Quotes of the Day

The rumors at the 56th cannes Film Festival were so much more entertaining than the stuff on the Grand Palais screen, they deserve their own prizes. So here are our Kick-the-Cannes Awards.

Best Pre-Festival Disaster Scenario: The Hell-no-we-won't-go rumor. After Gulf War II, journalists speculated that big American stars and producers would boycott Cannes in solidarity with the U.S. government's cold-shouldering of France. This notion of Cannes as a family picnic, where the feudin' cousins stay home, ignores what the festival really is: a place where movies are seen and sold. Hollywood will go anywhere to sell its product, and so will its grand old icons. Who came to Cannes? Just Clint Eastwood — he practically is America. And Arnold Schwarzenegger — he practically owns it.

Best Post-Festival Conspiracy Theory: The gay-Mafia rumor. Though Lars Von Trier's Dogville was deemed front-runner for the Palme d'Or, Gus Van Sant's Elephant took the prize. So the festival did end with the an openly homosexual French director (jury president Patrice Chéreau) presenting the award to an openly homosexual American director (Van Sant). But Chéreau was just one of nine jury members, all with their own wills and constituencies. If Dogville had won, theorists might have seen sinister connections between its star, Nicole Kidman, and jury member Meg Ryan, who stars later this year in the Kidman-produced In the Cut.

Best Goofy Diversion from a Dreadful Slate of Films: The mystery of the purloined penis. An American indie movie, Vincent Gallo's stupefyingly inept The Brown Bunny, let loose such a torrent of critical contumely that the director-writer-star-cameraman-editor apologized publicly for his film. Bunny's only selling point was the promise of an explicit scene of fellatio between Gallo and Chloë Sevigny. One hour and 47 minutes into the ordeal, there it came, and went. We later learned that Gallo had used a phallic prosthesis he'd taken from the set of Claire Denis' French film Trouble Every Day (shown at Cannes in 2001) and that Denis was still miffed about the missing member. Her exact quote is missing too, but wags paraphrased it as: "Vincent Gallo stole my penis."

The Brown Bunny has already entered movie lore as the worst film ever shown at a major festival. Cannes '03 may achieve a similar distinction. No one could recall a soggier batch of movies in the competition. The lures of the beach, lush weather and gorgeous people were never so seductive.

As beautiful as it was outside the Palais, that's how depressing it was inside. Good movies, bad ones — and a huge batch of pictures that could be called ambitious mediocrities — all had the tone of apocalyptic despair. Brazilian director Hector Babenco ended his Carandiru with the slaughter of innocents in a São Paulo jail. Austrian Michael Haneke depicted the moral chaos attending an unspecified disaster in his testy The Time of the Wolf. Even Denys Arcand's genial The Barbarian Invasions, a French-Canadian billet-doux to a dear, dying scoundrel, featured a jarring clip of a hijacked plane crashing into the World Trade Center. And the two main Palme d'Or contenders showed how the world could end in America: with a bang.

Dogville — like Von Trier's best-known films, Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark — is a parable of inner beauty defiled, except that, this time, the heroine gets to kill all her attackers. The film was also labeled anti-American, because that's today's fragrance. But Von Trier is mainly a cinema experimentalist, and Dogville is another of his clever ideas stretched to the breaking point. He resolved to make a movie with no sets, just the floor outline of the town's homes and stores, with empty door frames that slam after people have walked through them. It's a great notion for about 10 minutes, but not for the movie's current running (ambling) time of three hours. Despite the devout exertions of Kidman and a fine cast, Dogville plays like the read-through of a potentially fascinating play. Now Von Trier should go ahead and make the movie.

Elephant is a loose remake of Alan Clarke's 1989 bbc film about gunmen in Belfast. Van Sant takes the notion of civilians as target practice and transposes it to America. Most of the film describes, with no special urgency, a typical day at a generic high school: a blond boy arriving late because he has been caring for his alcoholic father; an athlete and his pretty girlfriend planning their social calendar; two other lads arming themselves for their own private Armageddon.

And then the shooting starts — a replay of the 1999 Columbine High School massacre in the U.S. The film's lyrical pseudo documentary style now lurches into horror-movie mode. The two killers stalk their prey down the bright corridors as efficiently and implacably as any Jason or Freddy. They are monsters of the id — our worst nightmare. Not America's: humanity's.

Evil is where you find it: in America and Asia, in fictional and factual films. Two of the strongest Cannes pictures this year were documentaries. Rithy Panh's long, harrowing S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine shows some of the Cambodian perpetrators of genocide in the '70s confronted by their victims or the victims' survivors. Errol Morris' The Fog of War lets Vietnam-era Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara make his nuanced, self-critical apologia for his decisions in a war that killed 56,000 Americans and 60 times as many Vietnamese. It's a must-see, especially for Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz.

The shroud of international evildoing covers two excellent films set in Afghanistan. Sedigh Barmak's Osama takes place in the early days of Taliban rule: to earn money for her family, a desperate woman disguises her 11-year-old daughter as a boy. It is a reckless ruse, one with humiliating consequences, which Barmak directs with poignant simplicity.

Samira Makhmalbaf's At Five in the Afternoon is set just after the Taliban's fall, when young women have earned the right to go to school but not the respect of their conservative fathers. The film shimmers and shudders with hopeful and horrifying vignettes. Girls declare themselves ready to be doctors, teachers, even the President of Afghanistan. Amid the optimism, anarchy rules. There is no water to drink, no place to stay. People find shelter in the hull of an abandoned plane, in the ruins of a palace. After 20 years of brutal occupation, Afghanistan is rich in ruins.

The film never raises its voice, but the 23-year-old Makhmalbaf did — on closing night, when At Five in the Afternoon won the Jury Prize (third place). "My movie is about a woman who dreams to become a president," she declared. "But I personally don't have such a dream ... because we are living in a world in which Mr. George W. Bush is the most famous President."

Wait a minute, you say. Didn't Cannes use to be the place to see elegant, middle-brow European films and buxom topless starlets? Wait no more: Ludivine Sagnier to the rescue. Voluptuous and pouty, Sagnier has her limitations as an actress — she doesn't radiate so much as glower — but just now she's everywhere in French movies, including two in the Cannes competition. In La Petite Lili, Claude Miller's summery adaptation of Chekhov's The Seagull, she disrupts the egos and libidos of all she meets. In François Ozon's Swimming Pool, she antagonizes and arouses older novelist Charlotte Rampling by sunbathing in the nude and bringing louts home to stay over. Neither film is a masterpiece, but both address the envy of old souls contemplating young flesh.

Amid the cinematic dross, a jewel emerged: Sylvain Chomet's Les Triplettes de Belleville (Belleville Rendez-Vous). This animated feature, about an old woman who battles the French Mafia to retrieve her kidnapped godson, possessed what other Cannes entries lacked: a vivid visual imagination, a generous wit, an understanding of the human impulse not just to survive but to save others. Dogville may have had the big buzz at Cannes, but Belleville was the great news.

Von Trier disappointed his fans by getting shut out at award time. But another Danish auteur did have reason to be there and be pleased: Christoffer Boe, director of Reconstruction, which won the Camera d'Or for best first feature. As he accepted his prize, Boe made this plea into the ether: "Vincent Gallo, don't give up! We need to fight conventional filmmaking."

Someone needs to make, and fight for, better films. Maybe next year: Cannes 2004 has already been dubbed the Atonement Festival. But if there's a lesson from Cannes 2003, it's that bad films are more fun to talk about than great ones. They're almost as good as rumors.

• RICHARD CORLISS | Cannes
• An autopsy of the coldest festival in years, and a guide to the few bright spots