Quotes of the Day
Just before announcing the awards on the closing night of the 61st Cannes Film Festival, Sean Penn, the president of this year's jury, recalled that he had once served in the same post at another festival. He'd run into Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar, who exclaimed, "Sean Penn, can you believe you're the president of anything?" The actor-director, a longtime critic of George W. Bush, then told the black-tie audience, "And I'm not the only president whose answer should be 'no.' " The crowd erupted into the applause of political solidarity.
International art cinema, as opposed to the red-meat Hollywood variety, is a left-wing enterprise. At Cannes, you simply will not find, say, a film on Northern Ireland's Troubles that is sympathetic to its English occupiers, or an Israeli film hostile to the Palestinians. This year, Hunger, the story of IRA leader Bobby Sands' fatal hunger strike in 1981, won the Camera d'Or (debut film) prize for Afro-Irish director Steve McQueen; and Waltz With Bashir, an animated documentary about Israeli filmmaker Ari Folman's sense of guilt over the Sabra and Shatila massacres of Palestinian refugees in 1982, was one of the critical favorites in the main competition, though Penn's jury gave it no award.
The top prize at Cannes, the Palme d'Or, went for the first time in 21 years to a French film: Laurent Cantet's Entre les Murs (The Class), which traces a year in a Paris junior-high class. This judicious, quietly touching film was made with nonprofessional actors, including the teacher, François Bégaudeau, on whose memoir-novel the film is based. When the unanimous award was announced, Cantet, Bégaudeau and the rainbow coalition of kids all swarmed onstage for an ecstatic reunion.
Among the other laureled films were two from Italy: Matteo Garrone's remorseless Gomorrah (the Grand Prize, or second place), about a Mafia clan's reach throughout the country, and Paolo Sorrentino's Il Divo (the third-place Jury Prize), a snazzy-looking, corrosively cynical biopic of three-time Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti. When he was shown the film before Cannes, Andreotti called it "the act of a scoundrel." After Il Divo won its prize, he took the longer view. "For anybody in politics, it seems to me, to be ignored is worse than to be criticized," he said, adding, "I'm happy for the producer. If I'd had a share in the profits I'd be even happier."
European films snagged most of the main awards. The Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne were given the Screenplay prize for their immigrant crime drama The Silence of Lorna, and Nuri Bilge Ceylan, from Turkey, was named Best Director (a consolation prize here) for Three Monkeys, his study of corruption within a business and a family. The Best Actress award went to Sandra Corveloni, who played a pregnant single mother trying to keep her poor family together in the Brazilian Linha de passe (Line of Passage). Only one U.S. picture was fêted: Benicio Del Toro was named Best Actor for his role as Ernesto Guevara in Che, directed by Steven Soderbergh. The movie's dialogue is almost entirely in Spanish, which means that, for the second year in a row, no English-language film took home any of the main jury's prizes.
This is not to say that Cannes (or Venice or Toronto) is immune to Hollywood star quality. The big festivals need celebrities to grace the red carpet, to be photographed by the paparazzi and TV crews, to glean worldwide publicity for the event. So the premiere of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the first Indy movie since 1989, was headline news. Producer George Lucas, director Steven Spielberg and leading man Harrison Ford showed up to promote their familiar if robust revival of the archaeologist adventurer. Jack Black and Dustin Hoffman appeared with their sweetly vigorous animated comedy Kung Fu Panda, and Woody Allen presented a very agreeable romance, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, with star Penélope Cruz in tow.
All these films were shown outside the main competition for the Palme d'Or. Hmmm, let's see. Is Angelina in the new film directed by Clint? (No surnames needed.) Then they will be there, if only to spark a new tabloid nickname: Clangelina. (And Brad came too.) Actually, Eastwood's movie, Changeling, is an honorable, fact-based drama about police corruption and child abuse in 1920s Los Angeles, with Jolie somewhat miscast as an ordinary single mom whose son is kidnapped, then found, only for her to discover that another boy claiming to be the son has returned in his place. Eastwood has brought five films to Cannes in the past quarter of a century, and for the fifth time his movie was shut out at the Palme ceremony, though the jury gave him the thanks-for-hanging-in-there gift of a life achievement award.
In the real world — which Hollywood honchos would define as the North American box office and the Oscars list — a U.S. film's showing at Cannes has little impact. In 1991, Joel and Ethan Coen's Barton Fink received an unprecedented three top awards (Palme d'Or, Best Director and, for John Turturro, Best Actor) but grossed only $6 million stateside; last year, the Coens' No Country for Old Men got no prize at Cannes, then earned nearly $75 million on domestic screens (plus $86 million abroad), and won the brothers three Oscars, including for Best Picture. Such Academy-nominated hits as L.A. Confidential and Eastwood's Mystic River also got snubbed on the Côte d'Azur; and Brokeback Mountain was actually rejected for the festival competition. So, for ambitious American movies, getting canned at Cannes may be more a good-luck charm than the kiss of death.
For Che, the future looks cloudy. With a director and star who are both Oscar winners, it was the most eagerly anticipated film in the competition. But as a 4-1/2-hour, two-part recounting of Guevara's rebel campaigns in the Cuban and Bolivian jungles, it was also the most dreaded. Neither prediction was quite accurate. The movie doesn't enthrall, nor does it outrage. It simply disappoints, at great length. Except for one zesty confrontation at the United Nations, the film is doggedly antidramatic. At a reported $60 million budget, Che is too expensive to be relegated to art houses, yet it's too stiff and forbidding to appeal to a mass audience.
In Part 1, our asthmatic hero helps Fidel Castro defeat the Batista forces in the 1958 battle of Las Mercedes; in Part 2, he fails to bring revolution to Bolivia, and pays with his life. Numerous scenes of him instilling military discipline are leavened by occasional celebrity cameos (including an implausible visit from Matt Damon). At the end the viewer is left wondering why the film omitted important elements of Guevara's biography — his supervising of hundreds of executions in the first year of the regime; his break with Castro; his war year in Africa; his wives and children — and why, instead, it just goes into the woods with Che and, artistically, gets lost there.
Soderbergh's film has one admirable quality: the big huevos of cinematic ambition. Too many of the European films at the festival erred on the side of minimalism, both in scope and style. They begin by promising thrills out of classic crime fiction — an immigrant marriage-and-murder plot in The Silence of Lorna, a wife falling for the man who sent her husband to jail in Three Monkeys, a woman who's afraid she ran over someone in Lucrecia Martel's widely praised Argentine film, The Headless Woman — before turning sullenly, claustrophobically inward. For many vaunted directors at Cannes, this was a year of treading water.
For the depressed cinephile, it was a tonic to find one movie of gigantic ambition and considerable achievement. That would be Synecdoche, New York, the directorial debut from U.S. screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. His scripts for Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind were complex and challenging enough — but they were finger-painting compared with this tale of an upstate New York theater director (played by the great Philip Seymour Hoffman) who tries to create a masterpiece of living art while his life tears itself to shreds.
Federico Fellini's 8-1/2 is an obvious inspiration, and Kaufman comes close to the Italian master in finding the wild wit in artistic misery. This vast, tragicomic mural spans 30-plus years and two continents, and slips so deviously from toothache reality into nightmare fantasy that you have to work to keep up with it. But Kaufman, Hoffman and a large, sympathetic cast make the ride exhilarating. It's surely the all-time funniest movie about depression, despair and death.
And the best omen for the future of Synecdoche, New York: at Cannes, it won no prize at all.
- RICHARD CORLISS/CANNES
- This year at Cannes, European films took home the top prizes while Hollywood's stars worked the red carpet