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Cannes Day 9: Lots of Lynch blood and Benicio’s bushy beard

As I sit here in my hotel room, listening to the clang-clank-clatter from the street below, where recycling trucks are picking up load after load of glass bottles from last night’s revelry, I realize that it’s Cannes Day 9 and this will likely be my last missive from the Croisette. Every year, the fest just whizzes by. And while I’m happy to get home to my family, friends, and felines, I always feel a bit of sadness when the circus is over and it’s time to pack up the trunks.

The buzz around town the last few days has been a mixture of: on-going concern that no U.S. distributors have made a single acquisition of any official Cannes films; that the movies have been noticeably weaker than in years past; and that we Yanks all feel like we’re breaking the bank every time we buy so much as a sandwich. Add to that the threat of pickpocketing I know two people who have suffered from slippery-handed street bandits this year and you can understand why Cannes 2008 has felt like something of an off year.

But not totally underwhelming, of course. Since my last PopWatch check-in, Dave and I made that 8:30 a.m. screening of Clint Eastwood’s The Exchange, which, as some of you brought up in response to Lisa Schwarzbaum’s lovely musings on the film, is undergoing a confusing bit of name-change. The catalog calls it The Changeling, the press notes call it The Exchange, and the French call it L’Echange the latter the only title to appear in the opening credits. At Tuesday’s press conference, producer Brian Grazer explained that the current, if not final, name is indeed The Exchange, so I’m going with that. Whatever Clint and the gang end up calling the movie, it seems to have a bright future ahead of it, at least according to some trade critics who rewarded it with glowing reviews. The audience at the screening Dave and I attended seemed to agree. That seemed to please Monsieur Cleeeeeent, who appears to have enjoyed himself here, laughing and smiling during TV interviews and lavishing praise on his leading lady, Angelina Jolie.

On Tuesday evening, Dave and I also hit a lively cocktail party for Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, Marina Zenovich’s terrific documentary that HBO will premiere on June 9. There was some hopeful chatter that the film’s controversial, Oscar-winning subject would make an appearance on the Croisette. But in the end, he did not. Can’t say I blame him, really. While the movie does ultimately reflect rather positively on Polanski, he himself did not participate in its making.

Dave and I kicked off Wednesday morning with a packed screening of Surveillance, Jennifer’s Lynch’s twisted, gruesome serial-killer thriller starring Bill Pullman and Julia Ormond. This is a flick whose opening sequence was so brutal and Texas Chainsaw-ish that I had to cover my eyes. (Still, it didn’t traumatize me quite as much as Funny Games did at Sundance. Ooof.) It’s Lynch fille’s first film since 1993’s Boxing Helena. Fifteen years later, she’s still every bit as fascinated by the morbid, black-comedy side of humanity. Makes you wonder what kind of discussions she and papa Lynch i.e. Blue Velvet/Wild at Heart/Twin Peaks mastermind David had over their morning cornflakes when she was growing up.

Last night was the much-anticipated premiere of Steven Soderbergh’s four-and-a-half hour Benicio Del Toro starrer, Che. Getting into the theater was the usual fight-to-the-death scramble in a country that proudly eschews organized queuing. (Ask my husband who is French. He’ll back me up.) The sprawling, Spanish-language biopic is essentially two movies, shown in succession here with one 15-minute intermission. (During which the audience was treated to complimentary brown-bag dinners of sandwiches, agua, and Kit Kats. Very thoughtful indeed.) The first part chronicles the Argentine-born guerrilla leader’s role in Fidel Castro’s Cuban Revolution. The second half deals with his failed attempt to bring Marxism to Bolivia, where he was killed in 1967. As I sat in my seat, watching what has to be Soderbergh’s most ambitious passion project yet, I was amazed at how uncannily Del Toro (left) captured a physical likeness of the iconic revolutionary. And there’s no question that Soderbergh (right) knows how to make a movie look spectacular. But as the minutes ticked by and I don’t need to remind you that there were 268 of them I kept waiting for the emotion to kick in some sort of dramatic rendering of who Ernesto Guevara was and why he devoted his life to this particular cause. I’ll leave …

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