Cannes: Woody Allen Mulls Mortality in <em>Tall Dark Stranger</em>

Mortality was on the minds of filmmakers at Cannes on Saturday, as Woody Allen descended on the Cannes festival with his new ensemble comedy, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger.

The stranger of the title refers not just to the hoped-for lover, but also to the grim reaper whose arrival is inevitable for everyone. Stranger is a relationship farce of Allenesque complexity, this time tinged with a very personal sense of doom.

Death and the futility of human existence is nothing if not familiar territory to Allen, now 74. The topic takes on a more immediate quality as he approaches the subject in his own twilight years.

"My relationship with death is the same, " he quipped at the news conference after the film's first screening "I'm strongly against it."

But clearly there is a newly felt element of life's narrowing horizon. Anthony Hopkins plays an aging fool, who leaves his wife of many decades (Gemma Jones) and quickly marries a gold-digging actress-prostitute (Lucy Punch). (Hopkins was not present in Cannes.)

The film also stars Josh Brolin, Naomi Watts, along with Hopkins and Jones, all coping with familiar Woody Allen relationship games.

Read the rest of the interview here with WaxWord-Cannes.

Read full Cannes coverage at Report From Cannes and WaxWord Cannes.