LONDON FILM FESTIVAL RED CARPET

LONDON - Red carpets and banners festooned a soggy Leicester Square on Wednesday for the opening night of the 48th annual London Film Festival, which has a slate as diverse as the teeming capital city that hosts it. Between Mike Leigh's working-class tragedy Vera Drake, which opens the festival, and the closing film, David O. Russell's existential comedy I (Heart) Huckabees on Nov. 4, 180 features and 103 shorts from 60 countries will be screened. Last year, 116,000 people attended the two-week event. Among this year's highlights: 2046, the latest film from Hong Kong director Wong Kar-Wai; Zhang Yimou's kaleidoscopic martial arts fest House of Flying Daggers; Mira Nair's Indian-flavoured take on William Makepeace Thackeray's 19th-century novel Vanity Fair; and Enduring Love, Roger Mitchell's adaptation of Ian McEwan's novel of obsessive desire. There are films by what Sandra Hebron, the festival's artistic director, called "the great and the good of international cinema" - including French masters Jean-Luc Godard (Notre musique) and Eric Rohmer (Triple Agent), and Senegal's Ousmane Sembene (Moolande) - alongside films from edgy younger directors such as American Gregg Araki (Mysterious Skin) and Sweden's Lukas Moodysson (A Hole in My Heart). Perhaps because it's an unsettled time for the world, Hebron said, it has been a good year for world cinema. "Many of the films in the festival are films that are somehow engaged with the world around us, films that are seeking to make sense of the world and also to talk about what they are seeing," she said. "There's a kind of intelligence coming through in a lot of the filmmaking - including some of the (Hollywood) studio pictures."

She cited Huckabees, already released in North America, which stars Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin as detectives who investigate existential crises instead of crimes, in a cast that includes Jude Law, Mark Wahlberg, Naomi Watts and Isabelle Huppert. "It's got a very starry cast," Hebron said, "and yet within that David O. Russell manages to slip in all sorts of political and moral questions. And a film like The Manchurian Candidate: a genre picture and a remake to boot, but you've got a director (Jonathan Demme) who brings an intelligence and curiosity and updates it in a way that makes it have a degree of contemporary relevance."-L. Laless.

 

BROOKE SHIELDS MAKES BIG TIME NEWS

NEW YORK --It was nearly a lifetime ago that Brooke Shields shocked the world as a knowing child prostitute in the film Pretty Baby and told us that nothing came between her and her Calvins. As that rare creature who navigated her way from child stardom to a successful adult career, Shields looks back on it all as a fun time, a great opportunity. But now that she has a baby of her own, she's wary about having her daughter follow her into the spotlight. "I just don't want to deny who she is naturally," says Shields, now 39. "The business is very different now. Kids are a lot more precocious. They're a lot more sexually aware. It wasn't like that for me when I was a kid. We were kids. We really just were kids." For now, Shields is toting 17-month-old Rowan to the Broadway musical Wonderful Town, a project she calls the perfect complement to her new life as a mother. Rowan watches the singing and dancing with wide eyes. When Shields snaps her fingers as part of a big swing number, her daughter imitates it by pinching her fingers together and making a clucking noise with her mouth. "She thinks that's snapping so I let her think that's snapping," Shields says with a laugh. "She does this really funny, awkward funny little dance." Munching on pizza backstage at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre, Shields says motherhood has made her appreciate comedy - something she fell into later in her career in the TV sitcom Suddenly Susan. "I've just noticed that I'm OK with being happy in my work. I find that it's just as valid if I'm having a good time. I don't have to be suffering for it to be good or for it to be art," she says. Not that she doesn't still enjoy a challenge. She had just two weeks to prepare for her role as Ruth Sherwood, a tough-talking journalist from Ohio in the Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden and Adolph Green musical. She took over the role from Donna Murphy, who earned a Tony nomination for the part. It was a daunting task, but for Shields, it fell into the category of the Eleanor Roosevelt adage: You must do the thing you think you cannot do. "It sort of terrified me," Shields says, "so I basically had to say yes." To the world, it would seem the former model is playing against type as Ruth, a brassy, sharp-tongued woman who never gets her man. But Shields says she identifies with the old-fashioned broad who fends off her vulnerability with a wry sense of humour. Audiences appreciate the comic turn and so did the critics. Her onstage battle with a stubborn sofa bed "recalls the great Lucille Ball at her most physically hilarious," wrote one drama critic; another said Shields was "an unpretentious delight." "This role is so perfect for her, it really is," says Jennifer Hope Wills, who co-stars as Ruth's sister, Eileen. "She's so funny, but in a natural way. And she just has that star quality." Celebrity has been a fact of life for Shields as long as she can remember. She started modelling at 11 months and never left the public eye, with controversial early roles in Pretty Baby and as a scantily clad castaway in Blue Lagoon. She examined the subject herself while a student at Princeton University, where she wrote her thesis on Pretty Baby and other Louis Malle films. In the movie, she portrays a child who lives in a brothel with her mother; a photographer falls in love with the young girl. Years later, Shields read accusations that she had been exploited, but it didn't fit with her memory. "I had a ball on the set," she says. "I played games with the gaffers. All the girls sang songs every day. It was like a big game. So there was a naivete that I think protected me from feeling exploited. And I think that's just lucky." As she grew into a bona fide star, the world watched her successes and heartbreaks, including her failed marriage to tennis star Andre Agassi and her professional break from her mother, who managed her career until the 1990s. Before Rowan's birth, a nurse leaked the news that Shields was having trouble getting pregnant with husband Chris Henchy and was undergoing fertility treatments. Shields hasn't been shy about discussing her troubles. She's finishing a book now called Down Came the Rain: My Journey Through Postpartum Depression, due out in May. Stripped of her makeup and wig, her long hair now blond, Shields sits in her dressing room surrounded by floral bouquets, with a picture of her daughter peering down from the mirror. She's happy to embrace a good time in her life by doing something fun and funny. "It's not heavy. You don't have to be told who you are and why you're bad and why life sucks," she says of the musical. "It's such a feel-good, kind of old-fashioned but very, very updated Broadway. It's what Broadway always was when I remembered it." It's the third time Shields has parachuted into a Broadway musical in mid-run - she replaced other actresses in both Grease and Cabaret. She calls the two-week rehearsal period "kind of devastating" and "almost not fair," but relishes rising to the task. "It's made me realize a capacity and a potential that I have that I thought I did, but now I can feel it and see it every night," she says. "So I think that to me and my career is priceless." -Lisa Talin.