Atom Egoyan's films really sell for 7 figures?

I read earlier today that Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisition Group had nabbed the latest from Atom Egoyan, but IndieWire is reporting (and maybe I missed this detail when I read it elsewhere) that Sony "negotiated the low seven figure deal" for Chloe, which premiered to lukewarm reception at Toronto last month. As of 27 September, Egoyan's last film Adoration has yet to cross $300,000 at the domestic box office, and that was a Sony release as well. I suppose Julianne Moore, Amanda Seyfried and Liam Neeson are a draw, but remember, Chloe is a remake of Anne Fontaine's abysmal Nathalie... from 2003, and that film had Fanny Ardant, Emmanuelle Béart and Gérard Depardieu. I have yet to see a film I wouldn't describe as a waste of my time from Fontaine, and while that's certainly not a claim I could make for Egoyan, his recent output has been dismal (and not exactly profitable). It's quite possible though that a low seven figure deal for worldwide rights is a modest deal. We'll just have to wait until spring to see how well this pays off.

Resnais en février

Kimstim/Kino will be throwing four Alain Resnais films from the 80s on your shelves on 19 February 2008. The titles include I Want to Go Home (1989) with Gérard Depardieu and Geraldine Chaplin; Life Is a Bed of Roses [La vie est un roman] (1983) with Fanny Ardant, Vittorio Gassman, and Chaplin; Love unto Death [L'amour à mort] (1984) with Ardant; and Mélo (1986), also with Ardant. I'd have rather Criterion announced Last Year at Marienbad, but take what you can get.

Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before

Paris je t’aime - dir. Various - 2006 - France

Here's problem presented in the anthology, Paris je t’aime. The short film format is something that either these famed directors have never truly worked in before or that feature-length narratives have clouded their memory of. Most of the directors here have decided to spoil their five minutes with a cheap gimmick, presenting something in one way, only to “surprise” us with a totally different understanding of what we just saw. Alfonso Cuarón is the most guilty, using his now signature single-take to show a dialogue between Nick Nolte and Ludivine Sagnier where Mademoiselle Sagnier discusses how “Bruno” is holding her back and she’s wanted Nolte to “do this” for a really long time. Much to our relief, they aren’t planning on fucking, and Bruno isn’t her boyfriend. Instead, Nolte is her father, and he’s finally going to babysit baby Bruno. Nolte has become strangely typecast as the crusty father or father-in-law of the French (see Four Days in September and Clean), solidified now with Cuarón’s nice-looking but dumb “Parc Monceau.” On the flipside of this, Richard LaGravenese’s (A Decade Under the Influence, Living Out Loud) “Pigalle” (those who know Paris will recognize this as the “red light district”) plays with the same elements of false presentation in a surprisingly effective manner as married actors Bob Hoskins and Fanny Ardant add some spice into their romantic life.

The other problem presented here is that many of the directors figured: short time, big sentimentality. In Gurinder Chadha’s (Bend It Like Beckham) “Quais de Seine,” a teenage boy skips out on his rude friends to help a Muslim girl. Various lessons in forced tolerance follow. Even in Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas’ “Loin de 16ème,” the otherwise-lovely tale of Catalina Sandino Moreno’s excursion to the sixteenth arrondissement results in an unfortunate I-knew-that-was-coming moment that just about ruins the beautiful shots of Moreno running through the subway system.

To save you the trouble of having to endure the lousy entries of the eighteen, here are the ten I could handle (and I do mean "could handle," not "enjoyed"):

- Gus Van Sant’s “Le Marais” with Gaspard Ulliel, Marianne Faithfull, Elias McConnell
- The Coen brothers’ “Tuileries” with Steve Buscemi
- Christopher Doyle’s “Porte de Choisy” with Barbet Schroeder (I’m not sure this one is particularly “good,” but it’s something)
- Isabel Coixet’s “Bastille” with Miranda Richardson, Sergio Castellitto, Leonor Watling, Javier Cámara
- Nobuhiro Suwa’s “Place des Victoires” with Juliette Binoche, Willem Dafoe, Hippolyte Girardot (which is actually worth it for the shot at the end of the film of Binoche holding a glass of wine up to Gena Rowlands)
- Olivier Assayas’ “Quartier des Enfants Rouges” with Maggie Gyllenhaal, Joana Preiss
- Oliver Schmitz’s “Place des Fêtes” with Aïssa Maïga, Seydou Boro
- LaGravenese’s “Pigalle” with Hoskins, Ardant
- Wes Craven’s “Père-Lachaise” with Emily Mortimer, Rufus Sewell, Alexander Payne
- Alexander Payne’s “14ème Arrondissement” with Margo Martindale

“Le Marais,” “Quartier des Enfants Rouges,” and “14ème Arrondissement” are the only ones I’d say I "liked" in case you were wondering.

Images and Trust

Nathalie... - dir. Anne Fontaine - 2003 - France/Spain

There's something terribly calculated about Nathalie..., a French star vehicle from director Anne Fontaine (Comment j'ai tué mon père, Nettoyage à sec). I'm terribly skeptical of star vehicles in the first place. When you get three big French stars in a film that takes three years to come to the United States, something's wrong. And wrong, indeed, is the film Nathalie... As a regular film viewer, we tend to trust the images less and less. Aside from the obvious fact that the images are constructed by a person who has chosen the framing, lighting, color, etc., it has become obvious that audiences today don't want cohesive films and endings; they want surprise and awe. Now, as for awe, I can't blame them for this. But surprise and trickery are hardly substitutes for old fashioned dramatic conclusion. To put Natahlie... off the hook for a minute, it's hardly as treacherous as certain other films that rely on this element of surprise.

From the earliest moments of the film, we cannot trust Nathalie... Catherine (Fanny Ardant) has planned a surprise birthday party for her husband Bernard (Gérard Depardieu), but he can't make it. He "missed his flight," which we already assume to scream affair. The set-up is so familiar: a beautiful, middle-aged bourgeois woman plans an event for her husband, he can't make it, nor does he realize this event was intended to bring some life into their failing marriage. Catherine later listens to Bernard's voice mails, in which a young woman, of course, thanks him for the great night. Though she does confront him, she begins a ploy to hire a prostitute (Emmanuelle Béart) to have an affair with him and report back to Catherine about the details. The real indication of the final deceit of the film comes when "Nathalie" first reports back to Catherine. We don't see Nathalie or Bernard fuck; we just hear her testimony, and then Catherine pays her. A contemporary French film that is hiding the sex from us? There's something fishy going on here. In fact, we really don't see any of the saucy sex that is supposedly taking place offscreen in Nathalie... We're only told, with our imagination to run wild (or, at least, that's what Fontaine hopes for).

Fontaine hopes our imagination can run wild, and we can forget the fact that we never actually see any action. Unfortunately, we (or maybe simply I) have been conditioned to not trust films and certainly not their directors. As the film progresses, you almost hope that it's not going to go the way we expect. Unfortunately, our fears are realized in the final ten minutes. And that's really just the jaw-dropper, deal-sealer. It goes everywhere else we expected (in addition to telling her erotic encounters with Bernard, Nathalie also brings the "life" out of bored Catherine) and to no real satisfying degree. Some people can appreciate star vehicles as simply a way to exploit the familiar faces and traits of some of our favorite stars. This was big in the Golden Age of Hollywood... and still exists, even in France (for a truly wretched example, see Isabelle Huppert in La Vie promise, in which she plays a worthless sketch of a very typical Huppert "heroine"). Though Dépardieu is barely even there, Ardant and Béart are quite competent, and, for that reason, we stick with Nathalie... until its bitter(sweet) end.