CAMPION

[Finn]

Does anyone else consider Jane Campion to be brilliant? I think she's very artistic and she always seem to have a fascination with the dark side. With "The Piano", "Portrait of a Lady" and "In the Cut", she seems to be interested in males dominating over the females in some way. I think her approach is brutal, brilliant and usually daring.

[The Silver Bullet]

I wouldn't say "brilliant," thought The Piano is one of my favourite films of the '90s.

[Pubrick]

overrated and too old to do anything about it.

[MacGuffin]

overrated

...and so is The Piano.

[Ghostboy]

I love The Piano. I appreciated elements of In The Cut, and thought it wasn't as bad as everyone said (for the most part). And I love the documentary on the making of Portrait Of A Lady, although I haven't seen the film itself. Again, I love The Piano, which I don't think is overrated one tiny bit.

[MacGuffin]

Again, I love The Piano, which I don't think is overrated one tiny bit.

Why does she send him a note knowing he can't read?

[Ghostboy]

People forget things sometimes when they're highly stressed.

[NEON MERCURY]

the only on eof here films that i hav eseen was in the cut.  i liked it. but my reasoning for my high regard for this film is the cinematography  its really lurid, seedy and beautiful...

[Gloria]

overrated

...and so is The Piano.

Finally...I thought I was the only one who thought this.  The Piano really wasn't as great as people make it out to be.

[The Silver Bullet]

Why does she send him a note knowing he can't read?

Wow! What a great reason to dislike something.

Maybe it was thought that counted...

Has anyone seen Sweetie? I've heard good things about it, though I've not yet seen it myself. I enjoyed In the Cut for the most part, but had issues that I can't recall right now [I just remember that I had them]. To be fair, I think there's far more to In the Cut than one viewing can really uncover.

By the way, if you're able to, try and track down her film school graduation piece, A Girl's Own Story. Some of it ["you wanna play cats?"; the scene at the dinner table] is really quite good, even if it takes one or two viewings to really appreciate [as it did in my case].

[MacGuffin]

Why does she send him a note knowing he can't read?

Wow! What a great reason to dislike something.

Maybe it was thought that counted...

It's a sloppy devise that fits the story and a major plot-hole that people who like the movie either fail to acknowledge or have their own reasons for but nothing is explained clearly. But it wasn't my only reason. I didn't like the Holly Hunter character. She's taken advantage of and forced into a 'prostitution' for piano keys and is basically a 'whore'. Yes, I know, the piano is her 'voice', but she can find strength without being the 'object' of the two men and (willingly) 'selling' her body.

[Alethia]

Why does she send him a

even if it takes one or two viewings to really appreciate

you generally do have to see something at least once to appreciate it at all

[MacGuffin]

Campion's 'Star' turn: Keats tale

CANNES -- Palme d'Or winner Jane Campion said she is prepping the romantic period drama "Bright Star" for Pathe U.K., the British-based production arm of France's Pathe Entertainment. The project, which Campion is writing, is a drama based on the three-year romance between 19th century poet John Keats and Fanny Brawne, which was cut short by Keats' untimely death at age 25. "I'm still in the process of writing it, and we don't know yet when we're going into production," she said Tuesday at the Australian Film Commission's 30th anniversary party in Cannes.

[grand theft sparrow]

They should just make the tagline:  "If you love poetry and being forced to cry..."

$100 they get Jonathan Rhys-Meyers for Keats.

[MacGuffin]

Get shorty
It's usually first-time directors who make a splash at Cannes with their short films. But now, more established names are getting in on the act. Jane Campion tells Xan Brooks why small is beautiful
Source: The Guardian

Cannes is the world of the brief encounter. For 10 days the place runs to a staccato rhythm of snatched conversations, bullet-point pitches, round-table junkets and business lunches. Away from the glare of the Palme d'Or competition, it has increasingly become the world of the brief film, too.

The short has always had its place at the Cannes film festival, with a number of programmes playing both in and out of competition. They provide a crucial platform for novice directors, the chance to show the industry what they are made of and - fingers crossed - drum up the funds for that all-important first feature.

But this year the balance has shifted, with these comparative ghettos of the schedule surprisingly gate-crashed by the rich and famous. The likes of Walter Salles (Motorcycle Diaries), Alexander Payne (Sideways), Alfonso Cuaron (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) and Gaspar Noe (Irréversible) would not look out of place in the main competition line-up. Jane Campion, Gus Van Sant and the Coen brothers are former Palme d'Or winners. All of them have short films in this year's event.

Campion's piece, The Water Diary, is a lyrical, child's-eye view of an Australian township paralysed by drought. It is the director's contribution to 8, a series of movies strung around a weighty brief: the United Nation's development project on millennium goals. "I told them I would do it if I was given complete control," she explains. "I could just imagine what hell it would be if everyone started getting involved and gave me suggestions. This was a good way for us all to be freed. It's my fault if I get it wrong. Blame the film-maker." The Water Diary took just six days to shoot. It was, she says, "a little holiday".

Campion admits that short films are often seen as the poor relations of cinema. "But they are not inferior, just different. I think the short gives a freedom to film-makers. What's appealing is that you don't have as much responsibility for storytelling and plot. They can be more like a portrait, or a poem. The great thing is that almost everyone ends up doing something creative with them, even those directors who then go on to make quite boring features."

You could say that The Water Diary has carried her full-circle. Campion first came to Cannes back in 1986 when her short piece, Peel, won a major prize at the festival. "I was so naïve back then," she says. "When they said they were putting my work in the programme I said, 'Oh, that's nice'. They said, 'Well, obviously you have to come' and I said, 'Oh no, I don't have that scheduled in my diary and I don't really enjoy that sort of thing anyway'. Fortunately they managed to convince me otherwise." Campion, of course, went on to further glory at Cannes when The Piano won the Palme d'Or at the 1993 festival.

This year she is keeping a lower profile, sheltering in the shade of a bar on the beach. She arrived with her daughter on the train from Rome, and has no particular thing that she needs to do. "It's nice coming here with a short film as opposed to a feature," she says. "It's a very relaxing way to see Cannes." Tonight she is planning catch a showing of Marie Antoinette. One senses that she is here as a tourist first and a film-maker second.

Described as "un film collectif", 8 points to a possible way forward for the short film. Evidence suggests that these bite-sized canapés traditionally struggle to connect with an audience accustomed to the banquet of the bona-fide feature. By grouping their work under a single thematic umbrella, the maker of short films is able to bypass such prejudices.

Playing further up the Croisette, Destricted boasts a rather different brief - a series of "responses to the theme of pornography by seven different artists". So far the tactic seems to be working. The queues go round the block while the mood in the cinema is festive, bordering on the bawdy. The tyro French director Gaspar Noe bounds up and down the aisle to greet the new arrivals. Larry Clark (of Kids and Bully fame) slopes to his seat with a furtive, watchful air. We learn that British artist Sam Taylor-Wood, who was also intending to be here to discuss her contribution, had to cancel because she's pregnant - that pesky consequence of actually having sex as opposed to filming it.

Destricted, inevitably, is a bit of a mixed bag. While some of the segments are genuine "responses to pornography", others are just pornography. Clark's film, Impaled, turns out to be one of the better efforts. The director interviews a gaggle of wannabe male porn stars, makes them strip for the camera and then abruptly introduces the winner to the woman he is supposed to have sex with. Elsewhere, Noe's film is a stroboscopic montage of brutish masturbation fantasies. Anyone who has caught his features (Irréversible, I Stand Alone) will know what to expect.

Like Campion, Noe won a short film prize at Cannes at the start of his career. Like her, he is drawn to the form for the freedom it provides. "With a short you are allowed to do whatever you want," he tells me afterwards. "It's like if you have a girlfriend and she tells you that you can do whatever you want. That's very exciting." He appears to be still stuck in steamy, Destricted mode.

The problem, explains Noe, is that the process of making a feature can be such a long and painful process. "It takes years out of your life. You get the green light and then it turns back to amber and you have to start all over again. Here you get the call and you have to come up with an idea and shoot it straight away. It feels so wonderfully fresh and liberating." For good measure, Noe also has a film about Aids, Sida, playing alongside Campion's in 8.

Finally we have Paris Je t'Aime, playing in the festival's Un Certain Regard section. It offers a sunnier, gentler example of the portmanteau movie: 18 five-minute love-letters to Paris, each one set in a different arrondissement. Its range of directors runs the gamut from Wes Craven to Gus Van Sant, Cuaron to the Coens.

At the Cannes press junket, the film-makers sit at a bank of round tables while the journalists bob between them like bees above a flowerbed. I speak to South African director Oliver Schmitz, who says that he found the format to be deceptively difficult, and that the act of boiling a life story down into one five-minute spell would be a challenge for anyone. Richard Lagravenese (who wrote The Fisher King and directed A Decade Under the Influence) suggests that we are entering a golden age for the short film, and that the internet provides the perfect platform for viewers who want entertainment in small doses.

Paris Je t'Aime is the brainchild of Marseilles-born Frederic Auburtin, who co-directs one segment alongside Gérard Depardieu. Apparently the original intention was to have 20 films in the collection. "Francis Coppola and Woody Allen were both very eager to get involved," Auburtin says. "They said yes straight away and stayed with the project for a long time. But in the end it didn't happen." Why was that? "They couldn't fit it in with their schedules," he says with a sigh. "They went off and made features instead." Amid all the generally positive talk, Auburtin strikes a rare downbeat note. For all its recent success, it seems that the short is not the new long after all - at least not quite yet.