Watershed Year for the 61st Cannes Festival

Any way you look at it, 2008 was a watershed year at the Cannes film festival.

Looking ahead, this was Thierry Frémaux's first year as délégée general, the first time he was listed in the catalogue as the man who put his own signature on the selection. Last year, he was down simply as director artistique, to wit: the festival's artistic director under the friendly aegis of président Gilles Jacob.

Looking back, Gilles Jacob is currently penning his collection of memories as the festival icon over the past 30 years. Knowing Jacob's unrestrained love for the Festival de Cannes, a spring event he has personally molded into an institution that stands head and shoulders over all other "A-category" festivals, his memoirs will surely offer insights into how he was able to balance the ideals of auteur cinema with the public's demand for starlets on the grand staircase and mediocre box-office entertainment fare.

This said, Thierry Frémaux found himself uncomfortably on the firing line at the 61st Festival de Cannes.

Why?

Because last year's 60th anniversary festival was rated by critics and professionals alike as a banner year in Cannes history. One that would be hard to beat by any stretch of the imagination. A milestone in Cannes history, if you will.

True, a festival is only as good as the production year itself. But in world cinema, there are other ways to smooth over the gaps in a lean season - like unveiling previously undiscovered vistas of cinema art that surface readily but need an astute scout to define talent and potential. In this regard, Cannes has the best crew of scouts on record.

So if nothing of interest is found in any given year in traditional filmlands, all Thierry Frémaux has to do is search other continents for new talent and thematic material. Thus, in the late 1990s, tired European cinema gave way to vibrant Asian cinema. And this year, unless my hunch is far off the mark, Asian cinema is being nudged aside by Latin American film waves.

How did Thierry Frémaux's virgin year as festival chief fare?

Several contrasting opinions have been offered in the press and media.

Like: Entries by auteur directors barely scored on the critics' lists in trade publications.

Or: Films about the mafia and prison life dominated.

Further: The documentary film has found a permanent niche in the competition, including a first-time animated documentary.

In general, Cannes 61 presented itself as a quite depressing mirror reflection of our present-day chaotic world.

The tone was set with the opening night film: Brazilian director Fernando Meireilles's Blindness (Brazil/USA/Canada/Japan), a weary, claustrophobic, futuristic tale set in a Guantánamo-like prison for an urban population afflicted by a plague that appears to be contagious. The film is based on Portuguese Nobel Prize-winning author José Saramago's bestselling allegorical Essay on Blindness, one of those high-water marks in literature that proved too much for a movie straightjacket by an aspiring auteur reaching for the moon.

It was followed on the next day by Pablo Trapero's impressive but rather heavy-handed Leonera (Lion's Den) (Argentina/Brazil/South Korea), a murder caper that finds an innocent pregnant woman sentenced to prison for apparently killing her lover. The compelling element in this rather familiar account is that actress Martina Gusman, the film's co-producer, was in fact pregnant, thus adding to the realism of a story that ends some years later with a contrived escape across the border with her infant son.

Two more Latin American entries by name directors drew mixed reactions from critics.

Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas's Linha de passé (Passing Line - a soccer expression) (Brazil), a four-son family drama set in the teeming slums of Sao Paulo, reminded this reviewer of Visconti's masterful Rocco and His Brothers (Italy, 1960). A wandering episodic drama directed with an uncontrolled hand, it won a Best Actress Award for Sandra Corveloni, the long-suffering mother whose brood's penchant for trouble-making stems partially from being offspring by different fathers.

Also, Lucrecia Martel's La mujer sin cabeza (The Woman Without a Head) (Argentina/Spain/France/Italy), came across as a rambling go-nowhere portrait of a middle-aged woman dentist who loses control of her sensory powers. We are made to believe that the memory loss - or better: fantasy delusion - was due to a head concussion suffered when her car hit an unseen object or person on the highway. Yet after her recovery, we still don't have a clue as to what is really going on in this obviously deranged woman's head.

If nothing else, however, these disappointing Latino entries whetted the appetite for Steven Soderbergh's Che (USA/Spain/France) (click for MPM's review), a two-part, long-awaited, four-and-a-half-hour epic on the life and times of Che Guevara, starring Benicio Del Toro in role of the legendary revolutionary. Unfortunately, the film as it now stands has to be re-edited to guarantee the success with audience and aficionados that the producers intended.

One would think that this "hottest ticket in Cannes" would offer something new on the asthmatic revolutionary who had helped Castro defeat Batista in Cuba (Part One, 1956-59) and then lost his way in the jungles of Bolivia (Part Two, 1966-67). But we scarcely perceive the real man behind Del Toro's acting façade.

Even more puzzling for history buffs in the Cannes audience was why the re-enacted visit of Che to the United Nations in 1964 had been included as a tie-together segment between the historical halves. Probably, contended an Argentinean colleague, it was there to underscore his intellectual acumen, particularly when Cold War journalists tried to bait him with loaded questions and "Commie" accusations.

Day after day, one auteur director after another bit the dust at Cannes.

For many in the press corps, Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Üç Maymun (Three Monkeys) (Turkey/France) was the frontrunner you had to beat for Palme d'Or laurels. Programmed early in the festival, his Three Monkeys prompted dozens of flattering interviews with the shy director (who seldom strays far from his home base in Istanbul) and his actress wife, Ebru Ceylan.

On the surface, Three Monkeys - read: the "monkey metaphor" of hear-no-evil, see-no-evil, speak-no-evil - is little more than a family kammerspiel about human failings. But below the surface, it also raises the philosophical question about how extravagant lies to cover up the truth can lead to tragic consequences. As strong as the direction is - Ceylan was awarded the Best Director at Cannes - what's lacking is his patented aching indictment of human failings that characterized his earlier films: Uzak (Distant) (2003), Grand Jury Prize at 2003 Cannes, and Iklimler (Climates), FIPRESCI Critics Prize at 2006 Cannes. Next time.

The same fate awaited Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's Le Silence de Lorna (Lorna's Silence) (Belgium/France/Italy/Germany) (click for MPM's review), an engaging film but lacking the persuasive power of the Belgian brothers' previous Palme d'Or winners: Rosetta (1999) and L'Enfant (The Child) (2005). For Lorna's Silence, they return to an environment they know only too well from childhood: Liège. Here, an illegal Albanian immigrant - played by talented Kosovo actress Arta Dobroshi, who learned French to get the part - falls into the hands of a slick taxi-driver with mafia contacts in order to obtain Belgian citizenship.

The marriage scheme begins with a junkie who is expected to die of an overdose so that Lorna can then marry a Russian mafia boss to enable the latter to obtain Belgian citizenship. But when her own unexpected pregnancy tips the apple-cart and Lorna finds herself without a passport, the game becomes dangerous, and the film ends in a no man's land. Lorna's Silence earned the Best Screenplay Award for Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, who also directed the film.

Arnaud Desplechin may be one of the darlings of the new nouvelle vague (this is the fourth time he has competed for Palme d'Or laurels), but his Un Conte de Noel (A Christmas Tale) (France) has all the earmarks of a sentimental vehicle for the home audience. The giveaway is the footnote "Roubaix" found in the preproduction title - like the Dardenne brothers' Liège, this is where the director was born and raised.

The setting of this two-and-a-half-hour, talking-head family drama is an estate in Roubaix, where a painful reunion takes place at Christmas that sparks animosity stemming from a family tragedy that had happened years before. Catherine Deneuve, as the ailing matriarch who needs a bone marrow transplant from one of her difficult offspring, was awarded the festival's Special 60th Anniversary Prize.

Kornel Mundruczo's Delta was also favored for Cannes laurels, if only because his debut feature, Szep Napok (Pleasant Days) (2002), a grim look at small town mores, had won him a six-month stay for young filmmakers at the Cannes Residence Program in Paris. Moving up the Cannes ladder, his Johanna, presented in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2005 Cannes, drew high critical praise as a rare example of a film-oratorio.

Delta, flooded with striking visual imagery of lush fauna in the Danube delta, was a standout at Cannes. The crippling element was the dilemma Mundruczo was forced to face when his leading actor (Lajos Bertok, to whom the film is dedicated) died in the middle of shooting - to be eventually replaced by a violin virtuoso, Felix Lajko, who also scored the film. Lajko, unfortunately, brings little up front to enhance this tragic tale of incest and retribution. Delta was awarded the FIPRESCI Critics Prize.

Atom Egoyan's Adoration (Canada/France) was a major disappointment at Cannes. Considering that this is the Armenian-Canadian director's tenth appearance at Cannes (including a stint as a member of the international jury), one would expect more maturity in his choice of thematic material. Instead, Adoration, a discourse on the chat phenomenon of the Internet age, is drowned at the outset in film and video technology at its most fundamental high-school level.

Wim Wenders's The Palermo Shooting (Germany/UK) is not much better. Indeed, its negative reception at Cannes might signal the demise of auteur cinema as a reliable festival ethic in the years to come. What made matters particularly embarrassing - especially for die-hard WW fans - was his specious dedication of the film "to the memory of Ingmar and Antonioni" - as though Bergman and Antonioni might deign to shower their blessings upon the German director's fiasco.

The problem with Wenders's lackadaisical roadmovie, about a chic-fashion photographer (German rock star Campino) just a few steps ahead of "Death" (Dennis Hopper) on a trip from Germany to Sicily, is Wim's bullheaded, all-out commitment to creative improvisation. This time around - on his ninth visit to the Cannes competition that included a Palme d'Or for Paris, Texas (1984) - he has completely sabotaged his ingrained penchant for "free-wheeling film art."

"Most stories are quite self-centered and have a tendency to push everything else aside," he once said in an interview in which he criticized narrative cinema. Now Wim is the victim of his own Wenders hubris.

As the Cannes carousel rolled on, a pair of Italian docu-dramas on how the mafia has infiltrated the social fabric, to say nothing of having reached the higher echelons of political circles, won increasing accolades of praise - like the proverbial snowball rolling down a hill.

For some critics, this apparent new wave of Italian mafia films heralded a revival of neorealist cinema.

Programmed toward the middle of the festival, the most talked-about film at Cannes was suddenly Matteo Garrone's Gomorrah (Gomorra) (Italy), awarded the runner-up Grand Jury Prize. Based on the non-fiction bestseller with the same title by Roberto Saviano, it deals with the inner workings of the Camorra mafia in Naples.

According to one unofficial report, the worldwide earnings of the Camorra is estimated at well over $200 billion annually, with the income reaching from drugs and extortion to waste disposal and the haute culture fashion market. That alone makes Gamorra interesting, while the intertwining stories feature some bravura acting performances. The story of how a young delivery boy, longing to join the mafia, sets up a woman for execution at the hands of rival toughs is chilling for its authenticity.

By the same token, Paolo Sorrentino's Il Divo (Italy/France), a portrait of former Christian Democrat Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti (brilliantly interpreted by Toni Servillo) is anything but flattering. Rather, Servillo's performance is peppered with such delightful moments of outrageous wit and humor that Andreotti comes across as a real-life, modern-day, double-dealing Machiavellian prince - one who will stop at nothing to retain power, cost what it may. Il Divo was awarded the Special Jury Prize.

Unfortunately overlooked for a festival award, Ari Folman's animation-documentary Waltz with Bashir (Israel/France/Germany/USA) is the one film in the Cannes competition that you cannot easily forget - and this for any number of reasons. The traumatic journey of the filmmaker himself into his own past as a young soldier during the Lebanon Crisis, the story is told in hand-drawn comic-book fashion to capture the viewer's attention and to spotlight confessional reports by eyewitnesses on what really happened in June of 1982, when Israeli forces invaded Lebanon.

As though to underscore Israeli complicity in the massacre of hundreds (estimated as high as 3,000) Palestinian civilians by Lebanese Phalangists in the Beirut refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, soldier-filmmaker Ari Folman shifts away from animation in the final scene to jarring actual documentary footage of the few survivors leaving the camps.

As a statement of conscience and shame, guilt and expiation, Waltz with Bashir stands high on the list of the best antiwar films made. Was the international jury under Sean Penn sleeping?! Ari Folman certainly deserved some kind of citation.

Programmed in the final slot on the last day of competition, Laurent Cantet's Entre les murs (The Class) (France) (click for MPM's review) was unanimously awarded the Palme d'Or. Surprising, too, was the fact it was Cantet's first visit to the Cannes competition.

Based on an autobiographical bestseller by François Bégaudeau, who plays the lead in this finely sketched story about 13- and 14-year-old students at a multi-cultural school in a tough Parisian neighborhood, The Class covers one year in a teacher's ordeal to instill a love for learning - along with a tolerance for discipline that makes learning possible in the first place. Call this fiction-documentary or docu-fiction, both are quite appropriate in this case - although, seen from a broader perspective, the film is entirely fictional from start to finish.

The attraction is how Cantet and Bégaudeau collaborated with screenwriter Robin Campillo to make the film in the first place. Throughout an entire school year in preparation for shooting the film, they ran a workshop for volunteer students aged 13 to 16, allowing the kids to improvise their own roles as they went along. In the process, both the students and the three-man camera crew got to know each other, thus enabling a smooth working relationship when the final casting was made just days before the actual shooting began.

Films like The Class come along only once in a while. It will be interesting to see how other would-be filmmakers fare when they try to imitate this lively, scintillating, cutting-edge classroom drama. -MPM