Cannes Can't Decide How to Feel About Marion Cotillard's Prostitution Drama

Outside the Cannes Film Festival screening rooms, two French directors in competition, François Ozon and Abdellatif Kechiche, have brought a dash of unexpected drama to the Croisette by landing in the middle of very different controversies. Ozon, whose terrific Jeune et jolie (Young and Pretty) chronicles a year in the life of a teenage girl who becomes a prostitute, drew fire for his comment in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter that "it's a fantasy of many women to prostitute themselves." Yikes. Kechiche, for his part, was slammed in the wake of the justifiably rapturous reception given to La vie d'Adèle (Blue is the Warmest Color) for allegedly subjecting the film's crew to excruciating working conditions and failing to pay them for overtime. Ouch.
Meanwhile, the competition continued Friday morning with the press screening of one of the most anxiously awaited—and divisive—works of this year's edition: U.S. filmmaker James Gray's period piece The Immigrant, starring French actress Marion Cotillard (in her first American lead role), Gray regular Joaquin Phoenix, and Jeremy Renner.
The 44-year-old, New York-based Gray is a bit of an oddity in U.S. cinema: a writer-director of dark, unironic melodramas and crime films that combine a polished formal classicism with noir-ish flourishes and plots straight out of Shakespeare or Greek tragedy.
His last three films—the very fine The Yards (2000), the less assured We Own the Night (2007), and Two Lovers (2008), his most distinctive, haunting movie to date—were all in competition here, making him a bit of a rock star in Europe even as he's remained on the margins of the American film industry.
The Immigrant is in many ways Gray's most ambitious film yet. A costume drama set in early 1920s New York, the film's story, in which a Polish immigrant (Cotillard) is lured into prostitution by a Jewish cabaret director (Phoenix) and tentatively romanced by his magician cousin (Renner), goes to the roots of themes that have always fascinated Gray: the grimy underside of the American melting pot, and the ways that family, community, and the dogged pursuit of the American dream can pull individuals toward excruciating choices with often dire consequences.
The result is a solid, but strangely uninspired work that's absorbing without ever fully grabbing you, despite a subtle and affecting performance by Cotillard and a handful of darkly beautiful moments.
Avoiding the all-too-common trap of overly busy historical reconstitution, Gray, production designer Happy Massee, and cinematographer Darius Khondji draw you into a menacing, sepia-toned Lower East Side teeming with immigrants being swindled by those who've assimilated into a post-World-War-I America in full capitalist swing.

'The Immigrant' plays like an old-fashioned but subdued melodrama, with a pleasingly ripe musical score and scenes full of big emotions performed at a hushed pitch.

As Cotillard's Eva resorts to selling her body for Phoenix's Bruno, who loves and protects her even as he exploits her, The Immigrant plays like an old-fashioned but subdued melodrama, with a pleasingly ripe musical score and scenes full of big emotions performed at a hushed pitch.
Gray (interviewed by France 24's Eve Jackson at the Marrakesh Film Festival last December) is one of the few American filmmakers who can pull this kind of thing off gracefully; The Immigrant never slips into tear-jerking pompousness, and he crafts images that feel fresh and thoughtfully composed