At first it sounded like Pollyanna Day at the United Nations. An international parade of prizewinners gathered on the Grand Palais stage at the 40th Cannes Film Festival to pick up their scrolls and mouth the loftiest banalities. One young filmmaker from Soviet Georgia thanked "all the inhabitants of that big wonderful country called Cinema." A Japanese director announced, "I would like to work for peace." Wim Wenders, who picked up the director's prize for his daunting, sentimental fantasy The Wings of Desire, ) said, "If we can improve the images of the world, perhaps we can improve the world." Everyone was on his best behavior at this birthday party for the world's most prestigious movie do.
Then, as if cued by Stephen King, the wicked witch showed up in this fairy- tale resort on the Cote d'Azur. The creature arrived in the ursine form of Maurice Pialat, critically the most revered, personally the most reviled, of France's movie auteurs. A few days before, he had shown his new movie, Under the Sun of Satan, a stately adaptation of the Georges Bernanos novel about a self-torturing priest (Gerard Depardieu); its directorial style fell somewhere between rigor and rigor mortis. And now Yves Montand, president of this year's festival jury, was announcing the award of the Palme d'Or to Pialat's dour drama -- the first local product to grab the top prize since A Man and a Woman at the 20th fest, in 1966.
Montand might as well have said that Ripple had been designated the official French wine, for the Palais audience immediately erupted in derisive whistles and howls. Catherine Deneuve, who presented the award, pleaded futilely for the mob to give the director a chance to defend his honor. But the catcalls delighted Pialat. "If you don't like me," he proclaimed, "I can tell you, I don't like you either." He smiled and raised a defiant fist. More boos, more hoots. Somebody spat at him. PALME D'OR SCANDALE A CANNES, screamed the next day's papers.
Thank you, members of the jury. Merci, M. Pialat and all your enemies in the Grand Palais. You brought the last-minute thrill of spontaneous animosity to a festival that had nearly suffocated in gentility. Until then, this assembly of 30,000 producers, directors, stars, distributors, critics and other swains of the celluloid muse could find little to cheer and even less to condemn. Oh, sure, you could watch Michael Sarrazin strangle a nude hermaphrodite in the Belgian thriller Mascara. You could cruise the low-rent Film Market and see ads for such films as Assault of the Killer Bimbos, Space Sluts in the Slammer and Surf Nazis Must Die. You could catch Jean-Luc Godard in a typically impish auto-da-fe. This year the Peter Pan of enfants terribles presented a captious, grating version of King Lear, starring both Norman Mailer and Burgess Meredith as Lear and Molly Ringwald as Cordelia. Godard, who later boasted that he had never read the play, seemed determined to accomplish what the banks and an indifferent movie public have not quite yet achieved: to bankrupt the Cannon Group, his sponsoring studio.