Samantha Morton

Dark matter in ‘I’ve Loved You So Long’ and ‘Synecdoche, New York’

At the press conference after the Cannes premiere of Synecdoche, New York, Charlie Kaufman’s feature directing debut, the screenwriter who hatched Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind looked understandably nervous. From the first question, asking why on earth he put a word in his title that most American won’t be able to pronounce, never mind understand, he was on the defensive. Synecdoche, in case you slept through that English class, is a figure of speech in which a part stands for a whole. It rhymes with the New York town of Schenectady—hence play on words in the title.

Just got back from a late dinner with a gang of journalists at La Pizza, which has always been Roger Ebert’s favorite restaurant in Cannes. Roger, sadly, isn’t here this year. He’s been in the hospital again. But his wife Chas is serving as his eyes and ears. At La Pizza, lots of vintage Cannes tales were zipping around the table. Glen Kenny, who’s just been axed from Premiere—the latest in a series of U.S. film critics to see their jobs deemed redundant—regaled us with a Cannes moment years ago, when he found himself overhearing a conversation between Nick Nolte and Terry Gilliam. Nolte was going into lurid detail about how he had to get a testicle-tuck, because his balls were so out of line he kept sitting on them. . Jay Stone of CanWest News Service had his own Nolte sighting just a few days ago. Nolte had slipped into the lobby of his apartment to have a smoke. Usually it’s the the other way around—you go out for a smoke. But Nolte isn’t what you’d call normal.