Cronenberg sends up incestuous Hollywood at Cannes

Cannes (France) (AFP) - Canadian director David Cronenberg returned to creepy form on Monday at Cannes with a dark satire of Hollywood perversion and the incestuous movie business starring Julianne Moore and Robert Pattinson.

"Maps to the Stars" presents Los Angeles as a twisted den of vice in which naked ambition goes hand-in-hand with an infantile hunger for acknowledgement.

Reminiscent of Hollywood nightmares such as Robert Altman's "The Player" and Bret Easton Ellis's "Less Than Zero", the film also revives the warped vision of Cronenberg's best-loved movies such as "Dead Ringers", "Spider" and "Crash", which won the Cannes Jury Special Prize in 1996.

Mia Wasikowska plays Agatha, a mysterious young burns victim who has just returned to LA.

She hires Jerome (Pattinson), an aspiring actor and screenwriter, as a limousine driver to tour her old haunts and after they become lovers, he explains to another character that sex with the disfigured girl will be good research for his film project.

Agatha finds work as a personal assistant, called a "chore whore" in the business, to Havana Segrand (Moore), an ageing star feeling increasingly sidelined by an industry obsessed with youth.

Havana has been seeing a New Age psychologist (John Cusack) who works through her trauma, including purported sexual abuse by her mother, with massage and talk therapy.

He is father to a family that is beyond dysfunctional, with a teenage son who is already a bankable movie star and recovering drug addict, and a wife who ruthlessly negotiates the son's film deals.

But two darker family secrets plumb new depths of debauchery.

-Pattinson suffers-

Cronenberg said the film looked at people who were so terrified of being discarded by show business it seems to them like a "living death".

"As a card-carrying existentialist, I have to say, these people are desperate to exist," he told reporters.

Cronenberg said despite the kinkiness and shocking violence of the plot -- one character beats another to death with a film prize trophy -- he intended the audience to laugh along.

"I think all my movies are funny and this one is no exception," he said with a coy smile.

"People say, you should make a comedy and I say, but I've made nothing else."

He said that although the film was a clear commentary on the pathological aspects of fame, limiting its scope to Hollywood was "shortchanging the movie".

"You could set this in Silicon Valley, you could set it in Wall Street -- any place where people are desperate, ambitious, greedy, pitiful," he said.

Cusack called the film "a very lurid, sort of fever dream about Hollywood" but Moore leapt to the industry's defence.

"I love the movie business -- I'm not here to disparage it," she said.

"The reason we value film, we value literature, we value narrative is because they tell us about our lives, about who we are," she said.

Moore, who drew strong reviews for her performance, said the themes of externalisation of the self and how that can play out to disastrous effect in a family were "fascinating".

"The fact that we get to explore that idea in Hollywood and again in entertainment I think is really, truly marvellous."

While the other actors fielded questions about their roles, Pattinson, the heartthrob of the "Twilight" films, suffered through queries such as who was the better sexual partner in the back of a limousine, Moore or Juliette Binoche, his partner in Cronenberg's previous Cannes outing "Cosmopolis".

When asked what he would like to tell his Japanese fans, Pattinson quipped that they should "go and see this film many, many times".

"Maps to the Stars" drew enthusiastic applause at Cannes and mainly glowing reviews.

Reviewer Robbie Collin of British newspaper The Daily Telegraph said it could give Cronenberg his first Palme d'Or, the Cannes top prize.

"My instant reaction, after stumbling, open-mouthed, from the cinema, was a pathological need to stumble back in again," he said.

Eric Kohn of US movie website said the film "captures the depths of madness plaguing Hollywood culture" and called it Cronenberg's "angriest, politically-motivated achievement".