This year’s Cannes film festival, with its bias toward former Palme d’Or winners and a liberal smattering of stars either established (Johnny Depp, Brad Pitt, Penelope Cruz) or thrillingly on the rise (Michael Fassbender, Abbie Cornish, virtually the entire young cast of Taking Woodstock), brings with it the promise of artistic integrity and serious red-carpet action. This is technically known as “Essence of Cannes”. Yet however idiosyncratic or unpredictable the films themselves may be, the line-up proves that this most illustrious of festivals is a well-oiled machine in which even apparent surprises have precedents and can be telegraphed well in advance.
Past Masters
Four of this year’s 20 competition entries are directed by previous recipients of the top prize, the Palme d’Or, shortening the odds considerably that the winner will be looking at completing a matching set of book ends. Isabelle Huppert and her jury will be picking over new works from these proven favourites: Jane Campion, who won in 1993 with The Piano and is offering Bright Star, with Ben Whishaw as John Keats and Cornish as Fanny Brawne; Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction, 1994), who returns with Inglourious Basterds, starring Brad Pitt as a Jewish-American officer gleefully bumping off Nazis in occupied France; Lars von Trier (Dancer in the Dark, 2000), who directs the horror movie Antichrist; and Ken Loach (The Wind That Shakes the Barley, 2006), bringing Looking for Eric (as in Cantona).
Can the Palme d’Or go to the same director twice? The Dardenne brothers are the most recent film-makers to do the double, following their 1999 win for Rosetta with The Child in 2005. Then there was Bille August (Pelle the Conqueror, The Best Intentions), Emir Kusturica (When Father Was Away on Business, Underground), Shohei Imamura (The Ballad of Narayama, The Eel), Francis Ford Coppola (The Conversation, Apocalypse Now) and Alf Sjöberg (Torment, Miss Julie). Most double winners have seen a gap of only four or five years between Palme d’Ors, which makes Loach’s comedy the favourite from the 2009 crowd.
No Laughing Matter
The prizes at Cannes, however, rarely go to comedies. Sure, there was humour in Mike Leigh’s Secrets and Lies, and in Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, but these are not laughfests. You’d have to go all the way back to M*A*S*H, in 1970, to find the Palme d’Or going to an honest-to-goodness comedy; before that, Richard Lester’s The Knack... And How to Get It (1965) and The Birds, the Bees and the Italians (1966) were rare in making laughter translate into awards.
This year, it’s hard to tell where the comedy will be found. The opening film, Pixar’s 3-D adventure Up, is sure to be a gas, but it’s not in competition. Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock will have its share of giggles, if the trailer is any indication. Loach has put the high-fibre history lessons of The Wind That Shakes the Barley on hold for Looking for Eric. And the art-house favourite Alain Resnais has had his lighter moments of late, but will his competition entry, Les Herbes folles, be in a comedic vein? It is described as a romance “in eight phases, corresponding to the rules of flying, and... the safety procedures before takeoff”. Its chances of going home with gold will be greatly improved if the mood is harrowing rather than hilarious. Which brings us to:
Agents provocateurs
Cannes is nothing without a bit of the old ultraviolence, and it will be a sorry day if Gaspar Noé (returning with the 2½-hour Enter the Void, his first feature film since the stomach-churning Irréversible) and Park Chan-wook (who brings his vampire movie Thirst to the festival that gave his brutal revenge thriller, Oldboy, the grand jury prize in 2002) cannot be relied on to supply the necessary outrage. If they are on brutal form, and if Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds delivers on the violent promise of its trailer, then expect an almighty brouhaha about on-screen brutality. This is, after all, the festival that looked adoringly upon The Eel (man brutally murders cheating wife within opening moments), Wild at Heart (man is beaten to a pulp by Nicolas Cage within opening moments) and Pulp Fiction (where to begin?). It was also the launchpad for such causes célèbres as David Cronenberg’s Crash, Man Bites Dog, La Grande bouffe, Pasolini’s Arabian Nights and Louis Malle’s Pretty Baby.
Always the Bridesmaid
Just as the Oscars has its shaming roll call of great directors unjustly overlooked, so Cannes has let plenty of cinematic visionaries slip through the net. Many would assume that François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard nabbed a Palme d’Or or two in their time, but no. Truffaut took the best director prize in 1959 — the year of the nouvelle vague’s inception — for his debut, The 400 Blows, beating Buñuel, Resnais and Michael Powell. Godard didn’t even get that far; in competition six times, he has never had a sniff at the Palme.
None of which bodes well for this year’s eternal bridesmaids, Pedro Almodovar and Michael Haneke. Both have been praised and rewarded, yet neither has gone home with the Palme d’Or. Almodovar won best director for All About My Mother (1999) and best screenplay for Volver (2006). Could his noir-tinged drama Broken Embraces, with another star turn from Penelope Cruz, take him all the way to the top? Haneke returns with The White Ribbon, a parable of fascism set on the cusp of the first world war. Like Almodovar, he has one best director win, for Hidden (2005), as well as the grand jury prize for The Piano Teacher (2001). The latter starred Isabelle Huppert, who, as this year’s jury president, may not w
Je t’aime...
Could it be precisely that fear of partiality that has led to France itself doing so poorly in the history of Palme d’Or winners? When The Class scooped the prize last year, it was the first home-grown picture to win in 21 years. (The previous winner was Maurice Pialat’s Under Satan’s Sun.) In the festival’s 62-year history, the prize has gone to a French director only nine times, compared with 18 wins for America, 12 for Italy and eight for the UK. But Visages could get a sentimental vote. The cast features some great French names: Mathieu Amalric, Jeanne Moreau, Fanny Ardant, Jean-Pierre Léaud and Nathalie Baye. If the jurors don’t go for that, there’s always the return of the excellent Jacques Audiard, director of The Beat That My Heart Skipped, with A Prophet.
Never Been Kissed
Ang Lee is hardly new to this festival lark. The Oscar-winning film-maker has two top prizes apiece from Berlin (The Wedding Banquet, Sense and Sensibility) and Venice (Brokeback Mountain and Lust, Caution). But he has never been kissed at Cannes and has competed only once before (with The Ice Storm). Now he’s back with Taking Woodstock, which traces preparations for the era-defining music festival. As a lauded veteran, he’s in good company: other directors to enjoy a late-career victory include Andrzej Wajda (who won with Man of Iron in 1981, three decades after his debut) and Theo Angelopoulos (whose Eternity and a Day won in 1998; three years earlier, he walked off stage when presented with the grand jury prize for Ulysses’ Gaze, snorting: “If this is what you have to give me, I have nothing to say”).
Hollywood Heavyweights
While Taking Woodstock and Inglourious Basterds have Hollywood money behind them, they are the sole US entries in the official competition. (Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, which features the last footage of Heath Ledger — whose role was completed in a kind of A-list I’m Not There-style relay race by Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell — is showing out of competition.) America has not previously had trouble getting selected, with the Palme going to a US film a staggering six times in the past 20 years. One such occasion, when 1991’s Barton Fink also took awards for best director and best actor, led to official guidelines all but outlawing another such clean sweep.
The Outsider
Red Road, the abrasive but poetic debut from the British director Andrea Arnold, made such an impression at Cannes in 2006, it was virtually guaranteed that her follow-up would be welcomed by the festival. Fish Tank draws inspiration from Arnold’s Oscar-winning short, Wasp. Talk is already rife that this could be her year to take the big one; if so, she would be only the second female director, after Campion, to win the Palme d’Or. Previous second features to win include Lindsay Anderson’s if... (1969), Alan Bridges’s The Hireling (1973), Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994) and Cristian Mingiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007). They certainly have a better chance than debuts. No first-time director has won since Steven Soderbergh, who took the Palme for 1989’s sex, lies and videotape, and memorably announced: “It’s all downhill from here.”
The Jury’s Out
Recent years have seen little in the way of jury-related controversy, but the history of Cannes is filled with so many suspect or weighted decisions that its spectre is always there, ready to tip the balance. There was the case of Apocalypse Now, screened at Cannes in 1979 in an unfinished version; it emerged that the jury was pressured by festival organisers into splitting the Palme between Coppola’s Vietnam epic and the jurors’ preferred choice, The Tin Drum. In 1996, some jurors threatened to walk out if Cronenberg’s Crash was awarded the top prize; it eventually went to Secrets and Lies. Most recently, commentators cried foul when Tarantino’s 2004 jury anointed Fahrenheit 9/11 the winner over arguably more deserving candidates. Was this political point- scoring against American neocons, as has been claimed? No comment.
Boo Who?
One thing of which you can be sure at any Cannes film festival is that the booing and jeering will be loud and enthusiastic. Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, the prize-winning L’Humanité and Vincent Gallo’s unfairly maligned The Brown Bunny are among recent competition entries that have been subjected to a sound Cannes-ing. The most notorious example remains Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1960 film L’Avventura, which is now regarded as a masterpiece, but was greeted with a chorus of catcalls on the Croisette. The director reportedly believed his career was over, until a band of critics and film-makers, including Roberto Rossellini, released a statement unequivocally supporting the film. It went on to win the jury prize.
ant to be seen playing favourites.
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