The people who run the world’s most glamorous convention have a funny way of marking its 60th birthday. The huge lobbies of Festival Palace, its main meeting venue, are usually bedecked with gigantic photos of its great and good. But they are bare this year, as if hitting 60 were something to hide, not trumpet. It’s either a false modesty or a decorative oversight, for Cannes has not forgotten how to promote itself. The celebrity quotient is high—Leo and Matt, George Clooney and Brangelina—and this Riviera redoubt is also crawling with esteemed auteurs, including a couple dozen top-prize winners of Palmes d’Or past. On opening night, a gawker would have seen the cream of world directors in formal dress entering the Grand Palais, from 28-year-old Canadian Sarah Polley to Portugal’s Manoel de Oliveira, 98, gamely scaling the 24 red-carpeted steps with as much satisfaction as a man climbing Everest.
Why do they dress up? Because Cannes is a huge party, in which films must fight for attention with gaudier enticements. A worthy effort from Eastern Europe may be upstaged by news that a Saudi billionaire’s yacht has run aground in the harbor. A global-warming documentary may be seen by few, but if its producer is Leonardo DiCaprio, journalists will turn up in droves seeking an audience. And what chance does a premiere by minimalist Taiwan master Hou Hsiao-hsien have when, that same morning, U.S. comedian Jerry Seinfeld is promoting his cartoon feature Bee Movie by dressing in a bee costume and flying, on guy wires, from the top of the Carlton Cannes Hotel across the town’s oceanside boulevard to land on a pier jutting into the Mediterranean? “They tell me Scorsese did the same thing last year for The Departed,” he quipped.
Almost any other film festival is more conducive to concentrating on the rarified art of cinema. But to resent the banquet of self-promotion and razzmatazz that is Cannes is to miss one big reason people, even critics, go to the movies. At this fabulous buffet, the films are the canapés. Are they tasty? Nutritious? Amid all of Cannes’ other enticements—the good food, fine wines, gorgeous people—one is tempted to ask: Who cares? But the 12-day bash, which ends Sunday, has had some lovely tidbits—a wide range of art films with pizzazz, genre pieces with a high IQ and a few probing documentaries have made this Cannes, so far, a rewarding festival. One mark of the overall quality: even the disappointing entries aren’t a total loss.
Take the opening attraction, Wong Kar-wai’s My Blueberry Nights. Much heralded as the Hong Kong master’s first English-language feature, and starring pop diva Norah Jones in her acting debut, this fable of a lovelorn woman’s jaunt across the U.S.—from New York to Memphis to Las Vegas and back again—lurches in and out of plausibility without ever quite weaving the slo-mo magic Wong brings to his homegrown fare. But then, just as the viewer’s patience is being tried by the relentless despair Jones’ character appears to live in, Natalie Portman shows up and injects a bolt of life as a gambler trying to wheedle her one big win. She’s just the defibrillator this languishing movie needs, and we thank Portman for her saucy radiance.
Surprises, too, from Romania—indeed, some of the greatest pleasures of festivalgoing are such unexpected ones as Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. It is set in 1987, during the final days of the Ceausescu regime, when the whole country seems to be in a sour mood. But politics are in the background of this taut, fraught drama about what goes wrong when a college student (Laura Vasiliu) seeks an illegal abortion. She and her roommate (Anamaria Marinca) are led to the ironically named Mr. Bebe (Vlad Ivanov), a stolid fellow with a sulfurous whiff of menace. He’ll do the job, but for a price that horrifies the desperate women. Shot and acted with ferocious precision, 4 Months is a movie well worth seeking out and shuddering through.
Nobody at Cannes gives filmmakers a list of topics to address, so it is by sheer coincidence that another Eastern European movie, Andreü Zvyagintsev’s The Banishment, also treats the topic of abortion. While on a stay in the countryside, a brooding woman tells her husband that she is pregnant, but not with his child. Crushed, the man insists she get rid of it. Their marriage, already strained, now splits at the seams, and everything tumbles into catastrophe. This tragedy is played out in beautiful settings and photographed with a graceful assurance, as if the world were blooming while the couple’s love withers. Their banishment, in this fine, supremely Russian film, could be from Eden.
Humankind’s downfall is, of course, a perennial topic for filmmakers, and watching the news—seeing real-life tragedy of an appalling and insoluble nature befall their fellow human beings—gnaws at the entrails of some directors, inspiring them to forsake glitz for grit. That’s very noble, the movie moneymen say, but will anybody pay to see your scalding exposé of how rotten everything is? The answer is they will, if the filmmaker is Michael Moore.
Beginning with Bowling for Columbine, his last three acerbic docu-comedies have premiered at Cannes, and in 2004 his Fahrenheit 9/11 copped the Palme d’Or on its way to a $222 million worldwide gross—unprecedented for a nonfiction film. Now, having sermonized on the problem of American gun violence and the occupation of Iraq, Moore takes his hatchet to the ailing U.S. health-care system in Sicko.
To non-Americans, Moore comes across like some jolly ethnographer explaining the folkways of a backward tribe. In this respect, Sicko has played like a dream in Cannes, earning a 20-minute standing ovation. It may have done so even if Moore hadn’t larded the film with adoring references to the French health system, and even if this weren’t a good movie. But it is. The mix of facts and faces, outrage and sympathy, the telling anecdote and the surreal observation showcases Moore’s savviness. So do his visits to Canada, Britain, France and, spectacularly, Cuba. Hearing Congressional testimony that detainees at Guantánamo are getting lavish medical attention, Moore sails to the base, taking with him volunteer rescue workers from the World Trade Center site who suffered respiratory and other diseases and said their plans did not cover the all treatment they needed. When their request to receive treatment at the base is denied, they go to Havana, where their ailments are efficiently cared for. (Cuba, whatever its other troubles, is widely recognized as having first-class health care.) Is this showboating, or just showmanship? Either way, the polemicist makes his point in a film that’s angry and one-sided, sure, but also instructive and often so funny you may pop a stitch watching it.
Barbet Schroeder has directed movies with stars like Jeremy Irons, Sandra Bullock and Gérard Depardieu. But he has also made documentaries, including up-close studies of Idi Amin Dada and Koko the talking gorilla. His new film, Terror’s Advocate, is a biopic of Jacques Vergès, the French lawyer who has defended many of the 20th century’s most notorious miscreants, from Carlos the Jackal to the Nazi “Butcher of Lyon,” Klaus Barbie. Asked if he would defend Hitler, Vergès replies, “I’d even defend Bush. Of course he’d have to admit his guilt first.” The answer is flippant, but it points to a question posed by this meticulous, powerful film: Why is the violence committed by individuals called terrorism, while the violence committed by nations called statecraft?
Both forms of bloodshed are preoccupying themes for the English director Michael Winterbottom. His 2006 movie The Road to Guantanamo is in part a straightforward documentary of three British nationals who were held and abused for two years in the U.S. detention center (before being released with no charges or apologies), and partly a re-enactment of the trio’s plight. In his new docudrama A Mighty Heart, he has enlisted the star power of Angelina Jolie (and her partner Brad Pitt as producer) to re-create the ordeal of Mariane Pearl, wife of Daniel Pearl—the Wall Street Journal reporter in Pakistan who was kidnapped and eventually beheaded by Islamic terrorists. The film is brisk and well told, and Jolie’s bold, harrowing performance is altogether honorable—yet some overarching unity is lacking: ultimately, A Mighty Heart doesn’t become more than an accumulation of dread and dreadful deeds.
That definition, of course, could fit many a movie thriller. Indeed, horror and grief are at the center of Juan Antonio Bayona’s The Orphanage, an intense sepulchral mystery about a Spanish woman (Belén Rueda) whose adopted son goes missing and is presumed dead; she, however, believes the boy’s whereabouts can be determined by spirits in her house, which happens to be the orphanage she grew up in. It sounds hokey, and the film is not reluctant to dabble in ghost-story conventions. But this is a shuddery, splendidly made parable about the power of both grief and belief. Bayona makes his feature debut here; if his form holds, he will be back in Cannes for years to come.
Speaking of shudders—and returns to Cannes—Joel and Ethan Coen have been going to the festival since 1984, when they peddled their first feature, the murder mystery Blood Simple, in the Cannes Market. They won the Palme d’Or in 1991 for Barton Fink. But the brothers’ earlier crime dramas are mere frolics compared to No Country For Old Men—a grim, mostly enthralling version of Cormac McCarthy’s 2005 novel about $2 million in missing drug loot. For most of its 122-minute running time, this is a gnarly action movie, a duel between a kind-of-good guy (Josh Brolin) who finds the stash, and an implacable monster (Javier Bardem) who’s pursuing him and leaving a heap of corpses along the way. Toward the end, when an aged, seen-it-all sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones) takes center screen, the film runs itself off the rails—willfully refusing to come to the climactic showdown the viewer demands. But mostly it’s a tense, fatal game of Texas Hold-‘Em, in which Brolin and Bardem give career-defining performances.
Defining careers have also been celebrated this year. Thirty-five of Cannes’ veteran auteurs have contributed three-minute filmettes to a compilation called Chacun Son Cinéma (To Each His Own Cinema). The theme is the movie theater. Predictably and poignantly, these brief movies are mostly nostalgic evocations of a communal film experience that may vanish in the face of audience-segmenting multiplex cinemas and the continued development of home-entertainment technology. If the old-fashioned tradition of cinemagoing is to continue, in fact, it may be only in places like Cannes that the great smorgasbord of the movie world seems more appetizing, for one heady moment each year, than a bag of chips in front of the TV.
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