Confirmed For Cannes: Cosmopolis 1st Trailer Takes No Prisoners – Again
With most of the world’s film and entertainment media waiting up for news of the Cannes Film Festival line-up, it’s likely many of them were also eagerly anticipating the first full Cosmopolis trailer. If so, it was time well spent. Proudly displaying the film’s official “in competition” selection for the Palme d’Or at 0:07 seconds in, Cronenberg, Pattinson and the cast of Cosmopolis pulled out the big guns for 2:04 minutes.
Without giving too much away for those that haven’t read the book, the trailer snapshots the weird and dangerous scenarios Robert Pattinson – as the progressively, reckless billionaire Eric Packer – finds himself confronted with. An out of control yen, an aloof new wife, an attention-seeking psycho with a penchant for pie-throwing, anti-globalization protesters dressed as/or carrying rats and warning anyone who’ll listen that “a specter is haunting the world”, and an anonymous assassin – today’s trailer had it all.
Intense and intriguing, Pattinson displays a previously unseen callousness in his roles to date, delivering the oddly poetic yet brutal tone Don DeLillo set in his book of the same name. At one point in the trailer Pattinson says,”the logical extension of business is murder,” at another – when reflecting on the fact that his life is in danger – he remarks, “It makes me feel free in a way I’ve never known”.
In the book Packer is a man pursued by his own demons and a bullet with his name on it, while on a 24 journey through Manhattan in a white, stretch limo. Cronenberg’s adaptation of DeLillo’s surreal shocker has had pretty much everyone in a lather since the March 21 teaser (22nd if in Europe). Reactions on that day were seismic, and it’s likely history will repeat itself.
Neon warnings of Packer’s predicament – No more money, No more sex, No more power, No more future – spell out the almost apocalyptic themes of DeLillo’s book. How does it end? You’ll have to read the book or watch the film. If you’re wise you’ll do both. If only to see how – hopefully, brilliantly – Cronenberg, Pattinson and the rest of cast that includes Juliet Binoche, Paul Giamatti, Samantha Morton, Jay Baruchel and Mathieu Almaric, bring to life a story that’s as potent today as it was when it was written. Cosmopolis has multiple release dates confirmed but no U.S distributor or release date as yet. A status likely to change – imminently.
