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Cannes reminds festival goers that it’s all about art
Despite all the glitter and glamour, the topless women on the beaches, the creamy-rich desserts and the endlessly flowing wine, the Cannes Film Festival reasserted this year that it’s all about art.
“We are celebrating, here in Cannes, film as art,” said Nobel Prize-winning Turkish author Orhan Pamuk, one of nine people on the Cannes jury, as he explained the reasons for the awards on Sunday night.
And nearly every member expressed support for the Palme d’Or victor, “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” the harrowing tale of an illegal abortion in Romania during the oppressive, waning days of communism. The movie’s most shocking scene: an aborted fetus, which is four months, three weeks and two days old, lying on a hotel room floor.
Director Cristian Mungiu said he put the fetus on screen to make a point. “People should be aware of the consequences of their decisions,” he said.
The jury’s proclivity for gloomy fare continued with the Grand Prix, the runner-up prize. It went to “The Mourning Forest,” which focuses on a Japanese nursing assistant who tries to help an old widower who hasn’t gotten over his wife’s death.
The best actor prize went to Russia’s Konstantin Lavronenko in “The Banishment,” a look at death and remorse. And the best actress prize went to South Korea’s Jeon Do-yeon of “Secret Sunshine,” the wrenching tale of a woman who loses both her husband and her son in a short period of time.
In other words, this was not a festival for popcorn.
The notion that gloom-and-doom movies deserve the biggest awards flies in the face of many Americans, who tend to think that entertainment can be art. Hitchcock turned a Peeping Tom tale into high art and entertainment in “Rear Window.” Coppola did the same with “The Godfather.” Tarantino proved the point again with “Pulp Fiction.” And on and on.
In this context, it’s hard to understand how the jury could overlook the Coen brothers’ “No Country for Old Men.” It had some of festival’s most thrilling, chilling scenes. It had fine performances. It had moral heft, and it wasted no time in telling its story.
And then there was James Gray’s “We Own the Night.” It had excellent acting from Robert Duvall and Joaquin Phoenix. It featured a car-chase scene rivaling that in “The French Connection,” sans baby carriage in the middle of the road. And its direction was superb.
Then again, maybe violence was a turnoff for the this year’s jury.
(On a side note, Gray and Duvall engaged in one of liveliest festival arguments during a lunch over the weekend. Gray was talking about movies that he admired and mentioned “Bonnie and Clyde.” This rankled Duvall, who pronounced that everyone in the movie “over-acted,” except for Gene Hackman, and that it was not deserving of such high praise. Gray then described how Duvall could be a pain to work with and that he directed Phoenix to get up in Duvall’s face during some key scenes of confrontation. Duvall just huffed that he wasn’t intimidated, that he could beat Phoenix in a fight any day. “Not [co-star Mark] Wahlberg, but I could take Phoenix,” he said.)
Some of the most entertaining movies weren’t even in the main competition and weren’t eligible for prizes. They included Michael Moore’s health-care documentary “Sicko.” Variety, the movie industry bible, proclaimed in its top headline the morning after the world premiere: “Sicko Is Socko.”
And then there were ineligible movies with all sorts of star power, including Angelina Jolie in “A Mighty Heart,” George Clooney and Brad Pitt in “Ocean’s 13,” Leonardo DiCaprio in the environmental documentary “The 11th Hour,” and Bono in the spectacular concert flick “U2 3D.”
To be fair, the world isn’t full of smiley, happy, pretty people, and there’s plenty of room for art films to deal with those who have had to deal with tragedy, poverty and oppression.
That’s one of the big reasons to come to Cannes, the biggest, most international annual gathering of movie lovers and makers.
It’s sometimes easy for Americans to complain that the top Cannes winners end up being seen by few Americans, and that the Palme d’Or means little. This attitude is typically summed up with the smug phrase, “no box-office potential.” While that may be true, that’s not what Cannes is really about.
It’s about seeing different cultural expressions on screen — and listening. In that respect, 60-year-old Cannes is still a success and is prepared to survive for 60 more.
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By m.a.
May 30, 2007 12:47 PM | Link to this
Screened at Cannes 2007 was the short film KILLING SNAKES based on the feature script about a triangle of revengeful drug dealing border polo players - first of the KILLING SNAKES AND SAPO DE ORO LLC projects (Sapo de Oro produced the Del Castillo concept videos PERODNAME and MARIA). The director is Carl Thiel (GRINDHOUSE, SPY KIDS, ONCE UPON A TIME IN MEXICO)