Cannes diary part two

Geoff Andrew reviews 'Summer Palace', 'Paris Je T'Aime' and passes judgement on 'The Da Vinci Code'.

May 18 2006

The first couple of days have seldom found Cannes on peak form, and the 2006 Festival is no exception to the general rule. My colleague Dave Calhoun has already offered a justifiably unenthusiastic assessment of Ron Howard’s 'The Da Vinci Code' – the best that can be said for such inane and meretricious tosh, as far as I’m concerned, is that it didn’t encourage me to go out and buy the book – and the next movie screened in the main selection also proved to be something of a long haul.

Not that 'Summer Palace', from China’s Lou Ye, was anything like as nonsensical or overblown as the American film; it’s simply that Lou’s over-extended blend of troubled romance and existential meditation on the almost inevitable loss of erotic and political idealism comes over as a severe disappointment from the writer-director best known in the UK for the very fine 'Suzhou River'.

The film centres on a young woman from a provincial town on the North Korean border who in the late ’80s goes to study in Beijing University where she meets and falls for a man far closer to her ideal than the boy she was seeing back home.

Suspicion and jealousy – quite possibly misplaced – turn their initially idyllic affair into a near-masochistic cycle of love and hate, attraction and punishment, and being caught up in Tiananmen Square riots serves to drive another nail into their relationship’s coffin, so that the man goes off to study in Berlin – where the Wall conveniently falls – and the woman drifts through a desultory series of affairs.

The problem with the film is primarily one of narrative clumsiness – long periods of time are covered by montage sequences, prompting one to wonder why those years have been deemed less interesting that the ones covered properly. But there’s also the fact that the historical backdrop seems almost an afterthought: we see protests, but never once hear any character discuss anything remotely political. It’s one thing to have a heroine uninterested in politics, another thing entirely for the filmmaker to treat the wider scheme of things merely as a narrative convenience.

'Summer Palace' seemed to take an age to end (and when it did this writer was left comparing it unfavourably to 'The Umbrellas of Cherbourg', of all things!). The same could probably not be said of 'Paris Je T’Aime', a predictably uneven compilation film with a bizarre but surprisingly strong selection of directors offering variations on the theme of it being the 'City of Love' in stories set in different arrondissements.

There are a few stinkers (Richard LaGravanese, Sylvain Chomet, Isabel Coixet, Vincenzo Natali); a number of delights one would expect from dependable directors (the Coens, Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas, Alfonso Cuaron); and a couple of gems.

Oliver Schmitz comes up trumps with an expertly crafted account of an African’s last days in Paris, while the surprise delight was co-directed by Gérard Depardieu and Frédérick Auburtin, whose tale of the brief encounter of a long separated couple about to finalise their divorce benefits from fabulous performances from Gena Rowlands and Ben Gazzara and from a deft script that somehow manages to combine affectionate warmth with acerbic bitchiness.

Along with Alexander Payne’s very funny turn about the French-language diary kept by a Denver woman on her first trip abroad, this was the most genuinely touching exploration of Paris’s reputation as an especially romantic city.

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