FESTIVAL IN CANNES []
Lame movie-biz satire. Running time: 99 minutes. Rated: PG-13 (gross kissing). At the First & 62nd Cinemas and the Angelika.
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IT’S quite an achievement to set and shoot a movie at the Cannes Film Festival and yet fail to capture its visual appeal or its atmosphere: that strange, beguiling mix of glamour and sleaze, of “art” and commerce.
But Henry Jaglom’s characteristically vapid and self-important “Festival in Cannes” – part romantic comedy, part gentle Hollywood satire, part bland farce – does just that.
Alice (Greta Scacchi) is an actress who has written a screenplay about an ordinary women dealing with middle age.
She’s approached at a cafe by Kaz (Zack Norman). A bald, mustachioed vulgarian industry-type out of central casting, Kaz is trying to put together a film that could star the aging French screen icon Millie Marquand (Anouk Aimee, looking wonderful).
But a powerful producer with a gambling problem, Rick Yorkin (Ron Silver), also wants Millie for a project. To get her, Rick sets out to seduce Alice and to engage Millie’s ex-husband, the artsy director Viktor (Maximilian Schell), who’s in town with his latest young girlfriend (Camilla Campanale).
Meanwhile, Rick’s ruthless assistant, Barry (Alex Craig Mann), falls for a pure-of-heart ingenue called Blue (Jenny Gabrielle).
There is something offensively lazy about the thinness of the Jaglom’s movie-industry characters, the simplistic problems they face, and the clumps of clumsy, apparently improvised dialogue they have to deliver as they hook up and break up while walking along on the Croisette or lounging at the Hotel du Cap.