Cannes round-up

Dave Calhoun looks back over a fortnight of film at the French festival.

May 25 2007

At Cannes, a critic's life is squarely in the hands of the programming gods. It is they who drag you from your bed every morning for screenings at 8.30am and it is they who set your blood-pressure racing when you turn up an hour early and still fear the queue may be too long for the world's first screening of a new Coen Brothers movie or even the first film in years from a 'difficult' director like the Hungarian Béla Tarr. Bad films linger in Cannes folklore for a generation and the festival's collective memory is not quick to forget the experience of sitting through such duds as Richard Kelly's grand folly 'Southland Tales' last year or Vincent Gallo's 'Brown Bunny' back in 2002. Thankfully, the festival this year delivered such consistently strong and exciting films that its sixtieth anniversary can be tagged one of the very best in recent memory. The only regret is that no out-and-out, undoubted masterpiece emerged.

Before the red carpet had even been hauled out of storage, our newspapers were groaning at the lack of British films in the 22-strong competition. But there was no excuse for jingoism once the festival started: Hong Kong's Wong Kar-Wai was the first of several filmmakers to blow the idea of national cinema out of the water with 'My Blueberry Nights', his first film in English, which opened the festival. This American road movie was a poorly scripted disappointment that even left some viewers retrospectively wondering whether '2046' or 'In the Mood for Love' were ever really as special as they once seemed. The film has enough characteristic imagery – courtesy of cinematographer Darius Khondji – to please the director's hardcore fans, but somehow Norah Jones and Jude Law as two damaged souls who meet over late-night desserts and take a whole movie to come together doesn't have the slightest ring of truth to it. Law plays an ex-pat Mancunian in New York with the same special laziness that he brings to most projects.

Other directors were operating outside their comfort zones, too. American artist Julian Schnabel, director of 'Before Night Falls' and 'Basquiat', presented 'The Diving Bell and the Butterfly', a French-language adaptation of Jean-Dominique Bauby's harrowing memoir of the two years he spent suffering 'locked-in' syndrome before his death in 1997. Bauby (played by Mathieu Amalric, en route to the Oscars) was the editor of French Elle in 1995 when he had a major stroke that left him entirely paralysed apart from his left eye, with which he learned to communicate through a system of blinking letters of the alphabet to a speech therapist. Schnabel’s visually rich film indulges in a 'locked-in' first-person perspective of Bauby's tragedy; it's largely through his one working eye that we view his family and friends as they and he come to accept his condition. Schnabel avoids sentimentality to tackle Bauby's state head-on, working with cinematographer Janusz Kaminski to express Bauby's trauma through visual poetry, from icebergs crashing into the sea to repeated images of a sinking diving-bell. It's refreshing that this challenge has been pulled off in so cinematic a fashion.

The prize for oddest cultural displacement must be shared between Tilda Swinton for her dubbed role in Béla Tarr's 'The Man from London' and Mexican director Carlos Reygadas for his German-language, Mexico-set 'Stellet Licht'. In Tarr's austere and mesmeric working of the Georges Simenon novel, which offers characteristically long and minutely choreographed takes, a sombre mood and a striking monochrome palette, Swinton is dubbed in Hungarian, although dialogue is sparse throughout this trying crime tale that riffs mysteriously on a case of cash in a harbour town. Reygadas, meanwhile, has moved on from the more provocative elements of 'Japon' and 'Battle in Heaven' to let his main strength rise to the surface: his astonishing grasp of mise-en-scène. Every shot (most of them very long – a theme of this year's festival, also seen in Ulrich Seidl's 'Import/Export') is carefully constructed in this lengthy tale of love and adultery within a rural Mennonite community. The characters are of European descent and speak the little-known Plautdietsch, or Low German. The film owes a heavy debt to Dreyer's 'Ordet' – especially in its final scenes – but this is Reygadas' most mature film yet.

There were other pleasures. The Coen Brothers didn't present the masterpiece that some expected, but their Cormac McCarthy adaptation 'No Country for Old Men', about a border-country man's man (Josh Brolin) who stumbles across a stash of cash and finds himself being pursued by the most creepy of gun-wielding psychos (a superb Javier Bardem) was still evocative and entertaining. Ulrich Seidl's 'Import/Export' built on his earlier 'Dog Days' with a bleaker collage of experiences of immigration and emigration in Austria, again using many non-actors – including an entire hospital ward of elderly male patients. In 'Paranoid Park', Gus Van Sant applied the approach familiar from 'Last Days' and 'Elephant' to the smaller scale of a Blake Nelson novel about a young kid who accidentally kills someone; Chris Doyle's photography and the film's sound design most impress. Alexander Sokurov presented a quiet, thoughtful take on modern war in 'Alexandra', and top marks to the festival for programming Marjane Satrapi's adaptation of her own confessional, political and wry comic book, 'Persepolis'.

Last week, I wrote how impressed I was by Romanian director Cristian Mungiu's '4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days', which screened right at the start of the festival and tells of a backstreet abortion in late-1980s Romania with a striking naturalism and a compelling and economic attitude to storytelling. The performances by Laura Vasiliu as the woman seeking an abortion and Anamaria Marinca as her loyal friend are both terrific. It remains my favourite of the competition: it's a tense, clever and fresh picture from a director to watch.

Not one film felt entirely out of place in the competition line-up, which is a rare feat. But there were disappointments. Christophe Honoré's a modern-day musical 'Les Chansons d'Amour' had French critics wetting themselves with joy but everyone else chewing their fists with embarrassment. Quentin Tarantino's 'Death Proof', an extended version of his 'Grindhouse' contribution, is for fan-boys only, with its banal dialogue and overlong car chases. And Andrei Zvyagintsev's 'The Banishment' wasn't a patch on his debut, 'The Return', which won Venice's Golden Lion in 2003. At two-and-a-half hours, it masks a dreary, often incomprehensible plot with some breathtaking post-Tarkovsky camerawork and a stimulating distortion of time and place.

One of the real strengths of this year's festival was that so many filmmakers were working so purely and rigorously with the visual elements of cinema to push the film image to its limits, constructing shots and scenes to thrill and astonish. If there were a few more special ideas and sparks of narrative brilliance to match, this year's Cannes would have been a truly great event.

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