Read full Cannes coverage at Report From Cannes and WaxWord Cannes.
Mortality was on the minds of filmmakers at Cannes on Saturday, as Woody Allen descended on the Cannes festival with his new ensemble comedy, “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger.”
The stranger of the title refers not just to the hoped-for lover, but also to the grim reaper whose arrival is inevitable for everyone. “Stranger” is a relationship farce of
Allenesque complexity, this time tinged with a very personal sense of doom.
Allenesque complexity, this time tinged with a very personal sense of doom.Death and the futility of human existence is nothing if not familiar territory to Allen, now 74. The topic takes on a more immediate quality as he approaches the subject in his own twilight years.
“My relationship with death is the same, “ he quipped at the news conference after the film’s first screening “I’m strongly against it.”
But clearly there is a newly felt element of life's narrowing horizon.
Anthony Hopkins plays an aging fool, who leaves his wife of many decades (Gemma Jones) and quickly marries a gold-digging actress-prostitute (Lucy Punch). (Hopkins was not present in Cannes.)
The film also stars Josh Brolin, Naomi Watts, along with Hopkins and Jones, all coping with familiar Woody Allen relationship games– he loves her, she loves somebody else, he loves still a third. At this point Allen's films have become so familiar (one might say predictable), that the relationship comic-angst becomes a backdrop for noticing Allen's other mounting concerns.
In this case, the fact that Brolin's Roy is becoming obsessed with the beautiful girl across the way is entirley expected; the fact that Hopkins' Alfie times himself after taking Viagra is something new.
“It’s not an advantage to get older,” he said on Saturday. “I’m 74. We’re not more wise. We’re not more generous. You have problems with back, your eyesight is bad… it doesn’t have a romantic quality. I would avoid it if you could.”
The filmmaker certainly looks to have aged, and struggled at one point to remember the name of the actor who did the voiceover in the film, and then struggled to recall the name of another actor.
Brolin plays the Allen stand-in, a writer who lives with Naomi Watts but becomes enamored of a stunning neighbor (Freida Pinto) on whom he spies across the way.
Allen openly lamented his own age as having pushed him off the screen. “For years I played the romantic lead, then I got too old – I couldn’t play it,” he said. “It’s no fun not to play the guy who gets the girl.”
He continued: “It’s so frustrating to do movies with Scarlett Johansson and Naomi Watts and the other guys get her. I like to be the one opposite them in the restaurant, look them in the eyes and lie to them.”
It’s been a few films already that Allen has wisely left that role to others, though his persona is clearly represented both in Brolin’s writer Roy, and Hopkin’s character, Alfie.
