Festival report: Cannes do spirit

With the 60th Cannes Film Festival at its halfway point, Dave Calhoun reports on the cheers and boos heard so far

'My Blueberry Nights'

Usually it’s the nasty stuff that institutions keep behind closed doors, but here in Cannes it’s the very lifeblood of the event that’s hidden away: the films. This leaves the real embarrassments to the streets, where you are confronted with countless billboards boasting artless new Hollywood productions and may even catch a glimpse of such high-minded stunts as Jerry Seinfeld high-wiring across the Croisette dressed as a bumble-bee to promote his new film (‘Bee Movie’). Meanwhile, inside the gargantuan Palais des Festivals, we lucky few thousand are able to escape the madness and indulge in new work from such heavyweights as Wong Kar Wai, Michael Moore, the Coen Brothers and David Fincher.

There are those in the industry who hate Cannes and, while I don’t count myself among their number, it’s easy to see where they’re coming from. ‘Pigs at the trough’ is how one filmmaker friend once described the event. But if the films are good, Cannes feels like the true home of world cinema, and it’s been a good year to date, give or take the odd dog, such as the festival opener, ‘My Blueberry Nights’ – Wong’s first English-language film, which offered yet another reason to ban Jude Law from acting for life – or Christophe Honoré’s modern-day Parisian musical, ‘Les Chansons d’Amour’, to which the only honest response was to chew your fist and hope it ended very soon. Not exactly a horror but certainly a disappointment was Russian filmmaker Andrei Zvyagintsev’s ‘The Banishment’. In 2003, Zvyagintsev won the Golden Lion at Venice for his accomplished, moving ‘The Return’. Sadly, this tale of a Russian family disintegrating while at a remote country house was blessed with remarkable camerawork but short on coherence and ideas. The ghost of Tarkovsky hangs over the film’s images, but the story is a lame duck.

An early favourite for prizes – even though there are titles yet to premiere from Gus Van Sant, Emir Kusturica, Bela Tarr and Catherine Breillat – must be ‘4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days’, the second feature from 39-year-old Romanian filmmaker Cristian Mungiu. Fans of ‘The Death of Mr Lazarescu’ should enjoy this stark realist work, which was photographed by the same cinematographer, offers a similar sense of urgency and truth, and also spans just a few hours of an unexceptional citizen’s life at a critical moment. It’s set in 1987 and student Gabita (Laura Vasiliu) is having to get an illegal abortion from a shady back-street character with the help of loyal friend Otilia (Anamaria Marinca). Mungiu adopts a simple style of one shot per scene, often with the camera locked on the same subject for a long time. The effect of the story is harrowing, the response to the filmmaking is pure pleasure.

Readers may be surprised to know that our own National Health Service is receiving some sterling free publicity on the Riviera from none other than Michael Moore, whose new film ‘Sicko’ played to great applause on Saturday morning. It’s an emotional and noisy dig at the US healthcare system, which, Moore claims, is structured to favour profit over patients. The NHS and French systems emerge as the heroes of the film and Moore spends half an hour or so traipsing about London in faux-naïf fashion, interviewing doctors, hospital staff and Tony Benn. It’s more subdued than ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’ – Moore himself is barely on camera, first appearing more than 45 minutes in – and more trustworthy in its handling of the facts, but there are similar stunts and laughs. You’re left begging for a bit more detail but no one else could make such a populist and potentially popular film on such a dry subject; for that and his sympathetic stance, you partly forgive Moore’s propagandist style.

So far the greatest attention has gone to Ethan and Joel Coen’s ‘No Country for Old Men’. It’s an adaptation of a Cormac McCarthy novel that’s mysterious, suspenseful and at points thrilling, though there’s a niggling sense that the Coens are fighting to make the source material truly successful as a film. We’re in dusty, stifling border country, and man’s man Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin) stumbles across a drugs deal turned bloody in the desert. He walks away with a case full of cash, only to find a psycho with a gun on his trail, superbly played by Javier Bardem. The film segues from a grandiose, sweeping opening that indulges the landscape of the Mexican border to a more intimate and bloody cat-and-mouse game. It then attempts a more transcendent close that isn’t entirely satisfying. No masterpiece, then, but a lot of fun.