"The Artist" Sparkles and Danny Huston Surprises at the Montreal Film Festival

Montreal Film Fest Wrap-Up by Stephen Holt

The wonderful joie de vivre that one always experiences at this most delightful of Film Festivals, Montreal’s Festival des Film du Monde 2011, is going to be carried on and felt right on up to the Oscars by the amazing, astounding, hilarious French silent B&W film “The Artist.”

Silent? Black and White? Oscar Contender?? Mais non! How can this be???

Well, take my word for it, “The Artist” is all these things and MORE!

And Harvey Weinstein, fresh off his Oscar Best Picture win last year with “The King’s Speech” is going to be going to the Kodak Pavillion again this yar with his Cannes Film Festival acquistion that I predict AMPAS (the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences) is going to love, love, love!

“The Artist” is so perfectly done, so marvelously executed under the amazingly deft and funny direction of Michael Hazanaviscius that it is really the rarest of rava avis, a sublime cinematic miracle.

It takes what my seem a heavy-handed, tired trope, a satire of Silent Movies comedies and (melo)dramas, and explodes it into something quite wonderful, which is a loving tribute to the magic and the glory and the artistry of that by-gone era. It’s rapturous.

The sold-out audiences in Montreal were in a bliss-out state as they exited the theatre in the Quartier Latin. “The Artist” makes you smile, smile, smile. What movie makes you feel like that in these cynical and serious days?

Well, Woody Allen did exactly that also this year with his tremendous, late-career come-back success of “Midnight in Paris” (which I’ve now famously seen EIGHT times!) And the joie of cinema and movie-going itself that “The Artist” makes you feel is smilar and very French and very universal at the same time. Why? In this case, pourquois? Because it’s silent, with witty English Silent inter-titles, and its’ silence therefore speaks to everyone.

Harvey Weinstein has chosen once again wisely. This movie is gonna hit the Academy (and audiences all over the world) right where it lives, in its’ collective heart. And it’s got prodigious Oscar seeker Harvey behind it. That’s a very strong combination.

One of its’ main strengths and delights is the sure-fire Best Actor Nomination-worthy performance of the French star Jean Dujardin. Dujardin won the Best Actor Prize in Cannes for this. How Dujardin makes us care so deeply for his self-centered Silent Film Star, a Rudolph Valentino/Douglas Faribanks type, here named George Valentin, is another onf of “The Artist”s triumphs.

And he does it without saying one word!

And I predict the Acadmey is gonna love him for that.

Dujardin is dashing, vain, sexy, handsome and very, very funny. He sweeps the audience off its’ collective feet with the aptness and precision of a Chaplin. He makes you think he’s been acting in silent films all his life. AND that you’ve been watching them and enjoying them.And of course, at one time or another, we all have.

“Who needs sound anyway?” “The Artist” seems to be saying.

But wait! Plot complication! Talkies are coming! And sound is in and silent films are out! And “The Artist”s strength is in fully engaging you in wishing this wasn’t so.

The future of film is embodied in the sprightly young movie extra Valentin becomes involved with the ambitious and perfectly pert Peppy Miller. French actress Berenice Bejo turns in the SECOND tour-de-forcce silent performance in this remarkably rich film. In a weak field for actresses this year (so far) Ms. Bejo could score a nomination, too. Are you listening, Oscar?

Seemingly overwhelmed and swept off her feet (and the screen) by Dujardin’s charismatic turn, Bejo holds her own and develops Peppy from merely pretty to pretty amazing as the plot twists keep coming thick and fast and Peppy ends up as peppery and complicated as any leading lady performance this year. AND SHE’S SILENT!

The Degree of Difficulty, in Actors Branch parlance, is off the charts.

American actors John Goodman and Missi Pyle Score, too, also silent, in supporting roles. But it’s Dujardin’s and Bejo’s time to shine, shine, shine Oh! And they dance a lot, too!

Oscar look out! You’re about to be swept off your feet in utter delight! Between “The Artist” and “Midnight in Paris” I predict it’s going to be a very French year at the Oscars!

Of course, everything is tres Francais in the French=speaking province of Quebec and its’ capital city of Montreal. And the Festivel des Films du Monde also specializes in honoring legendary European film icons, usually French, with tributes or “Homages.”

This year Catherine Deneuve was on her way in for the last part of the Festival, which ends Monday, as I was on my way out, having experienced the marvelous first half. And they do special presentations “Coup de Coeur” this year with French filmmaking legend Bertrand Tavernier.

Tavernier, originally a film critic for the Cahiers du Cinema and *gasp* a film publicist in his youth, presented a series entitled “American Cinema: Unappreciated Noirs.”I caught Joseph Losey’s American Hollywood period “The Prowler” (1951) and it was ANOTHER incredible highlight for me of the MWFF 2011.

Blacklisted during the McCarthy witch hunts and self-exiled to England, Joseph Losey is considered by all to be one of the great noir directors with films like “The Servant” and his close collaboration with Harold Pinter.Losey made so many highly regarded British films that most people think he WAS British. But the suspenseful, tightly written(by the also blacklisted and uncredited Dalton Trumbo)and directed by Losey, “The Prowler” totally creeped me out in a wonderful noir way.

Tavernier observed “Every room is uncomfortable and every person is uncomfortable in it.No one in this film is happy.”

Almost a two-hander “The Prowler” boasts career best performances by Evelyn Keyes and Van Heflin, two actors I never really remarked upon much. Keyes’ Scarlett O’Hara’s younger sister Sue Ellen is what Keyes is most known for. A thankless petulant part, that she played very well, but didn’t show her range. But “The Prowler” does! And Van Heflin, who is the creepy cop, who is supposedly protecting her from a prowler, who then becomes her prowler himself, is superb and steathily handsome. While Keyes’ matches him moment for moment, as the hapless repressed housewife who finds herself caught in a web of deception and intrigue she could never have imagined as Heflin kills her husband and then marries her!

Another film I mightily enjoyed was the wild Italian farce, “Nessuno Mi Puo Guidicare” where a spoiled rich woman suddenly finds herself a widow, and then a pauper. And OF COURSE, the only career-path open to her is that of a high class hooker! Written and directed at a break-neck pace by Massimiliano Bruno, its’ improbable premise is made believable by the delightful performance of Paola Cortellesi as the hapless heroine, Alice.

Another Montreal surprise was the serious, 360-degree turn of Danny Huston in a German English language film “Playoff.” Showing an impressive range and simpatico, we have never seen before from him, Huston sports and Israeli-German accednt as an Israeli basketball coach and holocaust survivor who returns to his native Frankfurt to coach the German National Basketball team. Based on the real life story of Max Stoller, Huston really delivers in this his most complex, heroic role.

I got to speak with him and he he told me this hilariouis Oscar anecdote about this father, John Huston and Humphrey Bogart, who were great friends.

Evidently Bogart, a New York blue-blood, who was nothing like hardboiled gangster roles that made him famous thought of the Oscar and the Oscar race as something beneath him and “slightly vulgar.” That is, until he one one. For “The African Queen” under Huston’s direction in 1951.

And doing a fantastic imitation of his Oscar-winning father John, Danny said his father told Bogart, “Well for someone who disdains the Oscar, you seem inordinately proud of it now that you’ve won one.”