( Fafarazzi ) - With the minor exception of missing out on Jim Toback's documentary on Mike Tyson (which will screen here this fall anyway - we can wait), the only regret we have so far about sitting out the Cannes Film Festival is our absence at the mini-riot that preceded the press screening of director James Gray's drama Two Lovers, starring Joaquin Phoenix and Gwyneth Paltrow. That's when we're at our best, as were Lou Lumenick and the "major U.S. film critic" (*cough* Manohla Dargis *cough*) who apparently exclaimed, "I'm not going to wait an hour for f--ing James Gray" before an ensuing screening delay, shoving match and seating free-for-all.
Like his resilient cousins in the roach family, Roger Friedman naturally outlasted the meltdown and later delivered his sterling, tasteful review, "Gwyneth Paltrow Bares a Breast in Film":
You don't really think of Oscar-winner Gwyneth Paltrow as the racy type. But in her new film, Two Lovers, which debuted at the Cannes Film Festival Monday night, she quite surprisingly bares a single breast. The shot is, shall we say, head-on into the camera. And it's for more than a couple of seconds. This is no wardrobe malfunction. It's on purpose. (To paraphrase a great Seinfeld quote: "They're real ... and they're spectacular!") Of course, this moment - it's the left breast, by the way - is meant to be part of the story; it's exactly what her manipulative character would do to land her man, in this case a character played by Joaquin Phoenix. In Two Lovers, Phoenix plays a mentally jumbled lonely guy who tries to juggle romances with both Paltrow's selfish car crash of a mistress and Vinessa Shaw's girl next door.