Word: melodrama
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...films at Cannes deal with young people trying to navigate the labyrinth of adolescence. In most serious international films, especially those from Brazil (Pixote, City of God), the route leads to violence and early death. Linha de Passe, directed by Walter Salles and Daniela Thomspon, renounces the lure of melodrama for a neorealistic study of four sons of a single mother in Sao Paolo. Their have ordinary dreams - to become a football star, to become a religious leader, to be something more than a motorcycle courier, to drive a bus - but they are reluctant to slip into crime...
Hollywood would take Begaudeau's book and turn it into Blackboard Jungle or Superbad. There are dramas within the class, but Cantet dispenses with melodrama to get to the truths inside these kids and the teacher who gives totally of himself to get through to them. (The kids were discovered in a school in Paris' 20th arrondisement, put through a long workshop period to play characters who were part fictional, part themselves.) As the film unfolds, a half-dozen or more of the children reveal distinct, tough and touching personalities...
...Vuillard (Jean-Paul Roussillon and Catherine Deneuve) convene their three grown children (Anne Consigny, Mathieu Amalric, Melvil Poupaud) and their kids for the sort of holiday games you'll find in many family reunions: musical beds, generational scores-settling and the ripping off of psychic scabs. Amid all the melodrama - Junon has liver cancer and needs a bone-marrow transplant from someone of her blood - the conversation is bantering, often affectionate. In this chatty 2-1/2hr. film, Desplechin (Kings and Queen) seems to be going for the old French New Wave recipe of emotional warmth and cinematic wizardry...
...Already two-time Palme d'Or winners for Rosetta in 1999 and L'Enfant in 2005, the Belgian brothers are back with another underclass minimalist melodrama, this time set in the polyglot city of Liege. An Albanian girl (Arta Dobroshi) is in an arranged marriage with a drug addict to get her ID; the scheme of the criminals who control her is to kill off the junkie so Lorna can be sold into marriage with a rich Russian who also needs an ID. The film is an improvement on the formulaic L'Enfantand boasts an impressively naturalistic performance by Dobroshi...
...Band's Visit) and gets embroiled with him in a crime that might be described as the reassignment of property. The politics are plausible, the lead actors charming enough, and it's nice to see Palestine by sunset. But in its making, this is an all-too-familiar melodrama. Ordinary is the last word one would think to apply to a film from such a volcanic land, but it's the one that fits here...