The jury at the Festival de Cannes made some very odd choices - but there were no quibbles about the Palme d'Or, writes Michael Dwyer
On the opening weekend of the 60th Festival de Cannes, French writer-director Christophe Honoré was philosophical about the prospects for his modern-day musical, Les Chansons d'Amour (Love Songs),in the competition for the Palme d'Or. Making an apt musical reference, he compared the festival to the Eurovision Song Contest because "France usually comes second- or third-last". Honoré's prediction was not far off the mark. His movie was passed over by the jury at Sunday night's awards ceremony, and while two French productions collected prizes on the night, the host country lost out yet again for the Palme d'Or. Only once in the 41 years since A Man and a Womancollected the festival's most coveted award has it gone to a French film, and even then, when Maurice Pialat was given the prize for Under Satan's Sunin 1987, the predominantly French audience loudly booed him when he came on stage to accept it. Pialat responded by booing the audience.
Honoré's film was one of the most divisive among the critics at Cannes this year, being warmly welcomed by the French media and rather unfairly trashed by the international critics. Another French production, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which deservedly collected the best-director award for US painter-turned-filmmaker Julian Schnabel, was generally panned by the French media and widely praised by the international critics.
This year's Cannes jury, which had director Stephen Frears as its president, appeared to be even more divided than the media, given that their deliberations reeked of compromise. Their most baffling decision was to give the best-actor award to Russian actor Konstantin Lavronenko for his glowering one-note performance as a dour, domineering husband who forces his wife to have an abortion in Andrei Zvyagintsev's pretentiously protracted The Banishment. Clearly some jury members insisted that the film should receive some award, any award, regardless of how inappropriate it was.
An altogether more deserving winner of the best-actor prize would have been Javier Bardem for his adventurous and highly entertaining portrayal of the wholly amoral villain in Joel and Ethan Coen's adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men, a supremely stylish and visceral thriller embellished with the trademark quirky humour of the Coens. The film, their most accomplished in over a decade, was a firm favourite with the critics at Cannes, yet failed to receive any acknowledgment from the jury.
David Fincher's fine procedural thriller Zodiac, already on Irish cinema release, suffered a similar fate, and it was all the more surprising, then, that the only US film honoured by the Cannes jury was Gus Van Sant's minimalist, low-key Paranoid Park, which only sparks to dramatic life in its last half-hour. The jury inexplicably chose to give the festival's special 60th anniversary prize to Van Sant, a Palme d'Or winner four years ago for the far superior Elephant.
There were no quibbles, however, at the closing ceremony on Sunday night when Frears announced that the Palme d'Or was going to 39-year-old Romanian director Cristian Mungiu for his challenging, creepily powerful 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, which is set in 1987, shortly before the fall of the Ceausescu regime, in a drab unnamed Romanian town where one student helps another to arrange an illegal abortion. The film is deliberately unsettling as Mungiu sets his camera in a fixed position to observe the operation - and its consequences - and while the movie seems most likely to have a limited arthouse release in Ireland, it is certain to provoke strong responses from opposing sides on the long-running abortion debate.
Accepting the award, Mungiu described the experience as "like a fairytale", adding that its success demonstrated that "you don't need big budgets and big stars to make stories". He also received the award from Fipresci, the international critics' group, for the best film showing in any category at Cannes this year.
The Palme d'Or represents a triumph for Romanian cinema, following the Cannes awards to The Death of Mr Lazarescuand 12:08 East of Bucharestin the past two years. And there was another prize for a Romanian film at Cannes when the award for best film in the sidebar section Un Certain Regardwas given posthumously to director Cristian Nemescu - who died at the age of 27 in a car accident last autumn - for his feature film debut, California Dreamin'.
The Prix du Jury was shared between Mexican director Carlos Reygadas for Silent Light, and Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud, the co-directors of the animated feature Persepolis, which attracted one of the most sustained standing ovations of the festival and an official protest from Tehran against its inclusion in the Cannes competition.
Persepolisis based on Satrapi's autobiographical graphic novels about a precocious young girl, Marjane, growing up in Tehran from the downfall of the Shah in 1978 through the radical transformation of the country after the Islamic Revolution. Raised by middle-class liberal parents, Marjane is scathing in her outspoken criticism of the repression of women, in particular, under the new theocratic regime, and the movie is alternately poignant and uproariously funny. The spirited voice cast features Chiara Mastroianni as Marjane, her real-life mother Catherine Deneuve as Marjane's mother, and the venerable Danielle Darrieux as her grandmother.
THE BEST-ACTRESS prize went to Jeon Do-yeon for her affecting portrayal of a piano teacher distraught after the abduction of her young son in Lee Chang-Dong's moving, simmering South Korean drama, Secret Sunshine. After the death of her husband in an accident, Jeon's character, Shin-ae, moves from Seoul to his hometown of Miryang, in the hope of a better life for her and her son in the environment of a small town.
Although taken aback to realise that everyone knows everything about everybody else there, and that she is the subject of intense local curiosity, Shin-ae is settling in when her beloved little boy is kidnapped and killed. Jeon expressively captures her uncontrollable grief as she becomes progressively unhinged, not helped by her discovery that the murderer has taken on a beatific demeanour in the belief that God has forgiven him.
While Lee's film firmly commands the viewer's attention over a running time of two hours and 20 minutes, the new Béla Tarr film, The Man from London, makes no attempt to engage the audience over a similar duration. The first Hungarian production in 20 years to be selected for the Cannes competition, Tarr's film has had a troubled history, with shooting halted and the project seemingly doomed after its producer Humbert Balsan (to whom it is dedicated) committed suicide early in 2005, nine days after filming had started.
Tarr takes the film's basis, a Georges Simenon novel, and pares its narrative to the bone for what is essentially an exercise in visual style. The moody, precisely judged camerawork produces a succession of striking black-and-white compositions, but there is little else to engage the mind in a painfully slow-moving and largely uneventful film, which features Tilda Swinton in a thankless role for which she has been quite unconvincingly dubbed in Hungarian. No other film in the official Cannes selection came close to matching the walkout rate it prompted as it crawled along.
The Cannes jury members, who are duty bound to sit through all 22 films in competition, decided against giving any award to The Man from London, nor to the last of the US entries to be screened over the weekend, James Gray's thriller, We Own the Night. It returns Gray to the milieu of his auspicious debut, Little Odessa- among Russian immigrants in the Brighton Beach area of Brooklyn - and reunites him with the leading actors of his second feature The Yards, Joaquin Phoenix and Mark Wahlberg.
They play brothers in We Own the Night, which is set in 1988, with Phoenix as Bobby, the swaggering, cocaine-snorting manager of a Russian-owned nightclub that is a haven for drug dealers, and Wahlberg as Joseph, a man of principles who has followed their police chief father (Robert Duvall) into the force. The brothers are at odds with each other until an attempt on Joseph's life forces Bobby to realise that blood is thicker than water.
His overnight transformation is too abrupt to be convincing in a movie that is disappointingly conventional and mostly predictable, despite the committed performances of its central cast and a number of well-staged set-pieces, most notably an exciting multi-vehicle chase through torrential rain.
It was one of several films that appeared unworthy of inclusion in the official Cannes programme, although certainly more compelling than Quentin Tarantino's tiresomely self-indulgent Death Proof, which also rightly went home empty-handed. There were no prizes either for the tedious Jerusalem-set Psalms (Tehilim), but a much more positively received Israeli film, Edgar Keretand Shira Geffen's Jellyfish, took the prestigious Camera d'Or award for a feature film by a first-time director.
Having co-produced last year's Palme d'Or winner The Wind that Shakes the Barley, Element Pictures, the Dublin-based company run by Ed Guiney and Andrew Lowe, scored again this year when Lenny Abrahamson's Garagecollected the annual Art et Essai prize presented by the International Confederation of Arthouse Cinemas, representing over 3,000 screens in Europe, Latin America, Asia and Africa.
Although dismissively reviewed in Variety, Garagewas warmly acclaimed by critics and audiences, and it marks the emergence of a formidable serious actor in Pat Shortt, as Irish cinemagoers will discover when it opens here in the autumn.
It was one of the many highs that eclipsed the few lows in the satisfying, stimulating, hectic and pleasurably exhausting fortnight that has been the 60th Festival de Cannes. A happy birthday indeed.
