- Back to the blog
It strikes me as deeply unfair that Penelope Cruz should rise from her sickbed looking like Venus rising from the sea.
Yesterday we'd heard that the star of Pedro Almodovar's Los Abrazos Rotos (Broken Embraces) had come down with a case of food poisoning, but this morning Cruz appeared, seeming a tiny bit wan but still more glamorous than the rest of us could achieve without surgical intervention or a late-night chat with the devil.
Cruz said she'd had a spot of the flu - the normal flu - she added reassuringly, but still wanted to support her friend Almodovar, with whom she's working for the fourth time.
In the genre-straddling film (which, alas, fell a bit flat for me), Cruz plays a secretary-turned-call-girl-turned actress, who's much better at the former jobs than the latter. It's a noir with comic elements, and, in the main character of a blind film director lost in painful memories, a metaphor for Spain's post-Franco journey: Now that the country's had democracy for more than 30 years, Almodovar said, the time has come to recover those memories of the past. (He probably put it a bit more elegantly than that, but since his Spanish was translated to French then English, we were all clinging to the tower of Babel.)
Fans of Almodovar's earlier work will be happy to know that he reprises scenes from Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, including the great spiked-gazpacho bit.
That earlier film's having a bit of a resurgence; it's being adapted as a U.S. TV series and as a Broadway musical, and it's been resurrected in his new film. Almodovar filmed Broken Embraces on the same set as Women, so he felt every time he showed up to work he was being haunted, but these were very nice ghosts.
The stars are finally beginning to appear in Cannes, with Cruz, in her lovely satin platforms, being one of the highest-profile. Jim Carrey is also here to promote I Love You Phillip Morris, based on a true story about a con man who is jailed and falls in love with his cell mate (Ewan McGregor).
Carrey took time out to pose ankle deep in that fake snow I wrote about earlier, in a stunt to remind us that there's only six shopping months left until the animated version of A Christmas Carol hits theatres. The ghosts of Christmas past and future were busy tormenting misers in some other dimension, but costars Colin Firth and Robin Wright Penn frolicked gamely by Carrey's side.
Tomorrow, of course, we'll see Brad Pitt on the red carpet for Inglourious Basterds, or Quentin Tarantino Goes to War. Tarantino told the Hollywood Reporter that this is the closest thing I've ever done to Pulp Fiction. Even the actors haven't seen it before tomorrow's unveiling, but it's said to clock in at more than two and a half hours (oh, and it costars Mike Myers as a British intelligence agent. Austin Powers' dad, perhaps?)
Comments are closed
Thanks for your interest in commenting on this article, however we are no longer accepting submissions. If you would like, you may send a letter to the editor.
Report an abusive comment to our editorial staff
Alert us about this comment
Please let us know if this reader’s comment breaks the editor's rules and is obscene, abusive, threatening, unlawful, harassing, defamatory, profane or racially offensive by selecting the appropriate option to describe the problem.
Do not use this to complain about comments that don’t break the rules, for example those comments that you disagree with or contain spelling errors or multiple postings.
