Woody Allen's love affair with France, which goes back at least 30 years, finds its consummation with "Midnight in Paris," the latest of Allen's tourist-board brochures from foreign ports of call, which opened the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday. (His next movie will be made in Rome. Yes, really.) It's no surprise that premiere audiences here ate up this lightweight, rather silly fantasy about the eternal allure of the City of Light. But the good news is that Allen seems to be paying attention in a way he hasn't always done in recent films, and has found a way to channel his often-caustic misanthropy, half-comic fear of death and anti-American bitterness into agreeable comic whimsy.
Of all the leading men Allen has hired to stand in for him as the awkward, lovelorn, fatally talky writer-type hero since he stopped appearing in his own movies (a list that includes Ewan McGregor, Hugh Jackman, Josh Brolin and, unhappily, Larry David), none has seemed less suited to the role than Owen Wilson. As Allen explained to the press corps here, he cast Wilson as frustrated Hollywood screenwriter Gil Pender -- who sees a Paris vacation as a chance to start over -- precisely because Wilson was a "California beach boy" who didn't remind the director of himself. However it works, it works pretty well; Wilson may not possess immense range or dramatic technique, but I've always enjoyed him. He's masterful with subtle, slow-burn comedy and can be a gentle screen presence in a way Allen never is. Gil is a naive, almost feral creature, wonderfully unfazed by the farcical and magical adventures that befall him.
Gil is in Paris with his insufferable fiancée, Inez (a truly thankless role for Rachel McAdams, who can do nothing with it), and her even worse parents (Kurt Fuller and Mimi Kennedy), rich conservatives from who-knows-where who talk dismissively about French politics, wine and culture but don't blink at dropping 20 grand for some antique furniture to decorate their daughter's Malibu beach house. Fortunately these people only appear in a few scenes, because they're more like a New Yorker cartoonist's line drawing of what Republicans might be like than the real thing. Allen has never had even the vaguest idea of what sort of life may be found west of the Hudson; if he really wants to go exotic he could get off the Grand Tour and try making "Vicky Cristina Tuscaloosa."
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Miss BalaDespite this festival's long-standing reputation as a home for worthy and difficult dramas where nothing happens, its programmers have begun to embrace genre movies in recent years. Our first 2011 example arrived on Friday, with the premiere of Mexican director Gerardo Naranjo's pulse-pounding "Miss Bala" in the Certain Regard competition. I heard one prominent critic in the hallway after the screening complaining that some of Naranjo's plot twists were implausible, but give me a break. First of all, much of Naranjo's point is that almost nothing is implausible in the upside-down world of Tijuana, where it's nearly impossible to identify a clear line between cops and criminals. Secondly, while "Miss Bala" strives for a naturalistic feeling and draws on some recent criminal history, it's a bullet-riddled downhill thrill ride about a would-be beauty queen and a drug lord, not "The Bicycle Thief."
I don't have time for a full review right now, but this movie's definitely worth a quick shout. A canny and stylish director who was trained in the United States and has worked on both sides of the border, Naranjo has already made a couple of film-festival favorites ("DramaMex" and "I'm Gonna Explode") and may reach international fame with "Miss Bala." It tells the story of leggy, likable Laura Guerrero (Stephanie Sigman), a 23-year-old who leaves her home on the outskirts of Tijuana one day in hopes of auditioning for the Miss Baja pageant. (The film's title is a play on words; "bala" is Spanish for bullet.) I'm tempted to tell you what happens in the heartbreaking scene when Laura finally reaches the pageant stage, but I won't. Let's just say that this is one of those movies where a normal person takes one step off the straight and narrow path and winds up on the highway to hell.
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It's still very early in the 64th edition of the Cannes Film Festival, which means we're all amped on strong coffee and ample sunlight and likely to overpraise (or over-bash) ordinary, flawed motion pictures that seem like Big Events simply because they're here. That said, Australian novelist-turned-filmmaker Julia Leigh's "Sleeping Beauty" -- which plays like a mixture of not-that-softcore porn, Lacanian psychoanalysis and feminist conceptual art -- stands out among the strangeness of this year's Cannes lineup for being really, really strange. Whether it's good-strange or bad-strange is a highly subjective question; I found it gorgeous, opaque and disturbing in roughly equal portions, but it was a riveting experience all the way through.
Emily Browning, the 22-year-old star of "Sucker Punch," returns here in a vastly different kind of movie but with even less clothing. Actually, she wears no clothing at all for much of the film, especially after Lucy, the loose-cannon sexpot she plays, takes a job that involves sleeping with a succession of leathery, repellent, gargoyle-ish older men. "Sleeping with" is not a euphemism in this case; Lucy goes to visit a beautiful, buttoned-up schoolmistress type named Clara (Rachael Blake) and drinks a tea that knocks her out cold for eight to 10 hours. During this time she is subject to the attentions of ancient lechers, but Clara assures her, rather too clinically, that she will not be penetrated: "Your vagina is a temple, my darling."
Lucy doesn't think her vagina is a temple; in fact, she doesn't seem to care too much what happens to it, or to her. We've already seen her offer herself to strangers based on the result of a coin flip, and she meets Clara by working as a lingerie-clad wine waitress at some kind of faintly kinky underground supper club. (It's arguably preferable, and definitely better paid, than the menial jobs and medical guinea-pig work she's otherwise doing.) Browning is indeed a remarkable beauty, with perfect, brilliant-white skin and delicate doll features, and delivers a powerful performance as this self-destructive adventuress. Leigh's assured direction wants to play on all the emotions we may feel toward Lucy, from desire to concern to fear to shame.
Lucy herself mostly seems at home in this sinister, erotically charged landscape, where nothing seems forbidden and her acts do not seem to have consequences. Leigh has created a world that looks like our own, but seems full of secret corridors built by Michel Foucault, the Marquis de Sade, and Pauline Réage, author of "The Story of O." (The chilly, beautiful compositions are the work of Geoffrey Simpson.) But don't get the wrong idea; "Sleeping Beauty" has an atmosphere charged with sexual electricity, but it doesn't have any sex. Lucy has one semi-normal encounter, when she does drugs with a good-looking co-worker and brings him home, but we don't see any of that.
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