Seduced and Abandoned

Baldwin and Toback walk around Cannes and try to convince influential film-industry figures and sponsors, who don’t much understand films but have a lot of money, to support their film project (A variation on Last Tango in Paris set in Iraq). Every rejection illustrates the Orson Welles quote that opens the film: “I look back on my life and it’s 95 percent running around trying to raise money to make movies and five percent actually making them.” It’s brisk and humorous enough that you don’t have time to think about what the documentary actually wants to be. Though both mean supposedly mean it seriously (I recommend the long interview on Vulture), we get only very fragmentary information about their intended project (it will contain the trauma of war and bizarre sex), the arranging of meetings with powerful and wealthy players is not described in any way (it almost appears to be enough to just go to Cannes during the festival and crash the right party; the gathered information is not processed in any way and the filmmakers don’t draw any generalising conclusions from it (as if they don’t have the courage to ironically comment on the “I don’t read scripts” approach and thus alienate potential allies). Furthermore, some of the interviews don’t have anything to do with raising money for a strange art project with a pair of commercially unattractive stars and were apparently conducted solely for the purpose of adding an extra famous name to the credits. Though the transformation of the film industry is the leitmotif of the stories of Scorsese, Polanski and Coppola, some of those stories rather belong to personal portraits of those filmmakers (information about how they got their start). I won’t deny that I was entertained from start to finish, but it was entertainment similar to that provided by a satirical sitcom (30 Rock, for example). On top of that, you have to find the satire in this film for yourself. 70% (16.05.2014)