PARIS – Woody Allen’s ‘Midnight in Paris’ — featuring French first lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy in her first movie role — will open the Cannes film festival in May, organisers said Wednesday. The romantic comedy, with a starry cast that includes Oscar-winner Marion Cotillard and US actors Owen Wilson and Adrien Brody, will be shown out of competition at the world’s most prestigious film bash.
“‘Midnight in Paris’ is a wonderful love letter to Paris,” festival director Thierry Fremaux said of the period comedy set in the 1920s. “It’s a film in which Woody Allen takes a deeper look at the issues raised in his last films: our relationship with history, art, pleasure and life,” he said in a statement. US actor Robert De Niro is the president of the jury of this year’s festival, which opens on May 11 on the French Riviera. The list of films picked for the official selection competing for the top prizes is due in April.
De Niro, 67, is the third American in four years to head the jury, after director Tim Burton last year and actor-director Sean Penn in 2008. The presence of President Nicolas Sarkozy’s wife in the opening film will add to the star power at the annual festival that is a mix of Hollywood glamour and high-brow art house cinema.
Tabloid reports said that Bruni-Sarkozy was so bad in her cameo role as a glamorous museum curator that Allen was considering leaving her out of the final cut, but the director later insisted he was keeping her scene. “She was very professional, she interpreted the role… so well that each and every frame shot will appear in the movie, nothing will be cut,” Allen said last August.
Some reports said the director was forced to retake the same scene 35 times because the inexperienced Bruni kept looking at the camera as she played the role of a woman buying a baguette in a bakery. Bruni, a supermodel turned pop singer who married the president in 2008, herself admitted she might not be a great thespian when she first spoke of getting picked for the tiny role.
“I’m not an actress at all. Perhaps I’ll be completely hopeless but I can’t miss an opportunity like this one. When I’m a grandmother I’d like to be able to say I made a film with Woody Allen,” she said in late 2009. ‘Midnight in Paris’ is a about a family travelling to the French capital for business. The party includes a young engaged couple forced to confront the illusion that a life different from their own is better.
It is the 41st feature film from the 75-year-old New York actor, screenwriter, director and multiple Oscar-winner most famous for his comedies of manners. Allen is a regular at the Cannes festival, which in 2002 gave him a special achievement award. His new film will open in cinemas across France on the opening day of the festival.
