For almost two weeks the Palais des Festivals on the Cannes Croisette impressed its own rhythms on life, as professional cinephiles avidly squeezed in as many films and press conferences as possible. The splendors of the seaside resort gave way to the mirage of the cinematic events, while life developed a kaleidoscopic quality as the films began to unreel their imaginary worlds. As we discovered, these imagined visions bore a startling resemblance to reality, in all its aspects. Moments of sheer delight taken in the fleeting beauty of cinematic images were memorable in Pedro Almodovar’s Los Abrazos Rotos, Jane Campion’s Bright Star or Alain Resnais’s Les Herbes Folles. But equally powerful were images of tremendous brutality in Jacques Audiard’s Un Prophète, Brillante Mendosa’s Kinatay, Park Chan-Wook’s Bak-Jwi, Lars von Trier’s Anti-Christ and Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds.
It has been remarked that violence was again the dominating feature at this year’s festival, ranging from the graphically brutal to more insidious forms, and from situations of war to everyday domestic life. A simple survey would, however, unmask this impression as an exaggeration. It is fair to say that there were almost as many pacific films in the official selection as those in which violence was prominent, even if the emotional intensity that the most shocking scenes provoked justified a different impression. Instead of joining here the interminable debate over the extent of violence in various media, I would prefer to examine a question surrounding a particular kind of violence which repeatedly arose. What appeared to have captured the imagination of many directors was violence embedded in various structures of power, be they sanctioned by society’s consent or self-consciously established. The question then raised was how the individual could fare under the pressure exercised by these structures. This issue was much more than simply a matter of violent images, since such images sprang from a global vision that placed the individuals in situations where they became victims of aggression from various sources of power.
Palme d’Or and Ecumenical commendation for Michael Haneke
It came as no surprise that Palme d’Or was awarded to Michael Haneke’s Das Weisse Band (Le ruban blanc). The Ecumenical jury considered it a very strong candidate for their prize and decided to honour the film with a commendation in recognition of its superlative valour. Shot in black and white and score-free, it exhibits a formal ascetic style which is only matched by the subtle observations of early twentieth-century individuals and society. The aesthetic excellence lends support to an ethical preoccupation with exposing the mechanics of social, and ultimately political, violence. What we witness, on a small scale, through a German Protestant village during 1913-1914, is symptomatic of a society in which the generalized use of force and its underlying ideology are doomed to engulf the whole nation with the outbreak of WWI. Moreover, in the village children we see in formation, that very generation who would reach full maturity during the Third Reich.
The vision of human nature proposed by Haneke is irredeemably pessimistic, with a society corrupted by evil from children to adults. Under the mask of innocence and the pretense of retaliation the village youth inflict the cruelest punishments on adults and especially on defenseless young children. If the patriarchal society functions as a first structure of repression, affecting the women and the children, the children reduplicate it in a gesture of rebellion, inflicting harm on both the more powerful and the powerless. There is also smouldering dissatisfaction and open retaliatory violence provoked by that state of oppression engendered by class difference. The end of the film brings no resolution; the community is incapable of confronting its demons. Even the representative of the Church condones and augments such evil under the mask of self-righteousness. In such a world the only possibility of salvation comes through passive, but nevertheless complicit, withdrawal for those individuals who retain their free agency. The others are either moved to retaliate, by forming an underground resistance that perpetuates the same discretionary tendencies they oppose, or are the innocent victims of a corrupted society.
Grand Prix for Audiards Un prophète
Jacques Audiard’s Un prophète is both a character study and an exploration of the French penitentiary system. It offers a reflection on the corruption of the prison authorities, a corruption which makes it possible for criminal groupings to remain active inside. The social observations here are interesting, with ethnic segregation playing an important role. The protagonist Malik El Djebena, a young Arab thug, is placed from the very beginning in a situation where he is forced by inmates to choose between his life and taking the life of another prisoner. Once the decision has been made the film can be read as a bildungsroman, with Malik making a journey, first being used and then using the two dominant poles of power in the prison: the Corsican mob and the Muslim brotherhood. In the end Malik emerges as a man of independent mind and as something of a victor. But his victory is also a defeat of the humanity of the individual: crushed by power structures and constrained to eliminate other human beings in order to save himself, he perpetuates the very aggression to which he himself fell victim.
Award for Best Director
Brillante Mendoza’s Kinatay is an exploration into the moment at which the innocent individual gradually slips, almost unconsciously, into a pact with evil forces at work in society. The newly married police cadet Pepoy is dragged by way of an exchange of a small recompense into an episode of sheer brutality, during which a woman is kidnapped, raped and dismembered. The camera captures what the audience perceive to be his impressions of the way to the place of torture, of the murder and of his way back into the city. It briefly records images evoking Jesus to add greater weight to the moral choice with which the protagonist is confronted. But, again, the survival of his own individuality is at stake, as corrupted police forces pressure the individual into giving up any semblance of moral integrity.
Jury Prize Ex-aequo
Fish Tank directed by Andrea Arnold won the Jury Prize ex-aequo with Park Chan-Wook’s Bak-Jwi (Thirst). The latter is a surreal drama which struggles to obtain depth from a storyline in which the self-sacrifice of the protagonist, a Catholic monk, in the name of medical progress, leads to his transformation into a vampire. At a rather different place on the cinematic spectrum, Fish Tank is an exercise in social realism in which a few images function as metaphors, encapsulating the meaning of the film. The image of a sickly horse that Mia, the teenage protagonist, strives to unchain stands for the social constraints of her own situation and the efforts she makes to transcend them. The fish caught bare-handed and stabbed by her mother’s partner, Connor, anticipates Mia being manipulated into a brief love affair with him, and the violence to which she is then subjected. In the style of a coming-of-age drama Mia, now matured as a result of her newly gained experience into the misleading ways of the world, forsakes her past in search of a better future.
The Ecumenical Prize for Ken Loach
I have postponed discussion of the Ecumenical prize not out of modesty nor to reflect any kind of artistic hierarchy, but to reveal the motivation of the Jury in choosing a genre film as the winner. For those familiar with ecumenical prizes awarded to a profound auteur film, the light comedy genre of Ken Loach’s Looking for Eric might appear something of a baffling choice. But amongst the films present in the festival it was quite exceptional to encounter a work whose message was optimistic and affirming of human dignity, when so many were resigned to the idea that no alternative is left for the individual than to face compromise or being crushed by systems of power. It was refreshing to find a director who still trusts the capacity of humanity to uncover transformative inner resources capable of changing our world for the better without literally having to walk over dead bodies.
It would be misleading to believe that the presence of the Manchester United legend Eric Cantona turns the film into a facile celebration of either that iconic figure or the sport that made him famous. Instead, it is through Cantona, as an alter ego of the main character, Eric Bishop, that the latter reaches a level of self-reflection that enables him to change his life, fix his past mistakes, and save his family. The recurring moral dilemma facing the individual in so many of this year’s selected films – whereby one must either compromise with evil or suffer the consequences - is rejected in favour of a third alternative. The film teaches with humour and grace that, where the individual fails, the solution to difficulties is often found in human solidarity and friendship. In Loach’s vision the ‘united’ disempowered render evil ineffectual, not by opposing force with force, but by disarming it through inventiveness and laughter.
The ‘anti-prize’
It was unprecedented for the Ecumenical jury to award an anti-prize, and it is not assumed that this year will see the invention of a tradition. For this reason, and to suggest the playfulness of the affair, mention of an ‘anti-prize’ was not included in the official press release. The idea was prompted by the title of Lars von Trier’s Antichrist, as a response to its mischievous graphical rendition in which with the final ‘t’ represents the female symbol. The jury responded in the same ironic character, offering an interpretation of the film in the key already implied in the title. If the subsequent accusation of ‘censorship’ which arose from certain quarters missed entirely the jury’s intention, the fact remains that a great deal of feminist critique is troubled by von Trier’s treatment of female characters in his previous films.
Ecumenical events
For an ecumenical jury the world of Cannes is not limited to film. There is still another dimension that adds to the excitement of the cinematic attractions. This year, which marked the jury’s 35th anniversary, the ecumenical dimension was widened to include a wide mix of religious traditions: two Protestants (Serge Molla/Switzerland, Jean-Michel Zucker/France), two Catholics Claudette Lambert/Canada, Federico Pontiggia/Italy), one Orthodox (Alina Birzache, Romania) and one Jew (Radu Mihaileanu/France, president). We were extremely grateful for the kind support of both the Catholic and Protestant communities at Cannes, not only by way of their team’s daily engagement with the festival, but also through their wonderful hospitability at the official events. We experienced memorable moments of togetherness right from the first day when we met with the local team, and this continued when we were welcomed by the religious authorities after Sunday mass at the Église Catholique “Bon Voyage” and the Protestant Temple. Such friendship was crystallized at the ecumenical celebration, which this year took place at the Église du Prado. It reminded us of the fruits of ecumenical collaboration which always brings us closer in spirit, and of that higher brotherhood of which our Jury at Cannes is just one facet.