OVER the 50 years of the Cannes Film Festival the various juries have come up with some quite bizarre decisions, the blanket snubbing of Three Colours: Red three years ago being particularly mystifying. However, this year's jury surpassed their predecessors for the unlikeliness of their decisions. Perhaps imagining themselves to be making major with their verdicts, the 10 jurors, led by president Isabelle Adjani, foolishly opted for worthiness over achievement.
On reflection, it was probably no surprise that Curtis Hanson's complex, intelligent and dynamic thriller, L.A. Conftdential, went unrewarded here; it was the only Hollywood studio film in competition and juror Mike Leigh had expressed his contempt for Hollywood when the jury met the media on the opening day of the festival.
More surprising, then, was their decision to give nothing at all to Michael Winterbottom's often powerful Welcome To Sarajevo, or Michael Haneke's challenging and uncompromising Funny Games. Atom Egoyan's riveting The Sweet Hereafter had to be content with the runner-up award, the Grand Prix du Jury - in a year when the Palme d'Or was shared between two films and Ang Lee's thoughtful and illuminating The Ice Storm had to make do with what is regarded as one of the lesser awards, the best screenplay prize which went to its producer, James Schamus.
Instead the jury chose to present a Palme d'Or each to the well-made but unremarkable Japanese entry, Unagi (The Eel) and the simplistic and politically sensitive Iranian film, The Taste Of The Cherry. The jury's best director prize to Wong Kar-Wai for the gay Hong Kong movie, Happy Together, also had the whiff of a political statement about it, although in this case the award was merited. To top it all, the jury voted Sean Penn best actor for his grating performance in She's So Lovely.
The best film award to Unagi makes its director, Shohei Imamura, only the fourth film-maker in the 50 years of Cannes to win the Palme d'Or twice; the others are Francis Ford Coppola, Bille August and Emir Kusturica. Imamura won his first Palme in 1983 for the tortuous Ballad of Narayama, a film rarely seen after the festival, and a similar fate seems in store for Unagi.
There is a distinctly dated feel to Unagi, the story of a man (Koji Yakusho) who kills his adulterous wife and her lover, surrenders to the police and is jailed for eight years - with the eponymous pet eel as his sole friend. The film follows his attempts to readjust after his release and the awkward relationship he forms with a suicidal woman (Misa Shimizu) who resembles his wife. Despite earnest performances from the two leading actors, this is an erratic and all-too-conventional effort.
The Taste Of The Cherry is the latest film from festival favourite Abbas Kiarostami, who received a sustained standing ovation when he arrived in the Festival Palais for its official screening last Friday afternoon. The film has been banned in its native Iran, where the authorities refused to allow it to compete at Cannes, relenting only on the opening day of the festival. The ovation for Kiarostami - and his subsequent winning of the Palme d'Or acknowledged his achievement in making it to Cannes with his film more than what the film itself achieved.
This three-act movie involves the middle-aged Mr Badii (Homayon Ershadi) driving round and round Teheran in search of somebody to throw earth on his body after his planned suicide by sleeping pills. In the first act, he meets a young soldier from Kurdistan and asks him a series of banal questions as they drive around the city. When the young soldier runs away, Badii rounds up an Afghan seminarian for another meaningless exchange and more and more driving around.
In the third act he meets an older man, a Turkish taxidermist who tells Badii that he himself attempted suicide once. He recalls hanging his noose from a tree when he felt the soft flesh of a fruit; he ate the fruit and then another and then the sun came up and he re-discovered the meaning of life. The message of The Taste Of The Cherry is clearly intended as life-affirming and to encourage positive thinking, but it registers as merely facile and obvious in a film that exerts the fascination of watching paint dry.
The most pertinent political statement of the Cannes awards was the best director prize to the brash Hong Kong stylist, Wong Kar-Wai, for his gay road movie Happy Together. This year the Chinese authorities withdrew the new Zhang Yimou film from Cannes because the festival refused to cancel its sidebar screenings of the gay-themed East Palace, West Palace, directed by Zhang Yuan, whose passport has been confiscated in China. Had Wong Kar-Wai made Happy Together after the handover of Hong Kong to China next month, it, too, could have been withdrawn from Cannes or other festivals.
Happy Together, which takes its title from the exuberant old Turtles song played over the closing credits, features two handsome Hong Kong movie icons, Tony Leung (from Cyclo and Chunking Express) and Leslie Cheung (from Farewell My Concubine). They play gay lovers who are happy together when they arrive in Argentina from Hong Kong, but their relationship suffers when they take to the road.
To describe Happy Together as unpredictable is an understatement, as Wong's free-style film-making steers the narrative in any number of directions. The visual style is as flamboyant as ever with Wong working for the fifth time in six films with the gifted Australian lighting cameraman, Christopher Doyle - and it employs hand-held work, speeded-up film, gritty black-and-white and striking colour to achieve a sensual movie of a tempestuous relationship.
The runner-up prize to the Atom Egoyan for the Canadian entry, The Sweet Hereafter, disappointed many at Cannes who had expected it to win. Adapted by Egoyan himself from the novel by Russell Banks, the film effectively moves back and forwards in time as it captures the deeply traumatic impact of a school bus crash on the residents of a small town in British Columbia, killing 14 of their children.
IN A dignified and subtle performance, Ian Holm plays a lawyer who comes to the town and offers to represent the grief-stricken parents, while he himself has to deal with the pain caused by his own daughter's drug addiction. Egoyan eschews the obvious tear-jerking potential of the story, and the film is all the more potent for his cool, compassionate handling of the material. It is accompanied by a superb score from his regular composer, Mychael Danna.
The Cannes jury chose well in awarding best actress award to Kathy Burke for her fine performance as a physically and mentally abused spouse in Gary Oldman's Nil By Mouth, but the decision to give the best actor award to Sean Penn for She's So LoveIy is inexplicable. The movie is directed by Nick Cassavetes, and based on an old screenplay by his father, writer-director John, who died eight years ago.
Penn is absurdly mannered as an unstable personality, with Robin Wright Penn (as she is now credited) equally over-the-top as his uptight wife. I'd cut off my arms for you," he tells her in a declaration of love. "Love is so difficult," he protests later. "It's like horse-racing, it's like perfume, it's like fog." And he adds, "You can't see my obscurity unless you've got X-ray vision".
In this movie where the characters speak dialogue that it's impossible to believe anyone would ever speak, they get to behave even more irrationally and implausibly. Almost an hour into the movie, when it leaps forward 10 years in time, John Travolta joins the Penns for an embarrassing stab at Method acting, while the director's mother, Gena Rowlands, pops up in a cameo. It is not at all surprising that She's So Lovely was not filmed during the lifetime of John Cassavetes, and his son, Nick, has done his father's memory a disservice for digging up the screenplay and turning it into the wildly misconceived movie that it is.
Following the awards ceremony on Sunday night, the 50th Cannes Film Festival closed with the European premiere of the American thriller, Absolute Power, directed by and starring Clint Eastwood. It will be reviewed here when it goes on release in Ireland next Friday.
