Cannes Film Festival 1999 Report

Filmmaker Magazine
Summer 1999

Ghost Dog

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL

By Noah Cowan

Cannes suffered from the pre-millennial blues this year. Films by major directors felt minor, and no new schools of cinema emerged; neither was there any embarrassing or insulting work. The mood was somber, and the legendary parties lacked imagination. As such the Festival paralleled the cinema world as a whole. There is little energy now for cin­ematic experimentation, but filmmakers everywhere also acknowledge that the old cin­ematic avenues are feeling tired. (The excep­tion to all of this is the continuing sense of sophisticated daring coming out of East Asia, where the upcoming calendar event doesn’t seem quite as important.) There was also a sense of bottomless wealth for making films, and yet even the richest producers were look­ing over their shoulders at DV and the changes it may ring for cinema. These are uncertain times, apparently.

This spiritual exhaustion was accentuated by the Competition Jury’s ludicrous awards. The jury not only betrayed their lack of knowledge of recent film history but also profoundly mis­understood Cannes’ role in world cinema, all at a terrible cost. The two big prize-winners, Luc and Pierre Dardenne’s Rosetta and Bruno Dumont’s L’humanité are minor variations on better first films, La Promesse and La Vie de Jesus. (To be fair, Dumont was trying, in a cor­pulent two-and-a-half hours, to give a greater scope to his work but what he actually deliv­ered was told better and far more succinctly in his earlier film.) Both films express a kind of regional working class disenchantment with our age. The Dardenne film depicts a young woman’s frustration with her unemployment. L’humanité follows a simple-minded police­man and his friends through the intrigues around a brutal killing in their quiet town; the jury was particularly impressed with Emmanuel Schotte’s portrayal of a simple­minded, vacuous police officer, a performance that seemed less interesting after the actor’s simple-minded, vacuous acceptance speech. The jury, headed by David Cronenberg, con­gratulated themselves on highlighting films that world cinema would otherwise ignore. While it is true that Rosetta will get a few dol­lars more from its Arte sale and L’humanité might now get bought by a small U.S. distrib­utor, the jury’s “victory” was ultimately Pyrrhic.

Solid films from excellent directors were excluded from the awards. Three leap to mind: Pedro Almodovar’s All About My Mother, Chen Kaige’s The Emperor and the Assassin and Takeshi Kitano’s Kikujiro. Almodovar’s wonderful film is a tour-de-force tribute to the women of classic Hollywood from the inner­most soul of a gay man who loves them. Kaige has made an extraordinarily beautiful epic of warring Chinese states featuring the lumines­cent Gong Li. Kitano’s film, a radical depar­ture for him, is a heart-on-its-sleeve road com­edy that feel like a perverse cross between John Hughes’ Dutch and Gianni Amelio’s Stolen Children.

I am a big fan of the first two and less excit­ed by the latter, but for the sake of this article, they are in the same boat. All three are pretty commercial: glamorous women for gays; swashbuckling swordsmen for Ben Hur­-aholics and a comedy for the Kolya crowd. (Unfair: Kikujiro is much better than Kolya.) All three will be distributed by Sony Classics, a major company, and, as such, will be widely seen. Did the jury decide that these films had made it already? That a Cannes prize wasn’t necessary? I fear that was indeed their reason­ing.

What they failed to understand was that while, with their content and with Sony behind them, these films have a better shot than many, all three still enter the United States hobbled. The penetration of foreign-language art films into the American market, even ones by inter­national superstar directors, is a tiny percent­age of what equivalent international American art stars like Tarantino or Mamet are able to do. Despite the amazing success of Life Is Beautiful, it is still very difficult for a foreign-­language film to get seen by even one tenth of one percent of the United States population. Whatever your feeling about “Il Benigni,” his success could well have paved the way for an increasing number of foreign-language art films to reclaim a piece of America’s screen time, both small and large. These three would have been excellent candidates to do so. It’s not impossible now for this to still happen, but the prizes haven’t helped anyone.

The jury also failed to understand the nature of the American films in this year’s Competi­tion. The three main selections were John Sayles’s Limbo, David Lynch’s A Straight Story and Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai. The Sayles works an intrigu­ingly open-ended narrative in a contemporary Robinson Crusoe story; and the Lynch is a small, “shaggy dog” road movie for the whole family. Minor work from perennially interest­ing filmmakers. The Jarmusch is something else: a dramatic rethinking of the contempo­rary hit-man film through the eyes of an ancient samurai text. The result is absolutely American, urban and full of Ozu-like restraint.

One could hardly imagine a better sampling of iconoclastic filmmakers who represent a tense resistance between studio financing and independent production. While not necessarily important work by these directors, the films should certainly should have been in the run­ning for awards. One senses that they were excluded because they emerged from the dom­inant world cultural power.

Atom Egoyan’s tough, perfectly acted (espe­cially by Bob Hoskins) new film, Felicia’s Journey, was also studiously ignored by the jury. Perhaps he too was being punished for having his film produced by Mel Gibson’s Icon.

Other highlights included a controversial new film from Peter Greenaway. Loathed by most, I found it a welcome return to form after his dabblings in the literary (The Pillow Book) and historical (Baby of Macon) worlds. As tough and exciting as The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, 8½ Women is a jaded inspec­tion of overdetermined and overly successful collectors—the plague of millennial culture—played out with lots of humor and amus­ingly untantalizing sex. When Greenaway gets it right—The Cook, the Thief, A Zed and Two Noughts, and this new film—cinema has no better interrogator of contemporary culture.

Amos Gitai’s first good narrative feature film, Kadosh, delves deep into Orthodox culture in Israel to find an unsettling story of a woman abandoned. Gitai is a documentarian switch­ing to fiction, yet the film’s only whiff of documentary is its eeri­ly accurate sense of entering a forbidden world.

Many critics were taken (in?) by Aleksandr Sokhurov’s silly man­nerist Hitler bio-pic and another lugubrious Manoel de Oliveira yarn. Nobody much cared for Nikita Mikhalkov’s multi-houred Barber of Siberia nor Leos Carax’s bourgeois-loathing (read: self) tortured­ artist-amongst-the­Bosnian-refugees tome, Pola X.

The Directors’ Fort­night had a new director this year in Marie-­Pierre Macia, formerly of the San Francisco Film Festival, and her selection was good. She particularly excelled with the American inde­pendents, an area of baffling inconsistency in past years. The group included Alex Winter’s dark, obsessive and intricately Corman-esque Fever and Sofia Coppola’s sophisticated and charming The Virgin Suicides. Anjelica Hus­ton’s newest film, Agnes Browne—the plucky tale of an Irish widow getting back at her debtors—made up in charm and wit what it lacked in narrative complexity.

Macia also showed a strong feel for the new cinematic movements of Asia. Nobuhiro Suwa’s M/other is a follow-up to his largely improvised “screechy fighting couples” film, 2 Duo. M/other is a far more sophisticated film using the same improvisational approach; the story concerns a woman whose older boyfriend brings home a confused young son from a previous marriage. Her inability to feel like a mother to the child questions her role in Japanese society in a controlled and fascinat­ing way. Charisma is the newest and strangest film from new Japanese master Kiyoshi Kuro­sawa. His elegant blending of genre and exper­iment is winning him fans everywhere; this environmental cult thriller in which the villain is a tree should add legions of new acolytes. Chang Tso-Chi’s Darkness and Light shows an interesting turn in Taiwanese cinema: unusual­ly upfront sentimental material—the daugh­ter of a blind family of masseurs falls in love with a soon-martyred young gangster—is handled in the quintessentially dispassionate manner we have come to expect from the island’s filmmakers. It makes the film’s emo­tional resolutions far more genuine than one might expect.

Away With Words

Other strong work included Jeremy Podeswa’s sumptuous, lush and breathtakingly photographed The Five Senses, an interlocked set of stories relating to the eponymous sub­ject; and Benoit Mariage’s kooky, steely black-and-white Belgian family story, Les Convoyeurs Attendent.

Not strong was Macia’s French selection. Mediocre work, much of it by old school ’68ers who have nothing left to do but whine about the old days, was the rule, save the small, charming provincial film, Le Bleu des Villes, in which a policewoman dreams of becoming a singing star.

Un Certain Regard, the B-list of the Compe­tition selectors, outshone the main event for the second year running. Their selection mir­rored the Fortnight in most respects with less-­than-riveting films from France and a rich and deep Asian selection. The best of the lot though was Ratcatcher, the first feature by immensely talented Scottish filmmaker Lynne Ramsay. Atmospheric and moody, surreal and tough-minded, this is the kind of observational narrative we would expect from a great mas­ter in mid-career. Every note of the film is per­fectly conceived and elegantly presented, with the exception of a second, Fellini-esque end­ing out of keeping with the rest of the work. The film tells the story of a dirt-poor Glasgow family during a mid-’70s garbage collection strike in a community dealing with a child’s murder.

Many were surprised that Ratcatcher did not win the Camera d’Or for best first feature, but the film that did was a charming surprise. Despite its title, Murali Nair’s Throne of Death is a gently ironic fable about the first man to be sentenced to the electric chair in India. Instead of fear and dread, the uneducated peasant is full of pride; he becomes a local hero to the provincial village in which he gets to be executed because he has allowed the village to receive electricity and attract senior Cabinet Ministers to the unveiling.

Other section highlights included Wang Xiaoshuai’s gritty take on a Vietnamese prostitute in Shanghai, So Close to Paradise, and Chen Kuo-fu’s heavily stylized drama about the nature of loneliness, The Personals.

Un Certain Regard also saw the premiere of Chris Doyle’s wild experimental rollercoaster ride, Away With Words. A kind of poem to inarticulateness, Doyle’s two main characters are a sexy Japanese guy who transposes words and their meanings—so the word “house” means the color red to him—and a gay bar owner whose drunkenness renders him amusingly incoherent to all but a chosen few. The cinematography is unspeakably beautiful, with every frame a strikingly original take on color and form. No surprise: Doyle has shot all of Wong Kar-wai’s films.

Perhaps the old asters, so weary of predicting the concerns of the coming years, can learn a thing or two from the exuberant cinema of an East Asia reveling in all the confusion.