60ème Festival de Cannes
4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days
Cannes Celebrates 60
By all counts, the 60th Festival de Cannes (16-27 May 2007) will go down as one of the best in its distinguished history as the queen of international film festivals. Délégué Artistique Thierry Frémaux achieved a remarkable balance in the Competition, mixing veteran filmmakers with debutantes and blending in particular Asian entries with films by American mainstream and European auteur directors. Further, the Competition was backed by a high-caliber Un Certain Regard section. Indeed, some French critics, reaching for straws, felt that a couple films in Un Certain Regard surely deserved a slot in the Competition, while a few fiascos in the top drawer section could easily have been downgraded a notch. But this only added to the scuttlebutt in Le Club, the hangout for journalists atop the Palais des Festivals.
The Cannes awards also seemed to fit the anniversary occasion like a glove. One would like to give much of the credit for the right choice of awards to jury president Stephen Frears, save that during a press conference at the opening of the festival some other voices on the international jury seemed just as capable of selecting quality from among the entries. When jury member Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish Nobel Prize winner for literature, was asked about Turkey’s future chances to join the European Union, he sidestepped the issue entirely and affirmed instead his respect for film art. Some cinematic insights were also offered by the women on the jury: Portugal’s actress-director Maria de Medeiros, Hong Kong actress Maggie Cheung, Canadian actress-director Sarah Polley, and Austrian actress Toni Colette. In responding to a question about looking forward to jury duties, Maggie Cheung confirmed that Gilles Jacob had already asked her on two prior occasions to serve on the International Jury. “After turning him down twice – because I was working on a film – I decided it was time to amend the oversight.” So the festival was off to a good start before the first film hit the screen.
Golden Palm to Romania
For the first time in festival history, the Palme d’Or was awarded to an entry from Romania: Cristian Mungiu’s 4 luni, 3 saptamini si 2 zile (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days). Programmed at the outset of festival, it was one of the front runners for Palme consideration from beginning to end and was awarded in addition the International Critics (FIPRESCI) Prize. For that matter, what made Cannes 2007 particularly memorable was the breakthrough by Eastern European directors across the board in all the festival sections. The so-called “new waves” from Romania, Russia, and Hungary were duly celebrated in the press, although some were not really new all – just being tagged so by some popeyed trendsetting French critics.
Not an easy film to swallow, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is also not easy to forget either. This emotionally searing tale of a university student’s illegal abortion in a seedy hotel during the last days of the Ceauscescu dictatorship features riveting performances by Laura Vasiliu as Gabita, the pregnant girl, and Anamaria Marinca as Otilia, the good-hearted classmate friend pulled into the mess. Shot mostly with a hand-held camera against a bleak wintery background of blues and greys, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days explores in numbing words and images a desensitized society in a backwater university town, where everything of human value is tested, impeded, or discarded in the course of a frightful night of uncertainty. Even the friendship between the girls is derailed once Otilia realizes that Gabita has been feeding her half-truths all along that unexpectedly lead to dead ends.
Wong Kar Wai’s Blueberry Nights
Cannes opened with Wong Kar Wai’s My Blueberry Nights (Hong Kong/USA), the Hong Kong director’s first film shot in the United States. Ever since he was awarded Best Director for Happy Together (a Hong Kong production shot in Buenos Aires) at the 1997 Cannes festival, Wong Kar Wai has been a favored figure at Cannes. Wong returned in 2000 with the critically acclaimed In the Mood for Love, starring Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung (awarded Best Actor). Then, in 2004, his 2046 scared the daylights out of Cannes staffers by arriving just in the nick of time for screen projection in the Competition. However, instead of Cannes being angry with the procrastinating filmmaker, the opposite occurred. In 2006, Wong was asked to serve as president of the International Jury. And, this year, his My Blueberry Nights opened the 60th anniversary festival. To my knowledge, few auteurs have been treated with such unquestioning fealty by the Cannes hierarchy.
View Happy Together and In the Mood for Love as the forerunners of a rambling trilogy about love lost and the pain of missed chances, then My Blueberry Nights comes across as a weak rehashing of Wong’s primary theme set in bars and restaurants illuminated by neon lights. This time, the director himself seems lost. Despite a cast of name personalities, led by singer Norah Jones in her first acting role, My Blueberry Nights unravels when the scene shifts from Manhattan to Memphis, afterwards to Las Vegas and the wide open spaces, and finally back to New York again. Whether intentional or not, citations from films that had previously made history at Cannes add to the puzzle. Ry Cooder’s guitar strains recalls Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas (Golden Palm, 1984), and Norah Jones and Natalie Portman on the open road evokes Ridley Scott’s Thelma and Louise (closing night presentation, Cannes 1991). “We’re watching the wrong Kar Wai,” remarked a critic friend, and I couldn’t agree more. Why some foreign directors can’t resist the American road movie genre, without knowing how to wed it to their own artistic aesthetic, is beyond comprehension.
Fatih Akin’s Edge of Heaven
Citations from previous Cannes hits have become fashionable of late. Take Turkish-German director Fatih Akin at his word in an interview, then his Auf der anderen Seite (The Edge of Heaven), awarded Best Screenplay by the International Jury and the Ecumenical Prize, was inspired by Guillermo Arriaga’s screenplay for Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu’s Babel (Mexico/USA/France), awarded Best Director at the 2006 Cannes festival. Once again, overlapping stories chart the destinies of six searching individuals, three Germans and three Turks, who don’t quite know where they belong although fated to live in two different cultures. A pair of tragic deaths force painful decisions. And although Fassbinder actress Hannah Schygulla makes a respectable cameo appearance as a distraught mother, it’s veteran Turkish actor and stage director Tuncel Kurtiz who steals the show as a sympathetic retiree who accidentally kills a prostitute he has fallen in love with.
Like Wong Kar Wai, Fatih Akin has evolved into a Cannes regular. According to an inside source at the Cannes festival, the Turkish-German director narrowly missed an invitation to the Côte d’Azur in 2004 with Gegen die Wand (Head On) – it was entered instead at the Berlinale, where it won the Golden Bear. Subsequently, he was invited to serve on the International Jury at the 2005 Cannes festival, where he also presented his documentary Crossing the Bridge – The Sounds of Istanbul in an out-of-competition slot. There, as jury member, Fatih Akin made the acquaintance of writer Guillermo Arriaga, awarded Best Screenplay for Tommy Lee Jones’s The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (USA), a multi-layered tale of overlapping destinies set along the Texas border to Mexico. Akin’s The Edge of Heaven – the German title reads "On the Other Side" – doesn’t stray far from the same general Arriaga theme of miscommunication among cultures that constantly rub shoulders with each other without comprehending much more than that.
Alexander Sokurov’s No-Show
Although Alexander Sokurov himself has never been awarded a major prize at Cannes, his Alexandra (Russia) marked the fifth occasion that the St. Petersburg auteur has competed at Cannes – a record that puts him on an equal footing with Russian icon director Andrei Tarkovsky. The string began with Molokh (Moloch) (1999) on Hitler, followed by Telets (Taurus) (2001) on Lenin, the one-shot tour of the Hermitage in Russkiy kovcheg (Russian Ark) (2002), and the spiritually poetic and militarily oriented Otets i syn (Father and Son) (2003). Although all were critically acclaimed, only Moloch was singled out for Palm honors: to Sokurov’s reported consternation, Yuri Arabov and Marina Koreneva were awarded Best Screenplay. Had the impulsive Russian director not reported ill a day before the scheduled press screening (he doesn’t particularly like to fly), Alexandra might have set his Cannes record straight, for the film ranks among Sokurov’s best and deserved some kind of personal Cannes recognition.
Alexandra stars Galina Vishnevskaya, the wife of the late celebrated cellist and Russian dissident Mstislav Rostropovich. Well known in her own right as a legendary opera singer, Vishnevskaya is best remembered as Katerina Izmailova in the Russian opera "Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk", Dimitry Shostakovich’s masterpiece banned under Stalin. Just prior to shooting Alexandra, Alexander Sokurov had made a documentary titled Elegiya zhizni – Rostropovich, Vishnevskaya (Elegy of Life – Rostropovich, Vishnevskaya (2006), in which he eulogized both Rostropovich and Vishnevskaya and confirmed his admiration for the Russian opera singer since his childhood. The story of a worried grandmother who pays a visit to Chechnya to visit her grandson, an army officer on the war front, Alexandra required the presence of Galina Vishnevskaya in nearly every sequence. Her self-effacing courtesy to Russian military personnel, although she doesn’t approve of the war, is matched by her gentle attention to local muslim women at an open market, whom she invites to visit her back home. That moment alone highlights the absurdity of the war games surrounding her visit.
Andrei Zvyagintsev’s Banishment
Andrei Zvyagintsev’s Izgnanie (The Banishment) (Russia) takes up where his Vozvrashcheniye (The Return) (2003), the Golden Lion winner at Venice, had previously left off. Both films star a charismatic actor, Konstantin Lavronenko – awarded Best Actor at Cannes – as father and husband in a spiritual crisis that cannot be resolved by love or forgiveness. To the confusion of many at the press screening, Zvyagintsev dispenses with a narrative line to interpret the protagonist’s “banishment” through Old Testament biblical metaphors as the conscience-tortured husband and father of two wrestles with good-and-evil in the depths of his soul – doomed, of course, to lose everything in the end. For when his pregnant wife informs him that the child she’s expecting is not his, he suspects his brother and demands an abortion. This hard-heartedness on his part leads to a mishandled abortion and death, the twist coming when the wife tells him she had not told him the whole truth after all. Rather, she just wanted to test the sincerity of his love.
Filmed in Belgium (the dismal rainy scenes) and in Moldova (the bucolic summer scenery), The Banishment relies heavily on images to tell the story. The scenes with lush landscapes marked by rolling hills and abandoned ruins confirm the extraordinary visual mastery of cinematographer Mikhail Krichman, who also collaborated with Andrei Zvyagintsev on The Return. These shots contrast sharply with the dark, depressing images of the city at the opening of the film. Further, the choice of Swedish actress Maria Bonnevie to play the quiet, submissive wife contrasts sharply with Konstantin Lavronenko’s agonizing husband with a short fuse.
Béla Tarr’s Man from London
Béla Tarr’s The Man from London (Hungary/Germany/France), based on a Georges Simenon novel, may have snuck into the Competition through a convenient French coproduction window. Still the Hungarian director is hardly an unknown name at Cannes. His Werckmeister Harmonies, invited to the Directors Fortnight section at the 2000 festival, was well received by the critics. Widely recognized as one of Europe’s leading avant-garde filmmakers, Béla Tarr hit his stride when he collaborated with writer Lazlo Krasnahorkai on a five-hour screen adaptation of the latter’s Damnation (1987), followed by their seven-and-a-half-hour Satantango (1994) and then the two-and-a-half-hour Werckmeister Harmonies. Viewed altogether, these 15 collective hours come across as an apocalyptic allegory on the downfall of socialism in the communist era.
It took a reported seven years before Béla Tarr could find the backing to make The Man from London. Scripted again with Lazlo Krasnahorkai, and filmed in his patented bleak black-and-white tones (cinematographer Fred Kelemen), this is the exacting slow-motion story about a night railway-station attendant who witnesses a killing on a pier just after a ferry has docked. By happenstance, the attendant finds himself in possession of a great deal of money found on the person of the murdered man. At the press screening, as The Man from London unwound over a stretch of two hours plus, the audience grew itchy, and many left midway through the crime caper. Some cineaste admirers of Béla Tarr felt that he had compromised himself, although the Cannes invitation might just open up international avenues of further funding. Besides, there wasn’t much more the Hungarian auteur could say about the downfall of Stalinism.
Ulrich Seidl’s Import Export
Ulrich Seidl, the enfant terrible of Austrian cinema, has dampened his caustic criticism of a morally decaying, prone-to-violence bourgeois society (Dog Days, 2001) by turning his attention in Import Export (Austria/France) to the challenges facing CentEast members of the European Union. And he hits the nail right on the head: the new European Union states have to deal with the spread of drugs, gambling, prostitution, gang beatings, you name it. In the “import” portion of the film a low-paid qualified nurse and single mother leaves the Ukraine for Vienna simply because she needs the money to support her family back home. Along the way she is subjected to assorted humiliations by uncaring employers. In the “export” segment an unemployed Viennese security guard, deep in debt, accepts a job delivering second-hand slot machines to Slovakia and the Ukraine. Together with his lamebrain step-father, they sink whatever they earn in sex and alcohol.
Despite the rough edges in Import Export – for, as usual in Seidl’s films, some sex scenes are over-exaggerated for effect – the director’s sympathy is clearly on the side of the exploited nurse working under degrading conditions in Vienna. And the performance of Ekateryna Rak as Olga touches the heart, particularly when she steals time at a hospital for the ill and aged to sing a lullaby on the phone to her infant child back home. The theme of Import Export? Despair personified. And that’s what makes it so hard to overlook or forget this film.
Lee Chang-dong’s Secret Sunshine
Of the two South Korean films programmed in the Competition at Cannes, Lee Chang-dong’s Milyang (Secret Sunshine) was the standout. Jeon Do-yeon, in the role of a widowed mother whose only son is kidnapped by a local nut and killed, was deservedly awarded Best Actress by the International Jury. Unraveling at a slow pace of two and a half hours, Secret Sunshine offers a rounded portrait of life in a provincial town amid the struggles of a still young woman to find her footing in the birthplace of her deceased husband, all along subjected to religious ploys and well-meaning but generally useless neighborly advice. The story is typical of Lee Chang-dong’s oeuvre as a writer, screenwriter, and film director, who came to cinema late from a writing career as a socially engaged novelist: The Booty (1983), Burning Papers (1987), and There’s a Lot of Shit in Nokcheon (1992). His screenplays for Park Kwang-su – Gesom e kado shipta (To the Starry Island) (1993), Areumdaun chongnyun jeon tae-il (A Single Spark) (1995) – helped considerably to establish the Korean New Wave movement.
Although as a writer-director with only four films to his credit, each of Lee Chang-dong’s features is nevertheless a finely crafted statement on contemporary social problems. In Chorok mulgogi (Green Fish) (1996), the story of a young man recently discharged from obligatory military service, Lee underscores how the real world is at odds with the young man’s idealistic principles, so much so that by necessity he is dragged into the criminal underworld. In Bakha satang (Peppermint Candy) (2000), invited to the Directors Fortnight at Cannes and the Competition at Karlovy Vary, a young man’s suicide before a train at a riverside picnic is told in reverse to explain the reason why he had decided to end his life at this time and place. And in Lee’s Oasis (2002), invited to compete at Venice, a young man guilty of manslaughter leaves prison to care for a woman with cerebral palsy, the daughter of the victim of his own hit-and-run accident. In turn, his actions are questioned by a cold and indifferent society.
Kim Ki-duk’s Breath
With 14 films to his credit in eleven years, South Korea’s Kim Ki-duk, a director with a social conscience and a style to match, is often compared to another quick-on-the-draw cult director: Germany’s Rainer Werner Fassbinder. And like Fassbinder, Kim tends to repeat himself in depicting the struggles of outsiders to find a place in society at whatever cost. Most of his later films echo the themes of his initial back-to-back features: Ag-o (Crocodile) (1996), the story of a homeless lad living under a bridge who saves a girl from drowning only to make her his sex object; and Yasaeng dongmul bohoguyeog (Wild Animals) (1996), the tale of two young men in Paris, one a former soldier from North Korea and the other a street painter from South Korea (Kim himself was an art student in Paris and street painter), whose struggle for survival leads them into the criminal underworld.
Kim Ki-duk’s interrelated themes of love and distrust, sex and prostitution, violence and expiation have prompted multiple festival invitations. His Paran daemun (Birdcage Inn) (1998), about a girl who became a prostitute after having been raped by her father, was invited to the Panorama at the 1999 Berlinale. It was followed by invitations to compete at the Berlinale with Nabbeun namja (Bad Guy) (2001), about a girl dragged into prostitution at the hands of a smalltime gangster, and Samaria (Samaritan Girl) (2004), about schoolgirl-prostitution, the latter awarded a Silber Bear for Best Director. In each of these films the theme of crime and innocence is reworked.
Kim’s festival record is impressive. He competed at Venice with Seom (The Isle) (1999), Suchwiin bulmyeong (Address Unknown) (2001), and Bin-jip (3-Iron) (2004); at Moscow with Shilje sanghwang (Real Fiction) (2000); at Locarno with Bom yeoreum gaeul gyeoul geurigo bom (Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter … and Spring) (2003); at Karlovy Vary with Hae anseon (Coast Guard) (2002); at Mar del Plata with Hwal (The Bow) (2005); and at Chicago with Shi gan (Time) (2006). Given this lineup, one wonders why it took him so long to receive an invitation to compete at Cannes. Now that it’s happened, his melodrama Soom (Breath) offers nothing new. A condemned criminal, who has repeatedly attempted suicide, is visited by a lonely wife, who counters her husband’s infidelity by showering her affections on the prisoner. That her color-splattered, fantasy-filled visits do pierce the criminal’s hard crust is beside the point, for they serve more to release her own pent-up emotions and help resolve the marital crisis. Kim Ki-duk doesn’t bother to dig deeper than that.
Naomi Kawase’s Mourning Forest
Japanese woman director Naomi Kawase owes much of her international acclaim to three appearances at Cannes. It began when her low-budget film Moe no Suzaku (The God Suzaku, aka Suzaku) (1997), invited to the Directors Fortnight, was awarded the prestigious Caméra d’Or for Best Debut Feature. The story of poor people living in an isolated village, it presupposes the presence of the god Suzaku in the wind and the mountains, a tradition that animates both story and the film. She followed this with Sharasojyu (Shara, aka Shara – Light and Shadow) (2003), the story of a twin boy who mysterious disappears on a traditional feast day and how the family copes with the loss until the mystery is partially solved many years later. Invited to compete at Cannes, Shara features the director herself as the grieving mother.
Grief is also the primary theme in Naomi Kawase’s Mogari no mori (The Mourning Forest), a Japanese-French coproduction. A woman who is haunted by the loss of her child cares for a senile old man in a retirement home. The pair come to understand each other’s grief better during the old man’s birthday outing to the countryside. After the woman’s car breaks down along the way, they trudge aimlessly through the forest at the insistence of the old man. Finally, after two days of arduous wandering, during which they once engage in a child-like hide-and-seek game, they reach what passes for a grave-site in the forest. There, we discover that this is the 33rd year after the death of the old man’s wife. Thus, according to a Japanese Buddhist tradition, he lays flowers on her grave to commemorate a long lost love – and her final departure, for now her spirit will never return again to this earthly world. A magical film of dreams and longing, The Mourning Forest was awarded the runnerup Grand Prix by the International Jury.
Carlos Reygadas’s Silent Light
Mexican auteur Carlos Reygadas also began his Cannes career in the Directors Fortnight. And like Naomi Kawase, Reygadas’s Japón (Japan) (Mexico/Spain, 2002) was singled out for Caméra d’Or recognition, receiving the runnerup Special Mention. Inspired by the cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky, Japan chronicles the arduous journey of a gaunt old man, apparently a painter, to a remote Mexican village to commit suicide. Once there, he meets an old woman in a shack (named Ascen, or Ascension), requests sex with her, and gradually is reawakened to life again when he helps the old lady resist her conniving son. Reygadas followed this with Batalla en el cielo (Battle in Heaven) (Mexico/Belgium/France/Germany, 2005), a much discussed and disputed entry in the Cannes competition. Set in Mexico City during Holy Week and filmed mostly with nonprofessionals, Battle in Heaven is the story of the peculiar sexual relationship between a middle-aged chauffeur to a general and the general’s attractive young daughter, who herself works as a prostitute on the side for no evident reason. The film shifts into high gear when it’s revealed that the chauffeur and his wife have kidnapped a relative’s child for ransom, whose unexpected death then upsets all their plans and leads to a bloody tragedy in the end.
Carlos Reygadas’s Stellet Licht (Still Light) (Mexico/France/Netherlands) confirmed his credentials as an original cinematic talent. Unwinding slowly over a two-and-a-half-hour stretch, Still Light opens with a stunning shot of dawn breaking through a starry night over a peaceful summer rural backdrop that is crowned with the twitching of birds and the lowing of cows. The setting is a Mennonite community in the northern province of Chihuahua, where “Plattduetsch” (Rheinland Dutch-German from the Middle Ages) is spoken amid a smattering of Spanish. A story of adultery – in which the father of a family has apparently already confessed his sin to his wife, yet cannot deny the joy of his forbidden passion – the twist comes when the beloved wife dies and the illicit relationship is broken off at the wish of the other woman. In many respects Still Light draws its spiritual power from the same source as Danish master Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Day of Wrath (1943) and Ordet (1955). In short, as the title hints, the film’s theme is redemption. Still Light was awarded a share of the Prix du Jury (Special Jury Prize) by the International Jury.
Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park
Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park (USA/France) echoes in theme and style his Palme d’Or winner Elephant (2003), a free-flowing fictional account of the Columbine High School massacre. This time, however, Paranoid Park avoids conventional storytelling. Although he has adapted the story from a novel by Blake Nelson and cast the film via MySpace, Gus Van Sant has opted for a stream-of-consciousness aesthetic in order to effectively take the pulse of a frightened 16-year-old skate-boarder from a broken home who has accidently killed a security guard and doesn’t know how to handle the burden of not telling anyone. The lad’s catastrophic world leaves little room for emotional release, which in essence is the whole film. Christopher Doyle’s cinematography, counterbalanced by Rain Kathy Li’s Super-8 skateboarding footage, guarantees at least an arthouse audience, while in a retrospective sense Paranoid Park is the coda to Gus Van Sant’s thematic trilogy about alienated youth: Gerry (2002), Elephant (2003), and Last Days (2005). Paranoid Park was awarded the Special 60th Anniversary Prize by the International Jury,
Emir Kusturica’s Promise Me This
Winner of two Palme d’Or awards at Cannes – for Otac na sluzbenom putu (When Father Was Away on Business) (Yugoslavia, 1985) and Underground (Yugoslavia, 1995), Emir Kusturica’s Zavet (Promise Me This) (Serbia-Montenegro/France) is a throwback to the director’s first feature, Sjecas li se Dolly Bell? (Do You Remember Dolly Bell?) (Yugoslavia, 1981). The story of a country lad sent by his grandfather to the village market to sell a cow and bring back a wife, Promise Me This stars Ljiljana Blagojevic – the original “Dolly Bell” – as a school teacher in this amusing low-budget fable. At the press conference, Nemanja Kusturica (to cite his newly christened Russian-Orthodox name) went out on a limb to say: “All my cinematic life I have been making one movie, Do You Remember Dolly Bell? It’s like my first movie is still not finished.” Viewed from this perspective, Promise Me This (the film’s preferred title at Cannes) is light Serbian village entertainment, chock full of ribald characters (floozies, gangsters, conmen) and shot in a make-believe village erected in Kusturica’s own filmmaking image.
American Hits and Misses
In general, the American entries disappointed. European critics, particularly the French, don’t get very excited about films that fail to premiere at Cannes anyway. So what, if David Fincher’s Zodiac is an engaging thriller about a never-caught serial killer in San Francisco. OK, so the mafia hitman genre is alive and well in James Gray’s We Own the Night. And who cares, if Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof is a raucous salute to John Hughes and Grindhouse movies. Indeed, one has the feeling that Tarantino was invited to bolster the attendance list of past Palme d’Or winners (Pulp Fiction, 1994).
But the critics did get excited about Joel and Ethan Coen’s No Country for Old Men, a cross between black comedy and political satire (if Bush-whacking is intended). Starring Tommy Lee Jones as a wornout sheriff, with Josh Brolin as a luckless cowboy and Vietnam vet who suddenly finds himself in possession of a load of heroin and $2 million in greenbacks, the cat-and-mouse story begins when Brolin decides to keep the cash although he knows he’ll be tracked by the drug traffickers. Based on Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel that’s set in 1980, the film chronicles the end of an era on the Tex-Mex border and the dawn of a new age of drugs and violence. This is one of those instances in which the viewer may have to read the book first in order to follow the plot. Personally, I found the specious violence in the film rather tiring as this border tale meandered off in unexpected twists and turns, although Javier Bardem as the psychopath killer can send shivers up your back each time he stalks his next victim. Once again, the cinematography of Roger Deakins, who lensed all of the Coen Brothers’s films, can take your breath away.
French Cinema of Sorts
The best American entry in the Competition? A French one: Le scaphandre et le papillon (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), directed by Julian Schnabel. The moving story of the editor of the French magazine Elle, who had suffered a massive brain stroke, the afflicted man dictates his passion for life and living from his “diving bell” by blinking his eye lid to release the “butterfly” dreams of his imagination.
The best Asian film in the Competition? Also a French one: Persepolis, a feature-length animation film codirected by Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud. Reportedly condemned by the Iranian government before the film even hit the screen, Persepolis draws upon Iranian writer and graphic-artist Marjane Satrapi’s four-volume cycle of stories about an eight-year-old girl (Satrapi herself) growing up in Teheran in 1978, when the Shah was overthrown and the Islamic Revolution emerged to suppress freedom of expression and movement. Persepolis was awarded a share of the Prix de Jury (Special Jury Prize) by the International Jury.
As for the official French entries, Christophe Honoré’s musical comedy, Les chansons d’amour (Songs of Love), in which lyrics replace dialogue to interpret the thoughts and emotions of three lovers in Paris, came across as a pale tip-of-the-hat to Jacques Demy’s splendid Les paraplues de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg) (1964), the Grand Prix of the 17th Cannes International Film Festival. Also, Raphael Nadjari’s Tehilim (Psalms) (France/Israel), the story of an Israeli father’s mysterious disappearance, compounded by his teenaged son’s inability to come to terms with the loss, appears to have been invited to compete at Cannes due to its French coproduction link. Although a slight tale, Psalms does depict the discomfiting gap between orthodox belief and modern family life in present-day Jerusalem. Had the film been slotted in the Un Certain Regard section, it might have fared better.
Catherine Breillat, whose unabashed Sex Is Comedy opened the 2002 Directors Fortnight, returned to Cannes in the Competition with Une vieille maîtress (An Old Mistress), an adaptation of Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly’s scandalous 1865 novel. The story of a handsome young dandy who, after his marriage, pledges to stay away from his long-time mistress benefits from its acerbic dialogue. Not surprising at all, for Catherine Breillat is an adroit novelist with a sure hand for handling her material, in addition to being an accomplished filmmaker whose sensual tales had paved the way for others to follow (Bruno Dumont, Patrice Chereau). What is surprising, however, is that she could celebrate at Cannes a comeback after suffering three years ago a cerebral hemorrhage that threatened to incapacitate her permanently. The upshot? An Old Mistress is arguably her best film.
