Quotes of the Day

The anticipation for the opening-night film was so sizable, so tense and tangy, it was almost erotic. Think of it: a big new movie from an Oscar-winning quartet — star Tom Hanks, director Ron Howard, producer Brian Grazer, screenwriter Akiva Goldsman. Yet nearly as soon as The Da Vinci Code began, the critics fell into a peckish mood. At the end of a long, soggy film, the black-tie swells went off to their parties, and the critics slumped away to write their regretful pans.

Though we didn't know it then, The Da Vinci Code experience would turn out to be Cannes 2006 in miniature: great hopes for films that mostly underachieved. The big-name items — Pedro Almodóvar's Volver, Alejandro González Iñárritu's Babel and Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette — all had their adherents, but many others who expressed disappointment or derision. This was a festival with no consensus masterpiece. A few smaller movies got high praise, perhaps because they scaled modest peaks, while the more ambitious works, depending on the individual response, either soared or crashed.

Start at the top, with Volver. After two flat-out great films (All About My Mother and Talk to Her) and the crafty, corrosive Bad Education, Almodóvar carried a massive burden of expectations. To some, Volver was a marking of time between inspirations. To these eyes, it was a fully satisfying comedy-melodrama about the burden of motherhood, the power of sisterhood.

Volver begins with a tracking shot through the cemetery in a Spanish village, as dozens of widows polish the tombstones of their late husbands. Among the mourners is Raimunda (Penélope Cruz, in a performance of great strength and ferocity), scrubbing down the grave of her mother Irene (Carmen Maura). With his usual taste for bizarre but plausible narrative twists, Almodóvar manages, in the first 40 minutes, to get a corpse in the freezer and a ghost under the bed. And he's just getting started, since nearly everyone in Volver has a dreadful family secret she is keeping from someone else. This was the director's first film in 18 years with Maura, the earthy muse of his early years. Yet they fell instantly into perfect synch. The last line of Volver — "I don't know how I've lived all these years without you" — could be Almodóvar's testimony to his old friend and star. Whether or not he's working at masterpiece altitude, he remains at 56 the wonder boy of international cinema. Movies couldn't live without him.

Babel's story line is even more complex than Volver's, spanning three continents and a dozen major characters, most of whom never meet one another. Yet their most innocent actions — giving a present to a stranger, escorting two kids to a wedding, taking target practice in the North African desert — have startling, perhaps tragic repercussions on the others.

Iñárritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga have investigated this chance-is-destiny theme before, in Amores Perros and 21 Grams. This time, the canvas is larger, stretching from California and Mexico to Morocco and Japan. The weaving of the three story strands is dextrous; the performances, especially by Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett as a very harried married couple and Rinko Kikuchi as a deaf-mute Tokyo teen, are fierce and acute. Then coincidence keeps piling on improbability, and the viewer's interest sours into exasperation. Yes, bad things can happen to decent people. But compared to the calamities that befall the Pitt character in a single day — the shooting of his wife, the disappearance of his children — Job had it easy. When Babel opens in the fall, the mass movie audience may feel similarly plagued.

In a provocative Babel subplot, medical aid is slow coming to the wounded Blanchett because of an intergovernmental debate over whether the shooting is an act of Islamic terrorism. That was one of many echoes in Cannes movies of roiling events in the world beyond the screen. Yet Cannes '06 was fairly harangue-free; there was no Michael Moore to spike the punch bowl with one of his incendiary documentaries.

The most notable nonfiction political film was An Inconvenient Truth, starring Al Gore, the former U.S. Vice President and near-President. Essentially a slide show on the looming disaster of climate change, the movie is like its front man: both committed and muted, hoping to enlighten as much as arouse. And since the film was shown out of competition, it could not capture the Palme d'Or and bask in the resulting limelight. Poor Gore: again the noble nonwinner.

There were no Molotov cocktails in the handful of Cannes fiction films with political undertones. Not that it was hard to see which side they were on — virtually all art-house movies are left-wing — but the aesthetic approach was either too conventional or too oblique to send audiences marching into the streets. Lou Ye's Summer Palace, the only Asian film in the competition, boldly depicted the Tiananmen Square revolt of 1989 but was more concerned with the sexual politics of its heroine (the sulkily charismatic Hao Lei). She and her sex scenes were hot stuff, but the movie's critical response was tepid.

Three war movies also failed to astound: Ken Loach's The Wind That Shakes the Barley, a predictable rendering of the 1920 Irish battle of Catholic peasants against the Black and Tans; Bruno Dumont's Flandres, a horrifying but uninvolving study of Belgian farmers committing atrocities in an African war; and Rachid Bouchareb's Indigènes (Days of Glory), which dramatized the valor of Algerians who fought for the French in World War II, then found their pensions denied them after the Algerian conflict — an inspiring and troubling true story, encased in a deeply ordinary movie.

A pair of young U.S. directors tried their hand at political statements, but fell, respectively, into obviousness and incoherence. Richard Linklater's Fast Food Nation, based on the Eric Schlosser nonfiction best seller about the health hazards in the preparation and consumption of Big Macs and Whoppers, should have been a documentary; instead, it fruitlessly created fictional characters who never brought themselves — or the story — to life. Richard Kelly's Southland Tales, widely considered the flop of the festival, imagines a U.S. of the near future in which the government snoops on everyone and a gang of unattractive rebels wreak desultory havoc. Those last two words apply to the film as well.

But we come not to bury the bad films but to unearth some good ones and sing hallelujah. So all praise to Paolo Sorrentino's The Family Friend, a mordant Italian comedy about a gnarled moneylender and the beautiful young woman he hopes to corrupt and conquer; it's the Rumpelstiltskin fairy tale with a toxic twist, and the smartest entertainment at Cannes.

Another adult twist on a child's fable is Pan's Labyrinth. Writer-director Guillermo Del Toro flawlessly laces a Lewis Carroll-like fantasy of an underground kingdom into the realistic story of a sadistic officer (Sergi López) in Franco's Spain and a wily insurgent servant (Maribel Verdú), fighting for possession of a sad, dreamy child. It's got sumptuous special effects and, finally, a mournful wisdom about love, honor and death.

Also a standout was Climates, from Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan. This minor-key étude of love, sex and selfishness used minimalist strategies to reveal the shifting emotional allegiances of a college professor, played with gruff appeal by the director. Shortbus, a U.S. romantic comedy set in a New York City sex salon, might have been the outrage of the festival, since it contained several no-fooling hard-core sex scenes. But John Cameron Mitchell's movie brims with so much fun and heartbreak that it upset few people and beguiled many.

The densest concentration of film talent this year — 21 directors, including Alfonso Cuarón, Alexander Payne, Walter Salles, Sylvain Chomet and Tom Tykwer — collaborated on Paris, Je T'aime, an omnibus movie of short segments, each set in a different Paris neighborhood. This sort of enterprise can invite directorial indifference, but at least half of the episodes are charming or poignant, with a lovely, lingering aftertaste. Special mention to Joel and Ethan Coen's vignette set in the Métro, as a tourist (Steve Buscemi) learns to his peril not to make eye contact with that mysterious young couple on the opposite platform.

Another American in Paris, Sofia Coppola, was given the run of Versailles to film Marie Antoinette, about the Austrian girl who became the last Queen of France. Coppola's conceit is to reconceive the court of Louis XVI as a gossip party for rich, vapid teenagers. The film, starring Kirsten Dunst, got a few raucous boos, sending many critics rushing to its defense. Their gallantry was sweet but ill-conceived, for this lame satire is both a parody of emotional emptiness and an excruciating example of it. Such was the desperation of critics to manufacture a cause d'estime, in a festival short on both controversy and content.

It's best to see this session as a holding action between Cannes '05, when Caché, A History of Violence, Sin City, Once You're Born and The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada lent their luster to a generally strong slate, and Cannes '07, when the world's largest film festival will turn 60. That's an occupational hazard of Cannes regulars, who tend to think that last year was always better, and next year will be the best.

Perhaps that feeling is not unique to film critics. For most people, the past is golden, the future rosy. And the present? Ask us next year.

• RICHARD CORLISS
• Expectations were high at this year's Cannes International Film Festival — and few films lived up to them. But without a stand-out hit hogging the limelight, smaller movies got the chance to shine