From the moment Lars von Trier turned up on the red carpet at the Festival Palais half an hour before the closing ceremony last Sunday evening, there was no doubt as to who had won the Palme d'Or at the 53rd Cannes Film Festival. We knew Von Trier was not interested in winning minor awards such as the Prix du Jury, given his petulant response when Europa won him that award in 1991.
Ever since his first feature, The Element of Crime, competed at Cannes, von Trier had his sights set on the Palme d'Or, and after 16 years and on his sixth entry in competition, he was about to receive it for the trite and risible Dancer in the Dark. The surprise was that he was accompanied by Bjork, the Icelandic singer who stars in his film and who publicly shunned him at its world premiere in Cannes.
Taking a nod from last year's Cannes jury which gave its three acting prizes to unexperienced actors, the Cannes 2000 jury astonished the closing night audience by giving the best actress award to Bjork. Even the staunchest supporters of the film - and there were many, on the evidence of the 12-minute standing ovation it received at its gala screening five nights earlier - were amazed.
In an awards ceremony dominated by Asian and Scandinavian winners, the most conspicuous omission made by the jury chaired by Luc Besson was of Besson's own national cinema. At least two of the four French films in competition this year were expected to take a prize on Sunday night - Les Destinees Sentimentales, directed by Olivier Assayas, and Harry, He's Here to Help by Dominik Moll - and the exclusion of such accomplished work by rising French talent was perceived as a slight inflicted by one of French cinema's most high-profile directors.
The four US entries did not fare much better, taking just one award - best screenplay award for Neil LaBute's clever and very funny Nurse Betty - and this ensures that the fraught relationship between Cannes and American cinema will get even worse before it ever gets better.
Shown on the penultimate night of the festival and undeservedly passed over in the awards, The Yards is a taut, classically structured, social realist crime drama of simmering power directed with firm assurance by James Gray and building on the promise of his first film, Little Odessa.
Adhering closely to its genre conventions, The Yards deals with two young New Yorkers who have been friends since schooldays and are driven apart when one gets deeper into crime. They are played with conviction by Mark Wahlberg and Joaquin Phoenix in an exemplary cast which features Charlize Theron as the woman caught between them, along with three veteran actors giving their strongest performances in years - James Caan, Faye Dunaway and Ellen Burstyn.
On the same night Wong Karwai, the inventive Hong Kong film-maker named best director at Cannes in 1997 for Happy Together, was back in competition with In the Mood For Love, which took the best actor award for Tony Leung and the prize for best technical achievement, which was accepted by Wong's regular lighting cameraman, Christopher Doyle.
Arriving in Cannes wet from the labs and without a final sound mix in place, Wong's new film is a stylish and involving picture set in Hong Kong in 1962 with Leung as a a newspaper editor who moves into rented accommodation next door to a secretary played by Maggie Cheung. Gradually they are drawn to each other as they face up to the reality that their respective spouses are cheating on them.
In sharp contrast to the hyperactive visual style of Happy Together, In the Mood For Love is formed as a series of rich, graceful compositions and establishes a mellow mood enhanced by its romantic period song score and by the subtle, intriguing central performances of Leung and Cheung.
Sweden, which did not have a film in competition at Cannes since Joe Hill in 1971, took this year's Prix du Jury for Songs From the Second Floor, the first feature in 25 years from the prolific commercials director, Roy Andersson. This odd, rambling and eventually patience-stretching film features a non-professional cast as distraught characters in a city with chronic traffic gridlock. Its theme of the stress and pressures of modern living is treated heavy-handedly and only occasionally enlivened by surreal moments such as when an unwitting volunteer in a stage show finds himself being sawn in half by an inept magician.
The Prix du Jury was shared with The Blackboards, on which I reported last week, and which consolidates the growing reputation of the film's Iranian director, Samira Makhmalbaf - who, at 20, was the youngest film-maker ever to compete with a feature at Cannes. Iranian cinema was given further acknowledgement on Sunday night when the Camera d'Or for best first feature was shared by Bahman Ghobadi for A Time For Drunken Horses and Hassan Yekpatanah for Djomeh, both from Iran. Shown out of competition in the official selection at Cannes, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, directed by the ever-versatile Taiwanese film-maker, Ang Lee, provided the festival with many of its most exhilarating moments. Following three formidable English-language literary adaptations - Sense and Sensibility, The Ice Storm and Ride With the Devil - the uncategorisable Lee returns to Asian cinema to revitalise the action movie with terrific panache in his new film.
Lee describes it as "a kind of a dream of China" inspired by the martial arts movies he watched in his youth. It is set in the early 19th century, spoken in Mandarin and shot on spectacular sets and exotic locations as it follows the exploits of the apparently demure but rebellious young aristocrat, Jen (Zhang Ziyi), who has ambitions to be a fighter and to escape the marriage arranged for her. Chow Yun-fat authoritatively plays the martial arts warrior whose legendary sword she steals, with Michelle Yeoh as his equally athetic long-time friend, and Chang Chen as the fiery, young bandit who falls in love with Jen.
The two women acquit themselves at least as adeptly as the men when it comes to combat in the dazzling action sequences brilliantly choreographed by Yuen Wo Ping, who staged the fight scenes in The Matrix. Sparks fly as steel flashes in the movie's energetic swordplay, and the special effects work is quite extraordinary in the gravity-defying leaps and ascents made by the characters - at one point two of them are perched precariously high in the air on the branches of trees for a balletic aerial battle. At the heart of this charismatically played high-energy extravaganza is a tender, passionate love story.
Altogether more modest in its ambitions, Karyn Kusama's US indie, Girlfight, winner of two major prizes at Sundance in January, deals with a headstrong young Hispanic woman who takes up boxing at the Brooklyn Boys' Club, despite the initial reluctance of the trainer who takes her on and the objections of her surly, widowed father. Although it pushes credibility in its concluding stages, Kusama's film is commendably multi-layered and fresh in its outlook, and its star, newcomer Michelle Rodriguez, displays an impressive screen presence.
An 11-year-old English schoolboy incurs the wrath of his widowed father, a striking miner, when he switches from boxing to ballet lessons in Dancer, the moving and lovingly crafted first feature film from the renowned London and Broadway theatre director, Stephen Daldry. Set in a Durham mining village during the strike in 1983, and sympathetically scripted by Lee Hall, Daldry's film features glowing performances from the remarkable Jamie Bell as the boy, Gary Lewis as his father and Julie Walters as the ballet teacher, and as Daldry shamelessly taps into honest emotions, the audience responded audibly by choking and sobbing.
After Brassed Off and Little Voice, the similarly engaging Purely Belter is Mark Herman's third bittersweet picture of north of England lives, this time dealing with the often comic attempts of two wily close friends (Chris Beattie and Greg McLane) to raise the cost of season tickets to Newcastle United FC. The team's star player Alan Shearer appears briefly as himself - and is the subject of some good-natured humour - in Herman's hard-edged comedy, which succeeds in pulling off a feel-good ending without ever compromising its integrity.
Girlfight, Dancer and Purely Belter were all shown in the Directors' Fortnight sidebar at Cannes. Back in the official selection, the closing film last Sunday night, screening out of competition, was Stardom, which follows the progress and problems of a young Canadian (Jessica Pare) propelled to super-stardom as a model. Shaped as a shallow and redundant reflection on the nature of fame and our media age, this irritating trifle registered a deep disappointment from director Denys Arcand, whose Jesus of Montreal proved one of the most thrilling discoveries at Cannes back in the 1980s.
