Cannes: Day One

With news of Dominik Moll's opening night film 'Lemming' and the dire state of the British film industry.

May 12 2005

The 58th Cannes Film Festival got off to an unusually low-key start with 'Lemming', the third feature by French director Dominik Moll, who five years ago gave us the impressive 'Harry, He's Here to Help'.

The new film may boast a pretty high-profile French art-movie cast – Charlotte Gainsbourg, Charlotte Rampling and André Dussollier – but it's hardly a rival in the glamour stakes to recent Official Competition openers like 'Bad Education', 'Moulin Rouge', 'The Fifth Element' or even Woody Allen's 'Hollywood Ending', so terrible it never got a British release. (Allen's latest, London-shot 'Match Point' plays tomorrow, so watch this space!)

That said, Moll's film could hardly have been worse than a great many Cannes openers (besides the Allen, one reluctantly recalls the 'Fanfan la Tullipe' remake, and some elephantine monstrosity by Nikita Mikhalkov starring Richard Harris and Julia Ormond).

Indeed, it proved a very diverting way to kick off proceedings, shifting, like his earlier film, from droll comedy to very suspenseful drama as it charts the changes that befall a seemingly perfect marriage (Gainsbourg and Laurent Lucas) after they invite his boss and his wife (Dussollier and Rampling) to dinner.

It's part black comedy, part psychological thriller, and the most obvious reference points are clearly Buñuel and Hitchcock. More useful still as a comparison, however, would probably be the paintings of René Magritte; the use of sombre blues and greys, the brooding mountainscapes, and the perhaps metaphorical irruption of the titular rodent into a seemingly untroubled domestic environment all lend the movie the unsettling quality of a waking dream – an impression beautifully reinforced by Moll's expert use of sound and music.

Another early title was 'Sangre' ('Blood'), playing in the Un Certain Regard section, which had opened with Kim Ki-Duk's 'The Bow'.

Amat Escalante's film trails in the wake of both Fernando Eimbcke's 'Duck Season', which gave Mexico a hit in the Critics' Week at last year's Cannes, and of 'Amores Perros', which won the Critics' Week prize a few years earlier.

'Sangre' – which in terms of this year's Cannes status is somewhat overshadowed by 'Battle in Heaven' by Carlos Reygadas, screening in the main competition – is like, Eimbcke's film, a modest affair.

In most other respects, however, its slow account of – again – a relationship on the rocks (here, as in Moll, partly due to jealousy and suspicion) has rather more in common with Reygadas' 'Japon', unsurprising perhaps in that Reygadas is producer and even makes a cameo appearance.

It's one of those movies where most of what happens seems pretty inconsequential and protracted – the latter of course suggesting that it's not at all inconsequential but deeply significant.

Think not only 'Japon' but also Bruno Dumont's 'L'Humanité'; the non-professional actors are as hit-and-miss as in that likewise intriguing but ultimately unsatisfying movie.

Gossip-wise, the festival is certainly a slow-starter; there haven't even been any big parties lined up for the first few days to get the hacks excited.

Instead, discussion among British journos and filmmakers alike seems to be centred on a piece written by Michael Kuhn – clearly timed to coincide with the Riviera bash – arguing that Britain is currently undergoing its darkest period for years in terms of film production. The reason? The misguided policies of the UK Film Council, of course.

Virtually everyone in Cannes appears to agree with Kuhn's damning assessment of the Council, pointing especially to the massive wastage of funds on the initiative known as Skillset, which is basically being given tens of millions of pounds to train people up to work in an industry that doesn't actually exist – an industry that might just exist if more funds were given to production and distribution, instead of training.

Such measures, along with the impoverished cultural and imaginative decisions that have marked the reign of 'New Cinema' fund boss Paul Trijbits, have resulted in what many see as a catastrophic situation where the only movies that can be made in Britain are either ludicrously underfunded or, given our modest standing in the film world, absurdly over-budgeted.

What no one seems to have mentioned so far, however, is that there is a certain irony to Kuhn's argument, since the Chair of the Film Council, Stuart Till – whose day job entails working, as many have noted, for the American company Universal – was formerly Kuhn's right-hand man at Polygram.

For the rest of our Cannes stories, click here