Cannes 2005 assessed

Time Out considers the films that made Cannes 2005 such a treat.

May 23 2005

As a veteran of 18 Cannes Film Festivals, I'd venture that the 2005 edition was one of the strongest in years, at least in terms of the official competition; Thierry Frémaux has been experimenting and improving the main selection for a few years now, and this year came up trumps.

While it's true that there were no real shocks or surprises – though Tommy Lee Jones's 'The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada' proved an unexpectedly fine and assured first feature – there were certainly more very good films competing than usual.

Of course there were the usual duds, disappointments and downright dogs – the films by Wim Wenders, Lars von Trier and Marco Tullio Giordana were the most conspicuous – but when you get excellent work by the Dardenne brothers, Jim Jarmusch, Michael Haneke, David Cronenberg, Gus Van Sant, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Hong Sang-Soo, Dominik Moll and Tommy Lee Jones (all in competition) there's hardly cause for much complaint.

Perhaps what made the festival feel a little less than exciting, then, was simply the fact that these were great films for the most part being made by great filmmakers living up to expectations – and the jury, for once, acted sensibly and rewarded most of the right movies.

Wild cards were more or less non-existent, however, so there was very little 'buzz'. But who cares when the overall standard is high?

And to be fair there were a few gems to be found out there in the sidebars.

In the Directors' Fortnight, Lodge Kerrigan's 'Keane' was even better than his debut 'Clean, Shaven', while the Un Certain Regard strand offered decent work by Alain Cavalier ('Le Filmeur'), James Marsh ('The King'), Iranian actress-turned-director Niki Karimi ('One Night') and first-time Austrian director Benjamin Heisenberg ('Sleeper').

Even better were 'Lower City' from Brazil's Sérgio Machado (which won the Priz de la Jeunesse) and 'The Death of Mr Lazarescu' by Romania's Cristi Puiu, which rightly won the top Un Certain Regard prize.

So did any theme or preoccupations dominate this year? It was, in fact, quite remarkable how often films very different in tone or origins shared interests or plot devices.

Many movies dealt with the effects of the past on the present, very often with a repressed past irrupting suddenly and dangerously into seemingly settled and happy lives; Haneke, Jarmusch, Cronenberg, Egoyan and Wenders all dealt with this in one way or another.

And then there were the films about the problems of parenthood, usually featuring absent or negligent fathers – Jarmusch, Wenders, Cronenberg, the Dardennes, Masahiro Kobayashi, even the Giordana and the Carlos Reygadas film touched on intergenerational issues.

And then there were the films that featured group sex, promiscuity or infidelity, and the prospect of some sort of comeuppance – from Woody Allen, Arnaud and Jean-Marie Larrieu, Reygadas, Moll, Egoyan…

It may not be prudent or even possible to read anything into all this, save that it's possible to make a good or a bad film about any subject – Wenders and Jarmusch may have been treating similar material, but there's an enormous difference in their achievements.

In the end, then, it's not what you say but how you say it. Fortunately, this year's Cannes gave voice to a lot of very eloquent speakers.

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