sacre bleu, etc.
5/29/2006 2:24:42 PM
So as it turns out, the big winner at this year's Festival de Cannes was: political engagement. Both the Palme d'Or and the Grand Prix went to war films, with Ken Loach's The Wind That Shakes the Barley taking top honors and Bruno Dumont settling again (see also 1999, when he brought Humanit´) for second prize. Flanders posits an imaginary war in an unspecified country (played by Morocco), while Barley chronicles strife of nearly a century ago, but both movies clearly have current events in Iraq very much in mind. Toss in the Best Actor prize, awarded to the entire principal cast of Days of Glory (about racism during WWII), and it seems clear that this jury wanted to make a statement about an artist's responsibility to grapple with his or her times.
As far as I can tell, nobody saw the Loach victory coming. Indeed, as the very first Competition film screened, it had largely been forgotten; despite awarding it my own personal Jury Prize, I completely dismissed it as a contender. For one thing, it didn't seem like a Wong Kar-wai kind of movie -- but, then, neither did Polanski's The Pianist seem like a David Lynch kind of movie. Even the most idiosyncratic artists sometimes respond to a simple yet powerful story well told, and Barley, in hindsight, was the most affecting and unpretentious film this year's Competition had to offer. Still, I'll be surprised if it winds up in the Voice poll's top ten. As I said, it just wasn't that kind of year.
Poor Pedro. Volver, the presumptive winner (note to self: the presumptive winner never ever wins), had to be satisfied with two lesser awards, Best Screenplay and Best Actress, with the latter again doled out to pretty much every actor named in the opening credits. I'm giving myself partial credit for the former, since I cited Almodóvar's film as a likely Screenplay winner (at the very least) immediately after seeing it. And, incredibly enough, I hit two other predictions right on the nose: the Best Director prize to Alejandro González Iñárritu for Babel, and the Special Jury Prize (third place) to Red Road.
Total prizes awarded to the three high-profile American films (Fast Food Nation, Marie Antoinette, Southland Tales): zero.
The Camera d'Or, for best first film, went to a Romanian film called 12:08 East of Bucharest, which I didn't see. (At the Toronto festival in September, roughly a third of the movies I see will be ones that I missed at Cannes.) In concert with last year's insane praise for The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, I believe this officially makes Romania "hot." In the Un Certain Regard section, which has become so useless that I all but ignored it this year, the winner was Wang Chao's Luxury Car, which everybody seems to think is terrific; it's actually glossy and forgettable, with none of the absurdist rigor that made Wang's The Orphan of Anyang such a pleasant surprise five years ago. Maybe people were just grateful that he didn't include a five-minute shot of someone eating a bowl of noodles.
Next year will be Cannes' 60th anniversary, and I think I'm finally going to do something that I've been long dreaming of but could never figure out how to make feasible. (It basically requires an assistant, which will hopefully be my friend Theo. But it also requires me to live in a bubble for two weeks, walking around with my eyes glued to the sidewalk.) My plan is to see the entire Competition slate completely tabula rasa -- to arrive at the festival without knowing any of the selected films, and just show up for each screening utterly unaware of what I'm about to see. Since many films these days reserve their credits for the very end, in many cases I should be able to watch the entire film without knowing who directed it...unless that director's unmistakable personal style gives the game away. If nothing else, the experience should provide me with another long rant about the uses and abuses of the auteur theory. And if you're at Cannes next year, and you hear a sudden, agonized scream when the lights go down, you'll know that I had no idea Todd Solondz had already made another movie.
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