Cannes' Animal Farm

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SCHOOL DAZE: Elephant was a jumbo success

Van Sant's brisk (80-min.), remorseless film, which he made for the U.S. cable network HBO, is a loose remake of another TV drama of the same name. Alan Clarke's 47-min. original, shown in 1989 on BBC, was set in Belfast at the height of the Troubles. It followed a series of people who walked the streets, found victims and abruptly shot them, with not a word spoken. The title comes from the Irish novelist Bernard MacLaverty (Cal, Grace Notes); he said the Troubles were like having an elephant in your living room.

Elephant transposes this notion of civilians as target practice from Northern Ireland to the American suburbs, with Van Sant's home state of Oregon standing in for Littleton, Colorado. Most of the 80-min. film describes a typical day at a generic high school. For minutes on end, the moving camera faithfully tracks the movements of several students at Watt High: a blond boy arriving late because he has been caring for his alcoholic father; an athlete and his pretty girl-friend planning their social calendar; an amateur photographer snapping impromptu studies of his classmates; two other lads arming themselves for their own private Armageddon.

And then the shooting starts. The ambling, lyrical pseudo-documentary style quickly lurches into horror-film mode, with many of that genre's plot implausibilities. The two killers stalk their prey down the bright corridors as efficiently and implacably as any Jason or Freddy. They spring upon some victims unawares, giving them (and the audience) a seismic shock. Some of the hunted kids become so addled that, instead of escaping through one of the school's many windows or doors, they hide in classrooms and food lockers, where the monsters are bound to find them.

In this Riviera paradise, where the weather was obligingly warm and sunny for 12-day fest, directors had their minds on holocaust. Elephant and Dogville both end in bloody apocalypse. Hector Babenco's Carandiru depicts the slaughter of innocents in a Brazilian jail. Michael Haneke's The Time of the Wolf, shown out of competition, dramatizes the moral chaos attending an unexplained disaster, with Isabelle Huppert and Chereau himself leading the cast.

To many viewers, though, the larger catastrophe was the selection of the films in competition: a listless assortment of ill-tempered waxworks. Heading the parade was Vincent Gallo's stupefyingly incompetent The Brown Bunny, which stoked such a torrent of critical contumely that the director-star apologized for his film. This potholed road movie climaxes in an explicit scene of fellatio between Gallo and Chloe Sevigny. It was later revealed that Gallo had used a phallic prosthesis he had taken from the set of Claire Denis' French film Trouble Every Day, shown two years ago in Cannes. As Cannes wags paraphrased Denis' chagrin: "Vincent Gallo stole my penis."

Emaciated? Emasculated? The dog days of Cannes 2003 had something for everyone — everyone in the mood to be disappointed. Critics already had a hopeful phrase to describe next year's festival: "the atonement."