Stephen Holt’s Montreal Film Festival wrap-up

Gerard Depardieu Quips, David Arquette Breaks Out
at the Montreal Film Festival 2010!
by Stephen Holt

Iconic French film star Gerard Depardieu literally stole the show at this year’s Montreal Film Festival, but he wasn’t there on film. He was there live – onstage!

The mountainous Gallic actor, 62, who is now weighing in at around 300 lbs. and uses a cane,”because of his many motorcycle accidents,” upstaged tous le monde at the Festival des films du Monde by slamming nearly every French film star and director he’d ever worked with. And the crowd went wild!

Billed as a “Master Classe,” it was really an extended,hilarious and very bawdy interview onstage live at the Cinema Imperial where Depardieu answered questions(sort of) posed by the eternally bemused Artistic Director of the Festival Serge Losique. He and Depardieu are old, old friends and only an old friend could’ve illicited such racy, intimate and outrageous responses. I loved it. It was an insight into French cinema that one could only get at Montreal. This was my twelfth festival visit and I’d never heard anything like this before!

He started off by calling Oscar-winning actress Juliet Binoche as “n’etait rien,” IOW “nothing” or “not much.” And he didn’t know “why everybody made such a fuss about her.”

He continued claiming he and Michael Daniel Autieul were “the only great actors alive now in France.”

He stated that the acting of Michel Picoli and Yves Montand “carried a bad smell with them” or “created a stench.” Which could also be translated as “They stink.”

He described vividly the many explicit sex scenes and nude scenes he has participated in a career of spanning over four decades and 150 films. He was especially candid about one with “Bob” DeNiro in Bernardo Bertolucci’s “1900” in which both he and DeNiro are naked and in a bed with just a female prostitute separating them. The details of which would crash just about anybody’s hard drive, and which I can’t go into here, merci le bon Dieu! But, as I said, the crowd loved every juicy morsel and applauded him heartily.

He saved his most biting words for legendary director, Jean-Luc Godard, calling him “pathetique” (pathetic) and a not a film maker, but “a professeur.” “He doesn’t know how to write. I don’t know how he became a cinema director…I used to tell him things in a private, personal conversation, and then that night, pages of the next day’s dialogue would be slipped under my door with exactly what I had just told him on them and then we’d have to enact them as the next day’s scenes.” This is occured during “Helas Pour Moi” in 1993.

And what of this year’s films? I enjoyed everyone I saw.

I loved “Das Lied Im Mir”(“The Day I Was Not Born” it’s being called in English),a German film with a breathtaking, sensuous, career-making central performance by Jessica Schwartz, as a young German woman, an Olympic swimmer, who suddenly finds her life turned upside down when her plane gets delayed in Buenos Aires. She loses her passport in Argentina, then inexplicably bursts into tears when she hears a baby’s lullabye being sung in Spanish. And she doesn’t speak Spanish.

She feels sure that she’s been in Buenos Aires before, but being thoroughly German, how is that possible? She then becomes a German Alice tumbling down a Spanish rabbit hole of which there’s no bottom, and she becomes trapped there.

“The Day I Was Not Born” will launch the beauteous, charismatic Jessica Schwartz already a star in her homeland into the cinematic stratosphere when this film hits the states. And her turn as “Romy” (about the German actress Romy Scheneider) is sure to cement her star status.

First time director 31-year-old Florian Cossen saw his gripping film, an astonishing debut in every way, win both the prestigious Fipresci Jury Prize, as well as the People’s Choice award. “The Day I Was Not Born” certainly gets my vote as my favorite film at this year’s Montreal Film Festival.

And finally, David Arquette, of all people, gave a surprising, break-through performance in “Land of the Astronauts” which is, of course, Hollywood.

Arquette stars as a down-on-his-luck film composer, who is going through a bitter divorce and child custody battle with his ex and is reduced to driving limos for stars. Our hapless, but talented hero, keeps trying to get them to listen to his demo tapes of his music, which are ironically quite beautiful.

This touching, serious performance by Arquette shows that his acting career could take an unexpected turn, should he continue to persue heartfelt roles like this and I, for one, hope he does. He’s got the charisma and “Land of the Astronauts” shows he’s developing the chops.

And so I have to bid “Adieu” once again to the beautiful, enchanting city of Montreal and its’ delightful international film festival. But I’ll be back next year, merci le bon Dieu!