The Peacock

We've been alerted to an eyewitness report of Murali in Cannes back in May. Read on:

... [Summer Palace] is one of the most beautiful films that I saw at Cannes. Such a film redeems the festival by allowing people to experience inventive, truthful, uncompromising cinema.

It helps to redeem the festival from films like 2.37, which showed alongside it in Un Certain Regard. 2.37 is a poor imitation of Gus Van Sant's Elephant, and doesn't hesitate to blatantly copy Elephant's plot as well as its characters with all of their problems and tics intact. The film ultimately yields to a common temptation amongst young directors: have a shocking twist, preferably at the end for maximum effect. This final scene, in which a girl slashes her wrists and slowly bleeds to death is unbearable not because it's tragic, but because it closes a film that has been made by hustlers and cheats.

And when one sees the director of this pathetic film descending the steps, strutting like a peacock, accompanied by his team, all dressed in t-shirts on the back of which the Palme D'or is accompanied by the question 'Who is Murali K Thalluri?', one thinks that this is just too much: This much self-satisfaction is utterly nauseating.

Courtesy of Cinelogs. Emphasis ours. Translated from the original French.