CANNES: Its dirty glamour and dazzling gentle have captivated administrators from Alfred Hitchcock to Steven Spielberg, and now Marseille is the setting for at least three movies on the Cannes movie competition, together with Matt Damon´s newest drama.
France´s raffish Mediterranean second metropolis has iconic standing in Hollywood because the setting for “The French Connection” thrillers of the 1970s.
Lately, the slender alleys main all the way down to its Old Port have been thick with movie crews.
As properly because the Netflix sequence “Marseille”, which performed up the city´s popularity for corruption and criminality with Gerard Depardieu as its crooked however charismatic mayor, a crop of gritty movies by younger French administrators have additionally thrown it again into the highlight.
“Stillwater”, which premieres at Cannes on Thursday, has Damon as a fish-out-of-water American oil-rig employee attempting to get his daughter out of jail for a homicide she claims she didn’t commit.
– New York on the Med –
The movie was made by Tom McCarthy, who made the Oscar-winning “Spotlight” and launched “Game of Thrones” star Peter Dinklage to the world with “Station Agent”.
It is not any shock that he ought to gentle upon Marseille, mentioned William Benedetto, who runs the city´s mythic Alhambra cinema.
“Marseille is the most American city in Europe. Its port, like New York´s, has been the springboard for so many stories,” he informed AFP.
Like the Big Apple, Marseille can also be a multicultural Babel, a metropolis of immigrants with an enormous character whose heroes and villains stroll the tightrope of legality.
Netflix snapped up one other Marseille-set movie, “BAC Nord”, earlier than it even premiered at Cannes, exactly as a result of it has the onerous-boiled high quality of an early Martin Scorsese movie.
It attracts on an actual-life corruption scandal within the city´s robust northern suburbs the place detectives had been accused of stealing from the drug sellers they had been supposed be locking up.
Also penetrating these tower blocks is “A Good Mother” by acclaimed French actor-director Hafsia Herzi, which can also be opening at Cannes.
As a local of town, Herzi had the credentials to movie there, however nonetheless needed to negotiate with the locals earlier than capturing.
– Resists and revolts –
Many legendary administrators have been drawn to Marseille, together with Hitchcock (“Rich and Strange”), Spielberg (“Catch Me If You Can”), and Alexander Korda, who made a trilogy of movies in regards to the metropolis.
And the quantity of movies and sequence shot there has tripled within the final decade, in response to native officers.
That´s nice for the financial system however maybe dangerous for its popularity, since many play on its stereotype because the violent and harmful “Kalashnikov City”.
“Marseille is a city that resists, that fights, that revolts, that doesn´t take anything lying down, and that borderline side of it can sometimes end up as a caricature like in ´BAC Nord´,” mentioned author Vincent Thabourey.
– Matt Damon ´a fan´ –
But the cliches have additionally given France´s former colonial port a world profile, he added.
That will get one other enhance from “Stillwater”, with Damon telling reporters on the pink carpet in Cannes that the “Marseille is a real character in the film” and even jokingly saying he was now a fan of its fanatically-supported soccer staff, Olymipue de Marseille.
Damon mentioned he drew on his personal feelings as a father of women to channel the anger and frustration of a misplaced Oklahoma redneck overseas.
The character “runs into all the issues you have when you have the language and cultural impediment that an Oklahoma roughneck would have abroad,” Damon mentioned.
The actor, of course, has historical past in Marseille because it was a fisherman from town that pulled an unconscious Jason Bourne from the Mediterranean at the beginning of the blockbuster franchise.
Trying to do justice to a “city as complex as Marseille is a real challenge for directors”, mentioned Thabourey, which is “why they probably keep coming back”.
