It was a dreadful year for Cannes, with day after day of awful films. At least the jurors stood by their convictions, writes Michael Dwyer
Bravo to the jury of the 56th Cannes Film Festival for their candour at the awards ceremony on Sunday night. They deserve to be saluted more than most of the movies inflicted on them and the audience day after day of an exceptionally weak year for the festival, when the official selection reeked of geographical tokenism and of propping up a jaded old boy network.
Cannes' round-the-clock experience seemed more remote from the real world than ever. There was the inexplicable sustained applause for Lars von Trier's dire Dogville, closely followed by the deserved humiliation of Vincent Gallo's equally worthless The Brown Bunny, along with a reduced but unusually feeble Asian representation and some tired auteurs getting the red-carpet treatment yet again for instantly forgettable efforts. Of the 20 films selected for competition, all bar six were by directors who had been chosen for Cannes at least once before.
Let's hear it for the jury chaired by the gifted French film, theatre and opera director Patrice Chéreau: directors from the US (Steven Soderbergh), Bosnia (Danis Tanovic) and China (Jiang Wen), actors from India (Aishwarya Rai), the US (Meg Ryan) and France (Karin Viard and Jean Rochefort); and the Italian writer Erri De Luca.
In marked contrast to most recent Cannes juries, they had the courage of their convictions. They divided their awards between just four feature films in competition, giving two each to three of them, signalling that they could find too little merit in the other 16 even to give them one of the other prizes at their discretion: the regularly awarded accolades for artistic contribution and technical achievement, which were not presented this year.
In the long list of films that went home empty handed from Cannes this year, the most conspicuous - and entirely justified - omission was the absurdly overpraised Dogville. That decision will come as a long-overdue shock for von Trier, the smug, vain Danish director who was boasting a week ago that Cannes had selected every film he has made and given them prizes.
At the announcement of the Cannes programme last month, the organisers claimed to have viewed more than 900 feature-film entries. This suggests that the 820-plus movies they rejected were worse than those selected for competition, signalling that there's a deep crisis in world cinema - or, more plausibly, that the festival erred badly in making its final selection.
In the case of Gallo's The Brown Bunny, the only conceivable reason for its inclusion was a desperation to add another US film to the competition. Watching paint dry would have been more satisfying than sitting through Gallo's wildly self-indulgent film. Written, produced, directed and edited by Gallo, it features him throughout its yawn-inducing two hours as he drives across the US.
This ugly, grainy travelogue is shot mostly through the dirty windscreen of his van as he drives and drives and drives, with pauses along the way as he gets petrol, takes a shower, puts on a sweater or contemplates buying a bunny in a pet store. Towards the end, there is a graphic and entirely gratuitous scene in which Gallo receives oral sex from Chloë Sevigny.
All three Asian entries in competition suffered from overextended exposition. The most ambitious of them, Purple Butterfly, from Lou Ye, the Chinese director of Suzhou River, is a visually striking but far too sprawling drama set in 1930s Shanghai and featuring Zhang Ziyi, the young star of Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
Naomi Kawase's Japanese film Sharasojyu is a slow-burning melodrama following the mysterious disappearance of a twin boy.
Also from Japan, Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Bright Future fails to sustain interest in its protagonist, a young dreamer who is easily confused.
Father And Son, the new film from Russian Ark director Aleksandr Sokurov, is so wilfully impenetrable that it is certain to keep audiences confused to the end of its fragmented story about the deep bond between a young widower and his teenage son. The international critics' jury at Cannes clearly decoded its hidden meanings, however, as it gave it its award for the best film in competition.
The two final French entries to be screened were formed in the belief that nothing succeeds like excess. In Bertrand Bonello's pompously pretentious Tiresia, an embittered man imprisons a transsexual prostitute and commits an act of startling violence that provoked gasps all around the Palais des Festivals. The film's only interesting idea was to have the prostitute played at different stages by actors of opposite sexes.
Les Côtelettes, Bertrand Blier's calculatedly politically incorrect would-be comedy, features two elderly men - gamely played by Philippe Noiret and Michel Bouquet - lusting after a much younger Algerian cleaner (Farida Rahouadj).
It culminates in a preposterous finale that resembles a Saturday-night variety show on French television, as a few dozen dying characters engage in a blandly choreographed dance routine while Death (personified by Catherine Hiegel in fishnets) is sodomised by Bouquet's character.
Mystic River, Clint Eastwood's 24th film as a director, was widely tipped for a prize, given that Eastwood was in Cannes for the closing weekend. Based on the novel by Dennis Lehane, it deals with three boyhood friends in an Irish-American area of Boston.
One of the boys (later played by a subdued Tim Robbins) is abducted by two men, one of them a priest, and sexually abused for four days, leaving him emotionally scarred for life. His friends, played by Sean Penn and Kevin Bacon, grow up on opposite sides of the law, and their fates are interwoven by a murder. This solidly assembled movie suffers from some unlikely plotting and scenes of overstated method acting by Penn and Marcia Gay Harden.
The Tulse Luper Suitcases: The Moab Story is the first film in a trilogy by Peter Greenaway and registers as a certain return to form for the British director - although, as ever, he appears more concerned with form over content in a movie replete with familiar motifs: dazzling visuals, overlapping images, stylised sets, eccentric ideas, an obsession with numbers and statistical data, a frequently naked leading actor (J.J. Feild) and a Michael Nyman-style score by Boruk Krzisnik.
And so to the award winners. I wrote last week about Gus Van Sant's low-key, engrossing and ultimately jolting Elephant, which traces the build-up to a mass killing by two students at a US high school. In a decision that took just about everybody by surprise, it received both the Palme d'Or for best film and the best-director award for Van Sant.
Less than 24 hours after winning the Eurovision Song Contest, Turkey took two Cannes prizes for the moody, contemplative arthouse film Uzak (Distant), which also was reported here last week: the runner-up award, the Grand Jury Prize, and the best actor award, which was shared by its leading players, Mehmet Emmin Toprak, who died tragically young in a car accident earlier this year, and Muzaffer Özdemir, who was too shy to attend the prize ceremony.
The minor award, Le Prix du Jury, went to the young Iranian director Samira Makhmalbaf for At Five In The Afternoon, her impassioned but at times naive picture of post-Taliban Afghanistan and the lowly place of women in its society.
It was overshadowed by Siddiq Barmak's more direct and powerful Osama, which received a citation in the Camera d'Or category for first-time directors.
Charged by some extraordinary imagery and made with commendable clarity and justified anger, it presents an appalling picture of life under the Taliban regime.
Its focus is a 13-year-old girl who risks posing as a boy to earn some money for her widowed mother, who is not allowed to work. Barmak produced the film with Julie leBrocquy of the Irish production company leBrocquy Fraser.
By a long way, my favourite film in the Cannes competition this year was Les Invasions Barbares: Le Déclin Continue (The Barbarian Invasions), which won the awards for best screenplay and best actress (for Marie-Josée Cruze) on Sunday night. Written and directed by Denys Arcand, who made Jesus Of Montreal, the film is a loose sequel to Arcand's 1987 The Decline Of The American Empire.
Audiences familiar with that film will enjoy its resonances in the sequel, but it is by no means necessary to have seen it to savour the abundant pleasures of the new film. That begins as Sébastian (Stéphane Rousseau), a wealthy young London-based financial dealer, learns that his father, Rémy (the splendid Rémy Girard), is seriously ill at home in Montreal. After years of acrimony with his father he returns home; many of Rémy's long-time friends (from the original film) also gather at his bedside.
The movie presents a scathing depiction of the Montreal health system - the hospital corridors are lined with patients on trolleys, the medical equipment is as dated as the computer system and the administrators speak in callously bureaucratic jargon. Arcand's film is as touching as it is acerbic, as deeply moving as it is hilarious, and it is superbly acted by a terrific ensemble cast. This is classically made cinema, and Cannes could have done with many more films of its skill, quality and emotional depth this year.
Reel News from Cannes in The Ticket tomorrow
