Cannes Film Festival 2002 Report

Filmmaker Magazine
Summer 2002

Man Without A Past

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 

By Noah Cowan

Consensus was that this year’s Cannes festival turned out very well. And it’s hard to disagree—profoundly satisfying work from a litany of major names in the art ­film world will enrich screens for the months to come. Nevertheless, I cannot help feeling that the critical community, battered by the unrelenting mediocrity of contemporary cinema, may be overstating the case. 

While no important director checked in with a bad or embarrassing film—save the inexplicable decision to open the fes­tival with the unfunny Hollywood Ending by Woody Allen—no landmarks of cine­matic innovation emerged either. Very good films arrived from established film­makers returning to familiar narrative ter­ritories and engaging in familiar aesthetic strategies. But, instead of focusing on this impressive small group, the Festival’s crit­ical community forced a number of prob­lematic, politically pandering films into the “thumbs-up” category. In contrast, work that might have been subject to interesting debate, work that pushed at notions of film narrative and aesthetics, was brutally put down by the majority of attending press in aggressive post-screen­ing rhubarbs. This lock-step approach to art-cinema criticism cannot be a good thing—while it is necessary these days to identify basic artistic competence, there was far too much emphasis put on the haughty dismissal of challenging work. The jury picked up on this mood and awarded a series of compromise prizes that reflected the length of the standing ovations each film received at their evening screenings, rather than their cre­ative merit. 

That being said, the Competition, at its best, was awesome this year. Ken Loach’s return to working-class youth in Sweet Sixteen reminds us that the cycle of pover­ty, violence and abuse chronicled in his earlier films is still a potent force. Young actor Martin Compston sparkles in the lead role; the film won a prize for Best Screenplay. Also returning to familiar social strata are the Dardenne brothers, with their heartbreaking story of a tech­ school teacher who hires his son's killer as an apprentice carpenter. Their in-your-­face, roving camerawork teaches a lesson in creating visceral tension and suspense. The film won an acting prize for Olivier Gourmet, the glum yet impassioned teacher. 

Mike Leigh’s All or Nothing returns to Naked territory, using a stellar ensemble cast to explore the fallout from a failed marriage in a bleak housing estate. The film features at its close an extraordinary speech of humility and defeat delivered by the often mannered and professionally downbeat Timothy Spall. A summation in many ways of Leigh’s central character conceits, it dares the audience not to care about these sad people. 

Im Kwon Taek’s trademark pretty pic­tures and unceasing exploration of Korean historical detail find a happy match in Chihwaseon, the life of itinerant painter Oh-won. A biopic raised to impressive heights by its obsessive romance with the art of the brushstroke—think Rivette’s La Belle Noiseuse—it confirms director Im is in the top category of international film, a position reinforced by his shared award (with Paul Thomas Anderson) for Best Director. Abbas Kiarostami’s recent dab­blings in digital video get a fascinating and button-pushing workout in his small-scale Ten. A series of (ten) unequal segments tak­ing place in a car driven by a woman in Teheran, it tries to bring together the specifically Iranian forces of religious devo­tion, sin and, most interestingly, family conflict in its constrained setting. 

Aki Kaurismaki, after a spell of indiffer­ent work and sloth, returned with a bang. The Man Without a Past sees the icono­clastic Finn at his most romantic and humorous, investing a deadbeat, amnesi­ac hero with inviting charm. The film picked up the Grand Prize (second place). It also strangely received the Best Actress award, which went to Kati Outinen for her coy portrayal of his Salvation Army love interest. While she is undoubtedly charming in the role, her character is so objectified (on purpose) by Kaurismaki that it seems an odd choice for a jury dominated by divas like Sharon Stone and Michelle Yeoh. 

Minor triumphs of two different kinds, Alexander Payne’s About Schmidt and Marco Bellocchio’s The Smile of My Mother, sat well with audiences and critics even though they seemed to present such easy targets for criticism. 

Payne’s major studio entry explored such absolutely all-American concerns about old age, Midwestern agoraphobia and specifically American idioms of lan­guage and humor—just the stuff the French love to hate. The usually sneering Jack Nicholson plays a crusty widower try­ing to save his daughter from a bad mar­riage. But Payne ropes in Nicholson to an impressive degree and presents his argu­ment for intra-family compromise and human dignity in admirably low-key terms. The film has an honest wisdom to it, which makes its studio backing all the more surprising. 

Bellocchio had become something of an art-film world joke. The jaunty Catholicized communism of his great early period—Fists in the Pocket, China Is Near—was tumbling into anachronism even then. He has strug­gled to find a voice ever since. But this new film takes the central paradoxes of a deeply committed Catholic identity in an unbeliev­ing world in an interesting new direction. With a flourish of Kafkaesque paranoia, a priest informs a man that he is due to testi­fy at the Vatican the following day regarding his mother’s possible sainthood. But then the man encounters a strange plot by the fallen Italian aristocracy to restore itself to prominence. Duels, cardinals, miracles and such things follow. Bellochio plays the whole thing totally straight and the result is a satisfying, Aquinian intellectual exercise in faith and logic that poses new questions to the viewer even days later. While Catholic surrealism may not to be everyone’s taste, it certainly feels like something bizarrely fresh. 

So much for the films everyone truly liked. There were other films, though, that everybody claimed to like, whether they actually did or not. 

Roman Polanski’s so-called “comeback” film, The Pianist, was pegged by the French as the Palme d’Or winner before the Festival began. And, lo and behold, it won. A lumpy, cold historical trudge through familiar Holocaust pieties, it follows a Jewish Warsaw pianist from middle-class sophistication through ghetto life until he just misses getting on the inevitable train East. Afterwards he hides out as a fugitive, betrayed and hidden in turn by Poles and then a music-loving Nazi. It stars Adrien Brody, with a most uncompelling accent and an arch overuse of his moony eyes and their sad-sack lashes. Later on, things perk up with the charming Nazi, played by Thomas Kretschmann, but, by that time, we are longing for something a little less noble. The project, like other films admired for the wrong reasons, came to the Festival tightly wrapped in critical Teflon. After all, Polanski is a Holocaust survivor, so who are we to say that his approach is not valid? By denying its criti­cal worth are we denying the continuing historical power of the Holocaust? Allowing this dull, obvious Europudding such moral stature, as the jury did, dumbs down the moral strength of contemporary Jewish political discourse. Probably not a wise move these days. 

Not that Elia Suleiman would mind. His Divine Intervention, the first Palestinian film in Competition, dumbs down just about everything in its path, especially if Jews are involved. Suleiman is a clever filmmaker. He tightly intertwines an absurdist aesthet­ic, relying on flights of fancy and humor through repetition, with a David-like asser­tion of Palestinian rage. The first third of the film chronicles the amusing hijinks of a Palestinian community, including the filmmaker’s father; see, he seems to be saying, Palestinians are fun too. The second third finds the filmmaker, returning after his father takes ill, falling in love with a woman while obsessively spying on an Israeli checkpoint. The final, deeply trou­bling segment features his girlfriend as a ninja battling five Israeli soldiers at a shoot­ing range, and winning. 

A progressively-minded critic is hard­-pressed to admit fault with this film. Am I denying an authentic Palestinian voice by disagreeing with Suleiman’s aesthetic choices? By questioning his strategy of throwing provocative ideas up in the air without resolution (or hope or consisten­cy), do I misunderstand his oppression? I suspect so. But, nevertheless, I found Divine Intervention to be little better than a politi­cally savvy sketch-comedy show. Some of the jokes work, some of them don’t. But it is ultimately a film of moments, not of any profound or lasting importance. Of course, the majority of knee-jerk anti-Israel European intellectuals embraced the film’s honesty and courage. It won the Special Jury Prize. 

Another Special Jury Prize, invented on the spot as the 55th Anniversary Award, went to Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine. It was the first documentary to appear in Competition for 40 years or so and, as such, it requires a deeper analysis. Is it really better than anything ever made by the Maysles brothers, D.A. Pennebaker or Errol Morris? According to the French, Moore’s sarcastic take on America’s foibles perfectly matches the condescension of French intellectuals towards the sociopoliti­cal life of the United States, and they embraced it with cheers and foot-stamping enthusiasm. U.S. critics, so pleased to be represented on the right side of the political divide for once, joined right in. 

Moore’s progressive rabble-rousing has a certain vigor—here he is going after the gun lobby and seeking to analyze America’s love of firearms through the filter of his own youthful flirtation with the NRA. But intelligent critics have come to be justifi­ably wary of both Moore’s often simplistic solutions to difficult problems and his didactic populist confrontations. While I would not blame Moore for George Bush’s election, his brand of painless leftism con­tributed to the breathless utopianism that allowed millions of people to vote for Ralph Nader without imagining the conse­quences of accidentally electing a Republican president. Moore has set him­self up as the left’s most accessible polemi­cist. The position requires considerably more humility than this film, or his recent book “Stupid White Men,” reveals. Snotty Europeans don’t need to know this, but U.S. critics should. 

I also did not care for Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People but, to its credit, my reasons may not be all that valid. After all, it’s meant to be a fun movie and people really dug it. The film certainly does not cloak itself in any impermeable political discourse like Polanski, Suleiman or Moore; in fact, it has no political dis­course at all. Which, in the end, is my problem with it. With constant ribald, direct-to-camera voiceover, British comedian Steve Coogan portrays Tony Wilson and tells the story of the Manchester music scene in the 1980s: Joy Division, New Order, Happy Mondays, the Hacienda, the rise of Ecstasy. What is interesting about the first part of this story is how angry, poor-as-fuck, working-class guys reshaped and rethought punk into a nervous, poetic and lasting kind of music. What is interesting about the second part is how angry, poor-as-fuck, working-class guys found a new drug, a new way of par­tying and transformed a generation’s self-image. Except the film doesn’t tell these two stories. It instead tells us about Tony Wilson, an upper-class TV presenter who was a booster, manager, promoter, club owner and idealistic record label owner. Full of false humility and smarmy self­-deprecation, Coogan is apparently mim­icking a potent British icon. I just found this biopic a self-aggrandizing and beside-­the-point portrait of a classic yuppie. 

David Cronenberg’s uninteresting Spider—a favorite of the aged U.K. press—sees this powerful filmmaker creating the most hermetic Lifetime Network special of all time. Ralph Fiennes mumbles his was through a Victorian halfway house as painful flashbacks reveal the murder of his mother by his dad and his acquisition of a new, floozie wife.

Finally, there were the films roundly hated by the vast majority of the Festival’s attendees that, with all their problems acknowledged, need a second look. Most of these films were not particularly pleas­ant experiences to watch yet had serious intellectual intent. 

The French got particularly mauled. Olivier Assayas brought DemonLover, a cool, stilted story of corporate intrigue around the acquisition of a 3D-anime­ porn producer and its rollover sale to an Internet sex company, to the Competition. The film is about half an hour too long and nowhere near as raunchy as it thinks it is. Critics found it ridiculous—a bad European take on an American genre. Well, maybe—if the genre Assayas was after was the contem­porary American TV thriller genre. But Assayas is far more interested in the 1970s tropes of The Parallax View, The Bourne Identity and their ilk. Paranoid flirtations with the Other, pre-AIDS sexually predato­ry behavior—sex-as-power instead of sex­-as-death—and pre-feminist but unusual­ly empowered women mark this terrain. Assayas uses these contemporary anachro­nisms to bring into relief how prescient 70s-style paranoia was for our current faceless world. 

(Out-of-Competition there were several other genre films, including the Walter Salles-produced City of God, a Brazil­sploitation picture that tipped its hat to the Cinema Novo and Nelson Pereira dos Santos but really wanted to be Black Caesar. This section also included the new Star Wars II: Attack of the Clones, Barbet Schroeder’s Murder by Numbers and Brian De Palma’s Femme Fatale, rather thickly underlining the point.) 

Irreversible

One usually intelligent American critic told me the only thing to decide about Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible was whether it was silly or stupid. His comment joined the near-unanimous lynch mob on this most interesting film. 

Irréversible begins with end credits in blood red going increasingly askew and running backwards. This joke should have told critics that we are dealing with some ideas about the cinema here. No one seemed to have been listening. Noé fol­lows the credits with another joke: the murderous, incestuous father of his previ­ous film, I Stand Alone, rattles on philo­sophically about “time destroying all things”—Noé is about to literally destroy everyone in the film and then make them whole again. He also is setting us up for a profound comment on the failure of nar­rative cinema. 

Then the story is told backwards in time, forwards in narrative intent. A man (Vincent Cassel) rampages through a gay­ sex/torture club looking for the man who killed his girlfriend (Monica Bellucci); after abusing lots of the guys, he mistak­enly identifies a man as the killer, and this man is beaten to death by the girl’s former lover, a philosophy professor. We trace the story back (but really forwards), through the boyfriend’s quest for the killer, the bru­tal rape, the party she storms out of and their cuddling in bed, pre-party, ending with his girlfriend discovering she is preg­nant. 

Most critics believe the film should be judged as though the backwards narrative is in fact a stylistic flourish and that we need only reverse the film to read it. Read this way, the film is a conventional thriller à la every Ashley Judd vehicle and is easy to dismiss as, well, silly or stupid. 

But this reading totally misses the point. The film’s early sections strongly restate Noé’s themes of male violence being the essential feature of male identity and the driving force in social politics. These are men—representing a corrupt France—acting out. 

The later love scenes are what take Noé to a new, fascinating critical level. He dares the audience to reclaim the “descent into hell” narrative by throwing you the soft­ball set-up scenes that normally persuade us to invest in bourgeois peril. He even seems to like the couple. Yet we don’t reclaim the narrative and we find this scene somehow disturbing and creepy. And it is creepy—the real-life couple use the privileged act of making babies to assert the foolish and dangerous bourgeois myths of safety and protection. It’s their presumption that is vile, not their eventu­al demise. 

That the critics failed to understand this frightening idea and Noé’s critique of these sacrosanct social underpinnings is the only thing silly and stupid going on here, I fear. 

Following last year’s huge preponder­ance of Chinese and Japanese cinema in Competition, only one film from these nations made the cut this year: Jia Zhang Ke’s Unknown Pleasures. Jia made Platform, one of the great triumphs of recent art cin­ema. A three-hour odyssey through the youth generation lost to the Cultural Revolution, it is as widely admired as it is little seen. His new film uses a similar style as Platform but returns to the characters of his first film, Xiao Wu—the displaced, unemployed kids of contemporary urban China and how their aimless ennui-filled existence is creating a kind of national agony. But the crowds hated its dispassion­ate style, long takes and deliberate cine­matic language. 

In Atom Egoyan’s exploration of the Turkish slaughter of Armenians at the turn of the century, Ararat, he asserts that his­tory, like religion, is largely a matter of faith. His characteristic multiple storylines and quiet moments of emotional intimacy are not perhaps showcased at their best here—the film-within-a-film motif is dis­tracting, confusing and dominant—but it is pleasure to see an accomplished film­maker working hard to get at a big idea like this. 

The Un Certain Regard section, a well­spring of exciting cinema from the devel­oping world and the radical fringes of the West, proved to yield some treasures this year. 

Perhaps the finest film of the Festival was Abderrahmane Sissako’s Waiting for Happiness, from Mali. This absolutely stun­ning, perfectly shot film captures life in a transient town on the edge of the desert. The film intertwines simple metaphor and complex characterization seamlessly. And it is really funny; a scene with a boy from the city, unsure of the local language, getting seduced by a bunch of veiled women is glorious. (Sissako also made Life on Earth, a charming portrait of an African makeshift radio station.) This confirms him as Africa’s great new talent. 

More humor came from China in Liu Bingjian’s kooky and exuberant Cry Woman, the tale of a girl forced to aban­don her job selling bootleg CDs· on the streets once her husband is thrown in jail. She becomes a professional mourner, weeping and singing tribute songs at local luminaries’ funerals. As she gets greedier, she takes on more dubious assignments, including a dog’s burial. 

The hermetic, intensely difficult Blissfully Yours comes from Thailand’s ever-interesting film scene. Using a delib­erate style—kind of schematic impres­sionism—the filmmaker, Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Mysterious Object at Noon), introduces us to a figurine painter, her Burmese lover and an emotionally unbal­anced relative. The plot revolves around a rash on the Burmese man’s chest and what they do to fix it and ends with a most extraordinary sex scene beside a river. 

It is very odd that Pablo Trapero’s El Bonaerense did not end up in a Latin America-less Competition. His Crane World was one of the sensations of the fes­tival world a few years back; its terse black­-and-white exploration of a working class man getting by under trying circum­stances was placed in the same circles as Laurent Cantet’s celebrated Human Resources and Time Out.

Using a gorgeous combination of pushed light and heavy grain, he tells the story of a locksmith who eventually becomes an inspector in the Buenos Aires police force. While corruption and brutal­ity weave in and out of the story, Trapero firmly focuses on a man nearly always drowning in circumstances beyond his control. Out of this mess, he tries his best to be a loyal employee and a good boyfriend to a single mother. Trapero’s refusal to condescend or judge the amoral­ity of his characters makes for invigorat­ing, honest cinema. 

Another film strangely excluded from Competition was Bahman Ghobadi’s Songs of My Mother’s Country. Ghobadi made A Time for Drunken Horses, one of the more popular and celebrated recent films from Iran. Here he returns to the borderless, migratory region around the border of Iran, Iraq and Turkey, home to the nation­less Kurds and lots of smuggling. Two chunky, hirsute Persian brothers help their father to track down his wife, a singer, who has run off with a Kurdish man. The film begins with lots of song and dance—they are all musicians-for-hire—and grad­ually becomes more serious as they become refugees themselves. 

If Un Certain Regard was the repository for developing world cinema, the Directors’ Fortnight was where the good women filmmakers took the spotlight. Gilles Jacob quite famously introduced “The Year of the Woman” about five years ago with a big bunch of films by female directors in the Competition. He announced at the time that Cannes had been transformed and that the Competition would look more like society at large from then on. Well, it has­n’t quite worked out that way. The only woman with a film in Competition was French industry-favorite Nicole Garcia with yet another middlebrow Daniel Auteuil vehicle too uninteresting to men­tion above. 

The Fortnight opened with Catherine Breillat’s newest provocation, a fictional­ization of the controversial sex scene from Fat Girl that has caused the film to be banned in Ontario and prompted ques­tions everywhere about its representation of underage sex. The new film sees Breillat in a comedic vein. Anne Parillaud does a dead-on impression of the confrontational but spacey filmmaker—Breillat is an icon herself in France—and Gregoire Colin has great fun waving around his massive pros­thetic cock. With its chilling last shot of Breillat, full of passionate satisfaction at getting her scene, beside a weeping Roxane Mesquida, just violated in front of a big crew, the film is transported to the world of Fassbinder’s Beware the Holy Whore and Wenders’s The State of Things—movies about making movies that leave one deeply suspicious of the medium one is watching. 

Morvern Callar

Another terrific film by a woman in the Fortnight was provided by Lynne Ramsay. Perhaps the closest film to a breakthrough masterpiece in the whole event, its exclu­sion from Competition is a black mark on Fremeaux and his boss, Gilles Jacob. Ramsey made the scorching ’70s ghetto horror show Ratcatcher two years ago. Here she turns away from Glasgow to Spain in a film about the anxiety of belonging, the conditions of a woman’s intellectual and sexual awakening and the limits of female friendship. Morven Callar is the name of the film and the unlikely name of its main character, a woman who runs away to Spain with a friend after her boyfriend kills himself. A pivotal moment in the film occurs when Morvern discovers a man cry­ing in the hotel room next door and goes to comfort him. The unexpected, liberat­ing sex that follows is as emotionally con­frontational to viewers ready to grieve as it is to Morvern, who then quietly trans­forms her whole life once and for all. It is a transcendent moment that makes us all believe that cinema is alive and well.