard Henri-Levy’s documentary about the last eight months of Muammar Gafaddi’s dictatorship in Libya, Anne Thompson reports. Another acquisition is Christian Vincent’s culinary comedy “Haute Cusine,” based on the true story of Danièle Delpeuch (Catherine Frot), who became the personal chef of the late French president François Mitterand (played by novelist Jean D’Ormesson). Her cooking made her one of his favorites, which did not endear her to other members of his household. According to Thompson, the company is also “expected to nab James Gray’s unfinished New York immigrant drama ‘Low Life.’” It stars Joaquin Phoenix, Cotillard, and Jeremy Renner.
In an unexpected bit of casting news, it was announced that Terence Davies has chosen the Lancashire fashion model and actress Agyness Deyn to play Chris Guthrie in the Scottish coming-of-age drama “Sunset Song,” based on Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s 1932 novel about life and love on a rural farming community on the eve of World War I. Peter Mullan will play her widowed father, who casts incestuous eyes on Chris. The multi-national production, sales, and distribution company Fortissimo Films has acquired the international rights to the $8m movie,writes the Liverpool Echo. Read more ARTINFO news on "Sunset Song" here and on Deyn here.