The Festival de Cannes 2013 competition showed one of the highly anticipated film, Behind The Candelabra by Palme d’Or winner Steven Soderbergh with Michale Douglas and Matt Damon, and The Great Beauty by Paolo Sorrentino, celebrating the splendors of Rome.
Behind The Candelabra (via Festival de Cannes)
Behind The Cendelabra by Steven Soderbergh
Behind the Candelabra is a love story, starting in 1977 and for several years between Liberace, a virtuoso pianist in his sixty in the film and a young man from the countryside.
Michale Douglas plays Liberace, a popular and exuberant, pianist a showman on stage and on TV, doing excess on and off stage in the ways of Elvis, Elton John or Madonna. This “kitsch”, very talented American artist had a real sense of the show and the music hall; he died of AIDS in 1987. The title of the film, Behind the Candelabra, based on the book by Scott Thorson Behind the Candelabra: My Life With Liberace, evokes Liberace kitsch candlestick that rested on his piano when he was playing. With this title, Soderbergh states his intention to show behind the scenes; he indeed shoots characters who actually are seemingly pathetic…
Steven Soderbergh won the Palme d’Or in 1989 with Sex, Lies and Video. The prolific director says that Behind the Candelabra, deemed “too gay” by distributors was refused release in the United States, will be his last film …
The Great Beauty (via Festival de Cannes)
The Great Beauty by Paolo Sorrentino
The Great Beauty is reminiscent of Roma and La Dolce Vita, the masterpieces that must have guided Paolo Sorrentino because in this film the protagonist, Jep Gambardella – a handsome irresistibly charming man but grown tired of women and fashionable soirées – is primarily an observer in the splendor of the summer.
Journalist and seducer, he wrote a successful book in his youth and now, on the threshold of old age, he hides his dismay behind a cynical and disillusioned attitude that brings him to lay on the world a look of bitter lucidity. In the film, it is often referred to Flaubert and sense of nothingness. Worn by the existence, surrounded by ugliness, the character is in search of beauty from its terrace overlooking the beauties of Rome. Wil he overcome the disgust with himself and others in a city whose blinding beauty is something paralyzing?
According to Sorrentino, La Grande Bellezza, which marks his return to Italy after his American getaway “This Must Be The Place” with Sean Penn, is “a movie totally debtor of the great Italian cinema: Scola, Fellini, Ferreri, Monicelli, without that use the quote in a sctrict sense.” The Great Beauty is starring Toni Servillon, Carlo Verdone and Sabrina Ferilli.
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