Cannes:
Cannes loves to shock and the fourth day of the film festival showcased movies that succeeded in raising eyebrows with their takes on religion and sexuality.
Hagar Ben Asher's Israeli drama, Slut (featured in Critics' Week) explores female sexuality and Asher is perhaps the first woman director of a legitimate feature performing the sexually explicit scenes herself.
An attractive village woman, Tamar (Asher), who strangely resembles Julia Roberts, is obsessed with sex. She sells eggs at her farm during the day and services men at night, and when veterinarian Shai (Ishai Golan) returns to her neighbourhood, he becomes part of her happy harem.
But Shai unlike other men offers warmth and love and is even willing to play father to Tamar's two daughters.
The relationship between Tamar and Shai questions stereotypes of gender and morality and the film is replete with explicit sex scenes.
Italian master director Nanni Moretti's We Have A Pope, playing in the Festival's Competition, began by veering towards big controversy, but becomes tame by mid-point.
The film deals with the dilemma of the Vatican when it finds that its newly elected Pope wants to abdicate from his responsibilities as the head of all Catholics even before he ceremonially appears before the hundreds of men and women gathered at St Peter's Square.
The movie turns out to be not quite the sensitive moral comedy it was touted to be, though the first scenes mislead us into believing that Moretti was all set to shake the Vatican.
Hagar Ben Asher's Israeli drama, Slut (featured in Critics' Week) explores female sexuality and Asher is perhaps the first woman director of a legitimate feature performing the sexually explicit scenes herself.
An attractive village woman, Tamar (Asher), who strangely resembles Julia Roberts, is obsessed with sex. She sells eggs at her farm during the day and services men at night, and when veterinarian Shai (Ishai Golan) returns to her neighbourhood, he becomes part of her happy harem.
But Shai unlike other men offers warmth and love and is even willing to play father to Tamar's two daughters.
The relationship between Tamar and Shai questions stereotypes of gender and morality and the film is replete with explicit sex scenes.
Italian master director Nanni Moretti's We Have A Pope, playing in the Festival's Competition, began by veering towards big controversy, but becomes tame by mid-point.
The film deals with the dilemma of the Vatican when it finds that its newly elected Pope wants to abdicate from his responsibilities as the head of all Catholics even before he ceremonially appears before the hundreds of men and women gathered at St Peter's Square.
The movie turns out to be not quite the sensitive moral comedy it was touted to be, though the first scenes mislead us into believing that Moretti was all set to shake the Vatican.
