Here in the UK the BBC have been running a handsome new TV serial version of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbevilles, which is a perfectly natural and interesting thing for them to do given the British public's liking for grand old books well-mounted over several nights of telly, and for this sorry tale of Hardy's in particular. Gemma Arterton, about to take her bow as this year's Ill-Fated Bond Girl (as well as the face of a new Bond Girl perfume) takes the lead role. I caught a few minutes the other night and it all looked fine and affecting enough. But the age that you are counts when you first come to these things, doesn't it? Back in 1979, aged 9, I was desperate to see Roman Polanski's big-screen version of Tess, just because of the utterly indelible impression made on me by its lobby poster featuring Nastassja Kinski, who definitely at that time seemed to me the definition of an angel on earth. I eventually got to see the film a couple of years later, on good old VHS videocassette, and found it just as bewitching and awfully sad as I'd imagined. I only had an idea, albeit a fascinated one, of who Roman Polanski was, but he was about to become the first 'film director' I was properly aware of, having seen and admired several movies that bore his name. It took me another year or so to get hold of his memoir 'Roman' and learn that Hardy's Tess was a book that Sharon Tate had kept by their bedside and urged upon her late husband as film material; and that Polanski's version was thus a form of uxuriousness, a debt of love ten years after Sharon Tate's appalling murder at the hands of the loathsome Charles Manson's ratbag devotees; and that per the forbidding bleakness of Tess's fate, Polanski never needed to be told that the world can be unspeakably cruel. So yes, Kinski's great beauty was a big factor in luring me to 'Tess' the movie, and I became her dogged fan over the next 5 years as she appeared in about 43 different movies, of variable distinction. But 'Tess' was also the start of a big passion of mine for Polanski, and the very affecting, near-ancient sense of fatalism and melancholy that underlies his work. He was the right man for 'Tess', whatever they said at the time.

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In drink-related film arguments I generally say Bresson's Arthurian movie is my all-time #1 favourite, rather than, say, Happy Gilmore. I've put up with a dodgy second-hand VHS of it for ten years now (Lancelot, that is), but recently I discovered it's new to DVD in the UK. So that's good. I wrote the following for a festival program in 1999:

'Among the elite group of acknowledged cinematic masters, Robert Bresson is the most mysterious, the most forbidding, the most intensely revered. On the strength of these slightly thankless distinctions, he was also reckoned to be box-office poison. But understand that Bresson was neither hostile to or aloof from the movie-going public. Au contraire: no director could have respected an audience more, been more desirous of their attention and appreciation. “You must leave the spectator free”, Bresson fretted during a Cahiers du Cinema symposium with Godard. “And at the same time you must make yourself loved by him. You must make him love the way in which you render things. That is to say: show him things in the order and in the way that you love to see them and to feel them…” From this you get a savour of the great man’s seriousness, and the depth of his passion. Of course, if each man’s love were the same as the next, we’d all get into a terrible punch-up. As it is, Bresson’s inimitable way of seeing can still divide a crowd. Five or so years ago, I took an American friend to the re-release of Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac at London’s Everyman. We were fellow film students, accustomed to casting a self-consciously cool eye over each other’s favourites. On my home turf, so to speak, I was a little anxious, not having looked at Lancelot in years. Yet within minutes of projection, I was bobbing happily on the edge of my seat. After all, who but Bresson had the nerve to make films like this? Towards the close, as Lancelot tersely rallied his comrades for their doomed last stand (“Pour Artus contre Mordred!”), I wondered why this moment couldn’t inspire the same misty cinephile reverence as Warren Oates’ analogous “Why not?” in The Wild Bunch. Nevertheless, en route to the pub, my buddy was wryly sceptical of what he’d just seen: ‘Man. All those shots of feet…’'

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Back in June I had a really interesting conversation with Sean Penn about his service as Jury President at this year's Cannes Film Festival. An edited account of said conversation ran in Sight & Sound.
After Sean was announced as this year's Cannes Prez I was struck by the number of media outlets who decided to run the rule over the Festival's choice, so rehashing the legend of Penn the Dangerous Hothead of 1980s tabloid lore, as if ignorant of the fact that inter alia he had previously competed in the Official Selection at Cannes both as actor and director, and won the Acting Palme for She's So Lovely in 1997. But, such is the general standard of reporting on cinema out there, and particularly when bracketed to coverage of the Cannes Festival, where the celebration of what is very best in film is inevitably shackled to a realisation that movies are consumed far more widely and profitably by devotees of Spiderman and Batman, be they young or old.
Sean has been on the record umpteen times in the past about his particular problems with the Hollywood mainstream, and the outriding assumptions about the audience. And this subject naturally arose in the course of our Cannes discussion: 'As an audience member', he remarked, "I always feel frustrated by the monoculturalism of American cinema, and in so many places it’s American monoculturalism that people buy." (Yes, 'Hollywood Movie Actor' is still his own main occupation, but the closest he's ever got to the Hollywood mainstream is working for Clint Eastwood, whose creative control over his own work is the envy of film artists everywhere.)

There is a certain caste of film critics for broadsheet newspapers, in the UK as well as the US, who see themselves as the scourges of that 'American monoculturalism', but very often I think they're kidding themselves, if not their readers: their own finicky sense of personal discernment is what comes top of their agendas. The thought reoccured to me when Sean described how he and his jury ignored all the daily critical chatter about the films they were adjudicating upon: a discipline that resulted in his feeling aggrieved on the part of certain films and filmmakers once he reviewed the press coverage in the aftermath of the Festival and saw how movies he admired unreservedly had been instantly weighed in the balance by The Critics and found wanting.

At Cannes the deadline-driven comprehensive-coverage rush to judgement can be very injurious to a movie. Of course, judgement is always waiting round the corner for any creative undertaking and cannot be hidden from. But I know how Cannes works, and what is the daily routine for most film journalists out there (it's long, but not arduous, not by any reasonable standard, other than on the liver...) And it's a matter of fact that Cannes is not the ideal place for arriving quickly at a considered view of a picture, much less for conveying that to readers. Hence Sean's lament, particularly on the part of Steven Soderbergh's Che, on which his jury bestowed the Best Actor prize for Benicio Del Toro, but which had a rough ride in a lot of print outlets. "The diminishment", Sean told me, "is reminiscent of the bad reviews Bonnie and Clyde got, or Apocalypse Now, or the 'failure' Wizard of Oz was or It’s A Wonderful Life was." This remark I think is particularly useful, because the critical tendency is very often to make the best the enemy of the good. But with a lot of critics who regularly refer to the masters and masterpieces of the past, all you have to do is imagine what they would have said of those great originals had they been reviewing at the time: most likely, "Not without interest, but with (sighs) a lot of problems..."

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