Seduced and Abandoned, review - Telegraph Dir: James Toback; Starring: Alec Baldwin, James Toback, Neve Campbell, Ryan Gosling, Jessica Chastain, Martin Scorsese, Diane Kruger, James Caan. Seduced and Adandoned is a film about the mesmerising machinery of the film business, using as its engine the conceit that its makers - the portly director James Toback and wickedly crumpled actor Alec Baldwin - are paying a visit to the Cannes Film Festival to seek financing for a movie they want to make. They envisage this embryonic film - which may or may not be primarily a jeu d'esprit - as an erotically explicit modern remake of Bertolucci's Last Tango In Paris set in Iraq, provisionally dubbed "Last Tango In Tikrit," with Baldwin in the Brando role. I'm telling you this early, because otherwise you might spend a while, as I did, dimly puzzling why it would be titled "Last Tango Into Crete," and staying alert for the Greek angle. I'm not so sure Last Tango needs or deserves a remake (its shock value seems very much of its time, as Brando's drearily obscene monologue about his lover having sex with a pig - replayed here - serves to remind us). Despite all that, it makes for an entertaining film, as Toback and Baldwin - with an engaging mixture of swagger and sly self-deprecation - wheel around town conducting interviews with directors such as Martin Scorsese (a particular joy), Roman Polanski, Bernardo Bertolucci and Francis Ford Coppola; as well as the actors Ryan Gosling, Jessica Chastain, James Caan and Diane Kruger.. Some game multi-millionaires, such as Arpad Busson and Taki Theodoracopulos, also play along with the duo's hapless pitch for cash. It's a ramble, but something of the impossible thrill, frustration and lunacy involved in making films arises pungently from each scene: a passionate dream distilled to cold cash by the baggy-eyed film financiers, who can take one look at any actor sitting before them, and immediately reduce them to a precisely-sized pile of box office returns.