Thirty years ago, when les evenements of May '68 spilled over from the streets of Paris to the Cannes Film Festival, there was anarchy in the Palais. While Carlos Saura's Peppermint Frappe was screening, Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard led the charge to the stage and literally pulled down the curtain on the festival.
That aborted festival spawned a radical offshoot a year later with the introduction of La Quinzaine des Realisateurs, which ever since has operated as an alternative, parallel programme entirely independent of, and regularly at loggerheads with, the main festival.
Introducing the 30th Quinzaine this year, its long-time programmer, Pierre-Henri Deleau, promised a selection that is "very contemporary, often insolent and sometimes disturbing", and that tone was established firmly by films from America and Australia, in particular. The US movie, Happiness, more than affirms the promise shown by its young director, Todd Solondz, with the rather over-praised Welcome to the Dollhouse.
The deeply ironically titled Happiness is set among an extended family in Solondz's native New Jersey. The parents of this dysfunctional dynasty, played by Ben Gazzara and Louise Lasser, are on the verge of breaking up after 40 years of marriage. One of their daughters (Jane Adams) is a lonely and naive idealist, unlucky in love and work.
Another daughter is a successful author (Lara Flynn Boyle) who turns the tables on a sexually frustrated neighbour (Philip Seymour Hoffman) by returning his smutty phone calls. The third daughter (Cynthia Stevenson), projects an archetypal all-American homemaker image which disguises the fact that her marriage is sexless; later her psychiatrist husband (Dylan Baker) is revealed as an unrepentant paedophile who preys on his son's school friends.
In a multi-charactered scenario as skillfully structured and executed as Short Cuts, the inter-connected protagonists also include a promiscuous and physically abusive Russian taxi driver (Jared Harris), a middle-aged divorcee (Elizabeth Ashley) determined to attract the Gazzara character, and a despairing, overweight woman (Camryn Manheim) who exacts lethal revenge on a man who rapes her.
Just as Truffaut and Godard tore the Cannes curtain down in 1968, writer-director Solondz strips bare the veneer of respectability, acceptability and cosiness with which these characters mask their secret lives. Made all the more unsettling by its spurts of very black humour, Happiness is a challenging and startling film that is certain to be controversial.
The provocative Australian movie in the Quinzaine, the aptly titled Head On, is directed by the Greek-Australian former solicitor, Ana Kokkinos, who made an auspicious debut with the short 1995 lesbian feature, Only the Brave. Set in Melbourne, Head On charts an eventful and often traumatic 24 hours in the life of Ari, a handsome and voraciously sexually active 19-year-old coming to terms with his homosexuality and his rigidly conservative Greek immigrant parents. "Proud to be Greek? I had nothing to do with it," he insists.
Head On is powered by an intense and uninhibited performance as Ari by Alex Dimitriades, a young veteran of Neighbours and Heartbreak High, who, like Guy Pearce in L.A. Confidential at Cannes last year, proves there is life after soaps. Like Happiness, Head On can be assured of attracting controversy, and not just for its sensually photographed sexual explicitness, but also for its depiction of a sadistic Melbourne police force, and its picture of the city as a racial melting pot simmering with tension.
The volatile gay artist, Francis Bacon, is the subject of an impressive, impressionistic portrait in Love Is the Devil, screening in the official Cannes side-bar, Un Certain Regard. The director is John Maybury, a disciple and one-time collaborator of the late Derek Jarman, whose influence is evident throughout the Bacon film. Also a prolific pop promo maker, Maybury won several awards for his Nothing Compares to You video with Sinead O'Connor.
Maybury's Bacon film is not a significantly illuminating picture of the artist's life and work - and it is inhibited in the latter respect by the Bacon estate's refusal of access to his paintings. Under those circumstances, Maybury opted - wisely, as it happens - to set the film in 1960s London and to focus on the tempestuous seven-year relationship between Bacon and George Dyer, the minor East End criminal whom he first encounters as a burglar and very soon becomes his lover in a sado-masochistic relationship.
A quintessential art film about an artist, Love Is the Devil is shot in a stylised, elliptical style which views several of the scenes in the bitchy, boozy environment of The Colony Club through the distorted image of a drinking glass. These disturbing drink-and-pills-soaked days chronicled by Maybury are vividly brought to life by Daniel Craig (even more quietly powerful than playing Geordie in Our Friends in the North) as George Dyer, and the sublime and complex portrayal of Francis Bacon by Derek Jacobi, who, in one of many memorable scenes, brushes his teeth with Vim and colours his hair with shoe polish.
Given its European premiere in Un Certain Regard at Cannes, The Apostle is an arresting picture of a Texas-born Pentecostal preacher with an all-consuming zeal that is sorely undermined by an all-toohuman frailty. He is played in a quite astonishing performance by Robert Duvall who wrote, produced, directed and even personally financed the film. Clearly, Duvall was robbed on Oscars night this year when his nominated performance was pipped by Jack Nicholson's rote role-playing in As Good As It Gets. I look forward to returning to The Apostle, which features a fine cast that includes Farrah Fawcett, Miranda Richardson and Billy Bob Thornton, when it opens in Ireland in mid-June.
IN the official competition at Cannes, much the most intriguing of the midpoint entries has been Claire Dolan, the second feature from the 34-year-old New Yorker, Lodge Kerrigan, after his edgy picture of a schizophrenic in Clean, Shaven, which went unreleased in Ireland.
Building on the strength of her performances in Naked, Career Girls and Breaking the Waves, Katrin Cartlidge's brilliantly judged performance as the eponymous Claire Dolan must make her a formidable contender for best actress at Cannes on Sunday night. A native of Howth, Co Dublin, the fictitious Claire Dolan works as a prostitute in New York to pay off a substantial, unspecified debt involving harsh interest payments to her unscrupulous pimp, Roland Cain.
Cain is played with chilling, menace-dripping presence - and in a striking stretch of range - by the Irish actor, Colm Meaney. An utterly callous operator, Cain claims to have known Claire since she was 12 - a reference never developed or explained - as he tells her that was born, and will die, a whore. It takes the death of her mother to force Claire to reassess her life, to finally quit prostitution and pay off her debts to Cain, and to pursue her maternal instincts.
Lodge Kerrigan's cool, austerely observational film formally echoes Claire's clinical approach to the so-called oldest profession. Precisely assembled in classically formed visual compositions in which primary colours are distinctly absent, this remains a sombre and thoughtful moral tale even if it doesn't answer all the questions it raises.
For a comedy to compete at Cannes, it must take on the gravitas of a serious comedy at least. The Chaplinesque Italian actor and director, Roberto Benigni, plays the first half of his new movie, La Vita E Bella (Life is Beautiful) entirely for laughs before switching to pathos and the humour of desperation in the second half.
The setting is 1939 in the Tuscan town of Arezzo, where the ingenuous and seriously accident-prone Guido Orefice (played by Benigni) arrives with a poet/upholsterer friend and the dream of opening a bookshop. Benigni's wife and regular co-star, Nicoletta Braschi, plays the schoolteacher for whom he falls when he crashes into her on his bike, landing on top of her on the street.
The slapstick comedy which permeates the movie's first half is expertly executed and played with terrific panache by Benigni. Backgrounding all this humour are ominous signs of the growth of anti-Semitism as the second World War breaks out, and the film's second half is set five years later when Guido, who is Jewish, is sent to a concentration camp with his young son.
The humour of the second half resides in Guido's elaborate attempts to save his son from the gas chambers and to shield him from the reality of their plight by pretending that it's all a game with a prize at the end. While the abrupt switch in tone and mood never quite gels, the movie remains a tour de force for Benigni's physical style of comedy and his keen sense of the absurd.
Two days ago I described Terry Gilliam's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as the nadir of the Cannes competition to date. That place has now been taken by Lars von Trier's tiresome and vacuous would-be comedy, The Idiots, which assembles a motley crew of Danish wasters who spend their time behaving idiotically, often at the expense of outsiders who - like the movie's audience - never quite get in on the supposed joke.
A huge disappointment from von Trier after Breaking the Waves, this shrill, inane and banal effort is shot in a rudimentary hand-held style with the boom regularly slipping into the frame. Von Trier attempts to spice up the concoction with liberal amounts of nudity, a few erect penises and even a brief scene of sexual penetration. Those attempts at shock value register as merely juvenile, and the film's attempts at humour caused me to laugh out loud just once over its two-hour duration.
Cannes reports continue tomorrow, Monday and next Friday.
