1905 Film Network News On May 17, local time, the fourth day of the 77th Cannes Film Festival. Director Tsui Hark's "Shanghai Night" met with everyone in the Cannes classic unit, and the starring Zhang Aijia appeared at the post-screening meeting. Godard's other posthumous work, The Playplay, also had its world premiere in the unit. In the main competition, the new film "The Good Kind" by Egges Lanthimoss and Emma Stone "The Stone" and Paul Schrader's "Oh, Canada" opened the main competition of the first weekend of the festival.
Premiered in 1984, Shanghai Night is a pioneering work by Tsui Hark Film Studio, starring Zhang Aijia, Zhong Zhentao and Ye Qianwen. The film tells a love story before and after the Anti-Japanese War in the thirties of the last century, combining various genres such as song and dance, music and comedy, creating a strong sense of drama and stage in the rampage. A few loud and never messy highlights are spectacular. The leading actor Zhang Aijia attended the on-site exchange, she said that Tsui Hark and Shi Nansheng founded the film studio to make some films that were different from those on the market, and there were many changes in the restored version, especially the re-dubbing of different dialects, and Tsui Hark also paid special tribute to the late songwriter Huang Zhan.
French cinema master Jean-Luc Godard passed away in 2022. However, due to the large number of semi-finished materials left behind during his lifetime, his new works have been released one after another in the past two years. The trailer for the movie 'False War' that will never exist is out in 2023. This "Screenplay" also inherits Godard's late thinking on the image itself. In less than 20 minutes, the film uses a variety of materials such as videos, books, paintings, and various sounds, and greatly modifies and remakes its original form to express its thoughts on the propositions of time and violence in the film.
In the main competition unit, the world premiere of "The Good Kind" by the director of "The Lobster" and "Poor Thing" by Lancemos was held in the afternoon local time. The film stars Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Jesse Plemon and other Hollywood movie stars. The 165-minute film consists of three fables that continue the previous style of grotesque and not lacking violence. However, so far, the film has received little positive reviews in Chinese-language media, while English-language media have given overall good reviews but not as good as the previous two films.
American director Paul Schrader has always been a close collaborator of Martin Scorsese. The last time he was selected for the main competition of the Cannes Film Festival was in 1988. This new film, "Oh, Canada," tells the story of a filmmaker in the twilight of his life. The film constantly shuttles between memories and shooting, and his memories are quietly misaligned with the real scene. However, this loose meta-cinematic concept does not seem to play its due role in the emotions of the characters and the rhythm of the narrative, and the film's premiere reviews are extremely mediocre.
So far, this year's Cannes main competition unit can be called a chicken feather. Tomorrow, can Jia Zhangke's new work "Merry Generation" turn the tide on Golden Saturday? Let's wait and see.