By Jonathan Crow
Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson might be soul mates in the “Twilight” series and may or may not be dating in real life, but in the just-released lineup of this year’s Cannes film festival, they are competitors.
Kristen Stewart stars in Walter Salles’s adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s classic “On the Road,” alongside Sam Riley, Garrett Hedlund, and Kirsten Dunst, who was named best actress at last year’s Cannes for her role in “Melancholia.” Salles is probably best known in this country for directing “The Motorcycle Diaries,” which depicted Che Guevara’s formative road trip through the hinterland of South America. “On the Road” shows Kerouac as he travels through America in the 1940s, hanging out with barely fictionalized versions of his Beat movement buddies Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs. Clearly, road trips are Salles’s auteurist thing.
Robert Pattinson, on the other hand, stars in David Cronenberg’s adaptation of the Don DeLillo novel “Cosmopolis,” about a burned-out hedge fund manager trying to negotiate Manhattan traffic. Judging from the international teaser trailer (in French and marginally NSFW), Cronenberg has shed the patina of respectability that he accrued with his last couple of movies — “Dangerous Methods,” “Eastern Promises” — and has created another mind-bending cinematic-fever dream along the lines of “Videodrome.” This film geek is stoked. The teaser shows, among other things, Pattinson shooting himself in the hand, stabbing some guy in the eye with a fork, and frolicking with a number of nubile young women. There also seems to be a massive wild boar walking around the city.
