Big-screen focus at Cannes for chatter and crazy compulsions

Publié le 4 mars 2011

The Times. Un article de Ben Hoyle.

Lire la fiche du film : Fleurs du Mal.

Film festival celebrates internet ’new wave"

Facebook, Twitter and YouTube may be integral to the lives of millions of people around the world but do far film-makers have ignored the 21st century’ biggest social phenomenon. As Cannes audiences discovered yesterday, however, the tricky business of making computer screens look exciting is no longer a barrier. The internet is having a big-screen moment. Everyday online applications and exchanges are integral to a clutch of films at the Cannes Film Festival this year, starting with Chatroom, a thriller directed by Hideo Nakata, the Japanese creator of The Ring horror films, and starring Aaron Johnson, the young British actor who played the lead in Nowhere Boy, and Kick-Ass and is engaged to the artist and film-maker Sam Taylor-Wood. However, as Nora Ephron’s limp e-mail romance You’ve got Mail with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan illustrated, shots of people glued to their screens quickly become boring. Cannes has seen several different solutions. The film that gets closest to most people’s experience of flitting between the real world and the web is Fleurs du Mal ( Flowers of Evil). About a quarter of the film takes place online. The woman character, a wealthy young Iranian woman, has been packed off to Paris by her parents to escape the violent pro-democracy protests in Tehran in 2009. After a chance encounter with a hotel porter she finds herself torn between her feelings for him and the pull of 24-hour rolling updates on Twitter and YouTube from her friends and family back home. The film-makers used documentary footage from about 3,000 amateur videos posted online, includind film of the death of Neda Soltan, the 27-year-old whose killing made her a global symbol of the protests. « The whole project was born from these images from the web, » Emilie Blezat, the producer, told The Times ?."It’s crazy to be able to find images like that people dying live. Crazy that people would want to film, crazy for us to watch it. Why are we doing this ? Why do we have this compulsion to film everything to archive it, to put it all online ?« She is talking to Facebook and YouTube about the possibility of distributing the film enough social networks »because that’s where it came from and because that’s the only way that the Iranian people will see it". Chatroom, made by the British company Ruby Films and partly financed by Film4, has been described as « Lord of the flies online » Nakata’s innovation is to imagine the discussion forums of the title as physical rooms in a sinister, labyrinthine building where the characters larger than life online avatars meet each other. R U There is a Dutch film about a professional video gammer who falls in love with a beautiful Taiwanese girl and enters into relationship with her that straddles both the real world and the virtual universe of Second Life. Fusing elements of both Chatroom and R U There is L’Autre Monde (Black Heaven), a french film about a femme fatale who leads a double life online luring young men into committing suicide in real life. Away from the Riviera, The Social Network will be released later this year. The film, about the origins of Facebook, is directed David Fincher, who made Se7en and Zodiac, scripted by Aaron Sorkin, the creator of The West Wing, and stars ’ Jesse Eisenberg and the singer Justin Timberlake.

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