Seduced and Abandoned – Film Review

Alec Baldwin goes to the Cannes Film festival, surprisingly for the very first time, along with the maverick film director James Toback, and they go on a hilarious quest for financing for their next feature film, a preposterous seeming updating of Last Tango in Paris.

Moving from director to one financier to another and one star actor to another, the duo provoke various luminaries into making revealing, funny statements, and it’s all edited together with great, relevant movie and archive clips. In fact, it’s film buff’s paradise. The duo waste an awful lot of people’s time by, I imagine, pretending to be making a movie that they know has no chance and maybe’s just a laugh anyway. It does strip away the veneer of tinsel behind the world’s biggest, most glamorous film festival and cynically shows, as Bob Dylan once said, ‘Money doesn’t talk, it swears.’

The relationship film-makers have with Cannes and the film financiers never looked quite so bitter-sweet. You feel this is a true insider’s view, telling some real truths. though I guess not all we’re seeing is actually real. It can’t be, can it?

Toback’s documentary features amusing and telling insights from directors Martin Scorsese, Francis Coppola, Bernardo Bertolucci and Roman Polanski and from actors Ryan Gosling, Diane Kruger, James Caan and Jessica Chastain and a host of film distribution luminaries, all of whom look like rabbits caught in headlights.

It’s the second documentary in succeeding weeks featuring old guys rambling down memory lane, but when it’s Scorsese and Coppola again, you gotta be there one more time.

I was hugely entertained and learned quite a lot. Great stuff.  Baldwin proves quite a force of nature, a fun loving but thoughtful guy of many contradictions and hidden depths. Toback is an admirable one-off, too, just as interestingly peculiar as his films.

(C) Derek Winnert 2013 derekwinnert.com