Canned Heat

One way to raise an emotional welt at the Cannes Film Festival is to mention a posh party you attended and say, “Everyone was there.” (What this usually means is that either you are important enough to be given an invitation or you ain’t too proud to beg for one.) Inevitably someone within earshot will grumble, “Well, I wasn’t.”

At the 54th annual Riviera bash, which concluded last week, the big do was a Hong Kong film party at the Majestic Hotel. Jackie Chan, Samo Hung, Jet Li, they were all there, and everyone was invited. Except Your Intrepid Reporter — even after begging. So YIR and his comely escort stood in the hotel driveway, watching thousands of lucky people pressed against one another in a subway-rush-hour crush. The only people allowed to join the party were Hong Kong celebrities arriving in limos and whisked into another entrance. Then YIR’s escort spotted a familiar face, that of director Peter Chan, inside one of the Mercedeses. “Hop in,” Chan said. We rode about four meters to the entrance, got out and were greeted like Asian royalty (with two American courtiers). The moral: it’s not who you know, it’s who is willing to say he knows you.

Aside from the Hong Kong affair, though, this Cannes was relatively star-starved. Everyone wasn’t there. Jack Nicholson (The Pledge), Cameron Diaz (Shrek) and Marlon Brando (Apocalypse Now Redux) all had major movies on display, but none of them showed. This was a festival of films, not photo ops, and even on screen the magic was in short supply.

The jury, headed by actress Liv Ullmann, gave the Palme d’Or to Nanni Moretti’s family drama The Son’s Room; second prize and both actor awards to Michael Haneke’s sexual war of wills The Piano Teacher; the screenplay citation to a Bosnian film, Danis Tanovic’s No Man’s Land; and director laurels to two Americans, David Lynch for Mulholland Dr. and Joel Coen for The Man Who Wasn’t There. Worthy films all — but the best of a mediocre bunch.

The Son’s Room tells a wrenching story — of a happy family riven by the teenage son’s death — in acutely somber vignettes that avoid the seductions of sentimentality and melodrama. The Piano Teacher stirs up a tasty poison porridge of lusts and hatreds between a precocious pianist (Benoît Magimel) and his stern tutor (Isabelle Huppert); in chic, lurid images it suggests that teachers, perhaps all adults, try to express and exorcise their frustrations by dominating their charges. In coarser hands, this tale of obsession and self-mutilation could be ludicrous from the start; in these hands it is goofy only toward the end, when the sadistic teacher becomes the terrified victim. But Huppert, the cinema’s most dauntingly intelligent actress, keeps luring the viewer back into her character’s tortured, torturing soul.

The Lynch and Coen pictures would make a fine set of bookends for your hardboiled fiction shelf. Both are set in the prime film-noir territory of sunny, sepulchral California: Los Angeles, home of Philip Marlowe (among other truth seekers) and moviemakers (among other chronic liars) for Mulholland Dr.; Santa Rosa (scene of Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt) for the toxic scent of small-town failure in The Man Who Wasn’t There. Both films serve up a lovely, lurid brew of greed, murder and twisted identities. But the Coen movie, with Billy Bob Thornton and Frances McDormand locked in a jealous adagio, is twistily faithful to the noir formula. The Lynch, which sails through its first 90 minutes as a ripping yarn about a mystery woman (brunet Laura Harring) and the would-be starlet (blond Naomi Watts) who gets involved with her, goes defiantly, inexplicably weird in its final third. And jolly smart fun it is too.

Fun — it’s a word one wouldn’t normally apply to a war film set on the Bosnia-Serbian border. And one could choke on the laughs that Tanovic evokes, at the co(s)mic absurdity of this or any war. But the novice director has devised a devious satire, in which everyone is splendidly misguided, from the ethnic enemies who wind up in the same trench to the French and British U.N. soldiers who try helplessly to impose peace on centuries of fratricide.

This fine film from a first-timer was matched by two excellent works by grand old Frenchmen. Jacques Rivette’s Va savoir! (Who Knows!) is a romantic rondelay inspired by the plays of Carlo Goldoni and Luigi Pirandello, as six characters in search of adventure entangle themselves in a buoyant comedy of manners. At 73, Rivette seems younger, lither than ever. His new film seduces viewers into the belief that nothing has deeper meaning or feeling, or danger, than the wayward heart at play.

Jean-Luc Godard is a mere 70, but he has been playing the role of the crotchety hermit-sage for decades. His Elogie de l’amour (In Praise of Love) is in two parts — the first, in black-and-white, a notebook of visual and verbal provocations. (“The question isn’t whether man will survive but whether he deserves to.”) The second part, shot digitally in carnival colors, concerns an old couple whose distant past as members of the French Resistance a Hollywood producer wants to turn into a film. This is an expression of Godard’s distrust of Steven Spielberg and his film Schindler’s List. “Mrs. Schindler was never paid,” one character notes. “She’s living in poverty in Argentina.” Ah, that Godard: he is always serious, always impish. He lives up to his own maxim: “Every thought should show the debris of a smile.” Elogie shows that smile as Godard’s own: the rictus of the wise old ghost of modernist cinema.

Here and there Cannes hosted films of graphic sexuality: not just The Piano Teacher (with occasional glimpses of porno movies) but The Pornographer, Bertrand Bonello’s study of a director (Jean-Pierre Léaud) who was once the king of hard-core; now he comes out of retirement, only to find that the rules have changed. The film includes some porno footage that, as aspiring actresses used to say, is absolutely essential to the plot. And it is, for it shows that the subtleties our veteran director insists on have no place in the wham-bam-merci-madame demimonde of porn video.

But for the true scent of romantic obsession, one would have to go east: to the Chinese Peony Pavilion, Hong Kong director Yonfan’s love story of two women (played by Japan’s Rie Miyazawa and Taiwan’s Joey Wong) in a Suzhou noble house. The film is so saturated in the sad glamour of their love that style becomes substance. The women don’t make their sexual affinity explicit; but one can always feel the breath of the other’s erotic interest, and the air goes humid with promise. Seeing Peony Pavilion is like getting high on the opium smoke a beautiful woman exhales as she gazes into your eyes and says, “Maybe.”

Some directors take a journey into the exotic past, some into the perilous present. Two distinguished Iranian auteurs made films that tested their journalistic as well as dramatic instincts. Abbas Kiarostami, who won Cannes’ highest prize in 1997 for The Taste of Cherry, was invited by the Uganda Women’s Efforts to Save Orphans (uweso) to tour their aids-ravaged country for 10 days. The resulting documentary, A.B.C Africa, may not be what either the film maker or his hosts had in mind. Apparently realizing that the devastation was too great to make sense of, Kiarostami takes shot after shot of bereft kids, most of them singing, nearly all of them smiling. After a while, alas, this approach looks like exploitation — a minstrel show starring dying children.

The Afghani children in Kandahar, by Kiarostami’s compatriot Mohsen Makhmalbaf, do not smile. One comely lad in a Taliban school loads a Kalashnikov rifle and obediently proclaims its virtues — it “kills the living and mutilates the dead” — as a mullah praises his recitation. (“Weapons,” a visiting doctor says later, “are the only modern thing in Afghanistan.”) Another boy, an orphan in the desert, will peddle anything, including himself, to keep going. He attaches himself to an educated Iranian woman who has returned from Canada to save her sister.

As Makhmalbaf showed in Gabbeh, he is Iran’s great colorist; here the grand vistas, the gorgeous hues of the women’s burkas (which hide all but their eyes), offer poignant counterpoint to the Taliban’s ravaging of a beautiful land. We know of their desecration of ancient Buddhas; now we see how they ravage their people. One way is through land mines that pock the desert; some are concealed in dolls that lure children to pick them up and lose a hand. At a Red Cross outpost, artificial legs rain from the sky in parachutes dropped from a plane, and the legless Afghani men race out of the tents to scavenge for them.

Kandahar is full to bursting with such images of desperate hope amid official atrocity. The incidents the film depicts make one ashamed to be human, even as its artistry makes one grateful for a world-class showcase like Cannes and for directors with Makhmalbaf’s craft and daring. If you can’t find Kandahar in your town, ask your local distributor. Don’t be too proud to beg.