Big-name directors deliver mixed results at the Cannes Film Festival, while a first-timer steals the show with her Glasgow-set drama. Michael Dwyer, our man on the Cote D'azur, reports
WE live in hope. The Cannes selection looks good on paper every year, with its mix of themes and genres from established directors, rising talents and promising newcomers. That optimism is often rewarded, although there have been years when the standard of the films in competition for the Palme d'Or fell far short of the quality threshold.
When you watch three or four movies from early morning every day, there is always the possibility of something special. That spirit is demonstrated every morning, to the eternal bemusement of the local people, as 2,000 reporters stride or totter from all parts of the Côte d'Azur town, converging on the Festival Palais for the 8.30am press screening.
Such was the wave of anticipation surrounding Babel that most of us left our accommodation even earlier on Tuesday to ensure a seat for one of the hottest tickets of the 2006 festival. Mexican DJ-turned-director Alejandro González Iñárritu was discovered in one of the Cannes sidebars six years ago with his dynamic Amores Perros and followed it with the powerful 21 Grams.
Babel concludes the trilogy of movies in which Iñárritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga employ overlapping narratives to reflect on the human condition. It takes its title from the Biblical tower built to reach toward Heaven, which so angered God that he made each person speak a different language, halting the project and spreading confusion across the planet. That is a timely metaphor for the world today, and the film acutely reflects the confusion of our times, the lack of communication and the propensity for conflict among peoples separated by cultural, religious and political differences. Iñárritu and Arriaga ambitiously broaden their range by intersecting four narratives set and shot on three continents.
Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett play an American couple on a Moroccan holiday fraught with personal tension. In San Diego, an illegal Mexican immigrant (Adriana Barraza) is the devoted nanny to their two young children. When her employers order her to stay with their children on the day of her son's wedding in Mexico, she impulsively takes the children with her in the car driven by her reckless nephew (Gael García Bernal).
In Tokyo, the police are seeking out a widower businessman, while his deaf teenage daughter resorts to sexual provocation to feel wanted by the boys who reject her. And in the mountains of Morocco, a young goat-herder is showing off his marksmanship with his father's newly acquired rifle when he fires a fatal shot that sets in motion events that link all the protagonists and those around them.
From this intricate premise, Iñárritu views our world as snapshots of friction driven by selfishness, fear, isolation and an inability or unwillingness to listen or understand, in particular when the speaker is using a different language and is immediately classified as foreign. However, absorbing and satisfying as Babel proves, it suffers from the sheer familiarity of a formula that has lost its freshness since Amores Perros came out of nowhere to electrifying effect.
The newcomer who has achieved that at Cannes this year is English writer-director Andrea Arnold. She won the best short film Oscar two years ago for Wasp and now makes an astonishing feature film debut with Red Road, the only feature from a first-time director selected for the Cannes competition this year.
Set in Glasgow, Red Road features a riveting performance from Kate Dickie as Jackie, a lonely woman watching the world go by in her job as a CCTV operator. When one of her monitors shows a couple having alfresco sex in the city's rundown Red Road area, she is shocked to recognise the man (Tony Curran) and to realise that he has been released from prison. It's clear he is someone from her past, but Arnold withholds more information for a while, heightening the tension as Jackie sets about following him, fully aware of the ever-present risk that he will spot her.
There are shades of Michael Haneke's best work about this often unbearably gripping psychological thriller, which is marked by authentic performances from its small, well-chosen cast. Red Road is the first feature produced by Carrie Comerford, who is Irish, and she can be proud of it.
Five years after deservedly winning the Palme d'Or for The Son's Room, Italian actor, writer, producer and director Nanni Moretti returns to Cannes with his loquacious, entertaining and politically jagged The Caiman.
It opens on a chaotic Marxist-Leninist gathering, which, it transpires, is taken from a fictional film, Cataracts, that sank the career of fictional B-movie producer Bruno Bonomo (Silvio Orlando). Ten years later, with his marriage falling apart and his debts soaring, Bonomo gets a script titled The Caiman from an idealistic young single mother (Jasmine Trinca), but it's only when they are on their way to seek finance from state broadcaster RAI that Bonomo realises that the subject of her film is the prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi.
The screenplay draws extensively from Berlusconi's own words as taken from the records, and is so scathing that, for the first time in 20 years, Moretti had to make it without state funding or, indeed, funding from RAI.
The Caiman became the most commercially successful of all Moretti's films when it was released in Italy a few weeks before the country's recent general election, and it quite feasibly contributed to Berlusconi losing power when Romano Prodi won by a wafer-thin majority.
Three years ago Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki took the Cannes runner-up prize, the Grand Prix du Jury, for his touching The Man Without a Past, the second film in his trilogy on socially marginalised outsiders that began with the equally fine Drifting Clouds and concludes with Lights in the Dusk. The film depicts Helsinki as the chain-smoking capital of the world, populated by glum characters, none of whom is lonelier than Koistinen (Janne Hyytiäinen), a doleful security guard inspired by Charles Chaplin's much-suffering tramp persona. Rebuffed by his colleagues, Koistinen dreams of starting his own security business, but his bank manager bluntly informs him that "guarantees from trash like you are worthless". When the prospect of a love affair unexpectedly dawns, Koistnen is easy prey for exploitation and betrayal, but his acceptance of his lot is stoic as he desperately clings on to the shards of his self-respect.
Kaurismäki clearly empathises with this personification of weakness in society, as does the audience for most of the way, but the film is short on the substance and emotional involvement that marked its predecessors.
The bright new hope at Cannes this year was the youngest director in competition, Richard Kelly, who, at 31, follows his cult breakout hit Donnie Darko with the extravagant multi-media show that is Southland Tales. Following a prologue showing a nuclear attack on Texas in 2005, the movie jumps forward to 2008 and the build-up to the end of the world as we know it. This momentous event doesn't prompt the slightest shrug of concern throughout an incoherent movie tiresomely over-extended to two hours and 40 minutes, and laden with as much expository voice-over as Dogville. The dialogue is irritatingly silly waffle and the narrative is naive and inane.
Ham rarely has been sliced quite so thickly as in the oversized performances, although it's hard to blame the actors (The Rock, Sarah Michelle Gellar and Seann William Scott have the leading roles) in a wildly self-indulgent exercise that suggests we are watching a spoiled child playing with many exceptionally expensive toys.
Michael Dwyer's Cannes Diary is in Weekend tomorrow. He concludes his reports from this year's festival in Arts next Wednesday
