Spielberg’s ‘BFG’ stomps into Cannes – Director Ade takes Berlin cool to fest

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CANNES, France, May 14, (Agencies): Steven Spielberg’s eagerly-awaited family blockbuster, “The BFG”, is premiered at the Cannes film festival Saturday, with the Hollywood director on the Croisette himself to launch it. The film is the first that the Hollywood legend — who has had a string of children-orientated hits since “E.T.” in 1982 — has made directly for Disney. And he has cast the rather diminutive — in real life — British actor Mark Rylance to play the friendly giant of Roald Dahl’s classic children’s book.

Every night the giant blows dreams into children’s bedrooms and one night, passing an orphanage, he takes pity on a frightened young orphan inside called Sophie, saving her from the clutches of the horrid matron, Mrs Clonkers. He brings her to live with him in the Giant Country, where the BFG is the sole vegetarian, with many of his neighbours preferring to eat children. Dahl dedicated the book — which became an instant bestseller it was published in 1982 — to his daughter, Olivia, who had died of measles encephalitis two decades earlier.

The film was shot in Vancouver, Canada, with Rylance’s face grafted onto the big-eared giant by New Zealand-based special effects company Weta Digital. Dahl, a fighter pilot and spy who also scripted James Bond movies, wrote some of the most loved children’s literature of the last century. Several of his books, including “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”, “James and the Giant Peach” and “Matilda” have already been turned into major films.

Let’s say for the sake of argument that giants really exist. That they galumph around London, ‘round about the witching hour, plucking kids from orphanage windows as a late-night snack. That one among them has misgivings about all this “cannybullism” and might actually make a pretty good friend, if given the chance. Wouldn’t you like to know about it? That’s the beauty of Roald Dahl’s “The BFG,” as brought to life by recent Oscar winner Mark Rylance: You believe. No matter how fantastical the tale (and it gets pretty out-there at points), this splendid Steven Spielberg-directed adaptation makes it possible for audiences of all ages to wrap their heads around one of the unlikeliest friendships in cinema history, resulting in the sort of instant family classic “human beans” once relied upon Disney to deliver.

Dahl’s widely read and nearly universally revered novel began its journey to becoming a Spielberg movie some 15 years ago, at roughly the same time the director released one of his only duds, the cacophony that was 1991’s garish Peter Pan rehash, “Hook.” That film served up more bad ideas than good, but among its takeaway lessons was the notion that magic only works so long as children believe, and here we see the principle put into practice. Though waiting a decade and a half meant losing out on the idea of casting Robin Williams (who would have altered the film’s chemistry entirely), it’s just as well that Spielberg waited, for technology has finally caught up to the project’s ambition, allowing Rylance to credibly become a 24-foot-tall “runt” — the smallest (by far) in a race of performance-capture giants.

“The BFG” is gonna be huge. That much practically goes without saying: With Spielberg at the helm, “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” screenwriter Melissa Mathison at the typewriter (though she died last November) and Dahl’s wonderful imagination — and vocabulary — at the fore, the film has ginormous box office potential. Still, without any bona-fide movie stars or franchise characters to drive worldwide audiences’ desire to see it, “The BFG” won’t have an easy time getting anywhere near the 20 highest-grossing films of all time (a list where Spielberg presently holds last place, with “Jurassic Park”).

Fortunately, “The BFG” bears far more in common with “E.T.” than “Hook,” representing yet another opportunity for a misunderstood young person — in this case parentless 10-year-old Sophie (newcomer Ruby Barnhill), who’s whisked from her orphanage window and spirited off to giant country — to connect with a creature whom her fellow human beans simply wouldn’t understand. For a certain generation, “E.T.” will always stand as the ultimate children’s movie, and while it certainly belongs in the pantheon, there has always been something deeply unsettling about the way the story veered from an intergalactic bonding opportunity to a panicky fable about how humans inevitably ruin everything (a flaw that subbing walkie-talkies for guns simply couldn’t fix).

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CANNES, France: Maren Ade, the woman who single-handedly banished a German dry spell at Cannes by landing a coveted slot in this year’s competition, is a standout member of the so-called Berlin School of filmmaking.

Ade’s third feature “Toni Erdmann” will be the first contender by a German director at the world’s premier film festival since Wim Wenders showed little-loved “The Palermo Shooting” in 2008.

Not even 40, Ade is vying with veterans including Pedro Almodovar, Jim Jarmusch and Ken Loach for Cannes’ Palme d’Or top prize, in a field that includes just three women.

Her new picture is billed as the portrait of a father trying to reconnect with his estranged adult daughter who is living in Bucharest. Reports said Ade was racing to finish the edit before her red-carpet premiere on Saturday.

Character-driven, hyper-realist and as downmarket cool as the city itself, the Berlin School has taken up the mantle from illustrious German directors including Wenders, Werner Herzog and Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

Sometimes billed as the “Nouvelle Vague Allemande”, the Berlin School has risen to such prominence in global arthouse cinema that New York’s Museum of Modern Art ran a retrospective in 2013 including Ade’s “Everyone Else” and f’s “Barbara”.

“After German reunification there was still a lot of no-man’s-land, on the streets and in the people’s heads,” co-curator Rajendra Roy said at the time.

“It was a time of insecurity after the Berlin Wall fell, of transitional space and fragile identities.”

One of its most distinctive features is drawing directors from Germany’s former west to tell stories in the east, compounding the fish-out-of-water quality of the films.

The Romanian setting of “Toni Erdmann” maintains that border-crossing focus and is expected to echo the bittersweet tone of her previous films, in which the tragic and the comic are intimate bedfellows.

Ade made her name with 2009’s “Everyone Else”, a finely wrought love story with two top theatre stars, Birgit Minichmayr and Lars Eidinger, playing a couple who reach a crossroads while on holiday in sun-drenched Sardinia.

In a rave review, Manohla Dargis of the New York Times said the movie “might not be perfect, but so much is right and true in this lovely, delicate work that it comes breathtakingly close”.

It captured the Silver Bear for best actress for Minichmayr at the Berlin film festival and the grand prize from a jury led by Tilda Swinton, while her feature debut, “The Forest For the Trees”, clinched the special jury award at the 2005 Sundance film festival.

Ade has since turned her focus to producing films, including her partner Ulrich Koehler’s 2011 award-winning “Sleeping Sickness”, and the rapturously received Portuguese feature “Tabu” by Miguel Gomes in 2012.

Born in the southwestern city of Karlsruhe, Ade discovered cameras as a teenager. She went on to attend the Munich Film School and “The Forest For the Trees” was her graduation project.

“My career has stayed on a single path, which I sometimes regret a little,” she admitted in an interview with Berlin’s daily Tageszeitung when “Everyone Else” was released.

She said she was most interested in capturing the unspoken and barely seen with her lens.

“I am always drawn to characters — that’s what occupies me most. It’s also a psychological focus — I’m very interested in subtexts when I write a scene, with desire, wishes and longing,” she said.

There are sides of ourselves — reckless ones, ruthless ones, occasionally hopeless ones — that we never want our parents to see, even, or perhaps especially, in adulthood. What we rarely consider is the equal number of imperfect facets — incompetence, insecurity, simple loneliness — that our parents do their best to conceal from us. And so the hidden half-lives of a civilly estranged father and daughter overlap to uproarious and finally devastating effect in “Toni Erdmann,” a stunningly singular third feature by German writer-director Maren Ade that transports the intricately magnified human observation of her previous work to a rich, unexpected comic realm.

At 162 minutes, this episodic, slow-building study of reluctantly shared depression is baggy, yes, but necessarily so: The film takes precisely as much time as it needs for its muddled, maddeningly human characters, played with extraordinary courage and invention by Peter Simonischek and Sandra Huller, to find their way into each other, and so into themselves. A writer as skilled and attentive to loaded details as Ade could likely have told a touching, redemptive tale of a harried businesswoman and her befuddled dad resolving their differences and finding common ground in half the running time, but “Toni Erdmann” has many more things racing and sometimes reversing through its mind. Engrossing in its own right, that fragile father-daughter relationship becomes a prism through which Ade addresses a far broader spread of contemporary manners and mores — not least a tacitly blistering feminist evocation of the everyday setbacks faced by women in the workplace.

That Ade’s screenplay limbos through such potentially clashing levels of sentiment and subtext without ever feeling diagrammatic or self-consciously declarative is no small miracle of dramatic construction, though her facility and fluidity with tone shouldn’t surprise any who saw her previous feature “Everyone Else” — a sexy, funny, emotionally battering beauty of a breakup drama — seven long years ago. Though she has kept herself busy producing for Miguel Gomes, among others, in the interim, one hopes a deserved Cannes competition berth earns her latest (a complicated commercial play, it must be admitted) enough international exposure to hasten further projects of her own.

In case you’re wondering, “Toni Erdmann” is the name of neither protagonist in the film — until, following a mid-narrative segue into brazenly extended bluff-calling and curiously cathartic roleplay, it kind of is. A deliberate, gradually farcical opening scene introduces Winfried Conradi (Simonischek), a divorced piano teacher aimlessly whiling away his semi-retirement in suburban Germany, as a habitual master of prankish disguise, practising multiple personae on a bewildered postman. When his beloved, elderly mutt finally gives up the ghost, Winfried has even less to build his life around than usual; reconnecting with his only child Ines (Huller), now a thirtysomething, pantsuit-clad corporate go-getter stationed in Romania, becomes his next project.

Trouble is, Ines is less outwardly keen to bridge the gap than her father is, particularly when he turns up unannounced in Bucharest for a surprise weekend visit. (A clever, pose-matching cut by editor Heike Parplies takes Winfried from mourning in his garden to idling against the office greenery of Ines’ office lobby, neatly dramatizing a rash impulse in one wordless swoop — even at such extravagant length, the moment-to-moment economy of Ade’s filmmaking frequently impresses.) What ensues is 48 hours of wince-inducingly believable emotional cruelty and cluelessness, as Ines half-heartedly drags Winfried to a series of professional engagements and they progress from terse niceties to searingly acute confrontation. “Are you really human?” he finally snaps at her, in one of those rupturing parental gaffes that even an immediate apology can’t erase.

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