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Cannes 2009 Festival Report
By Ron Holloway | August 3, 2009
When Austrian director Michael Haneke’s Das weisse Band (The White Ribbon) was awarded the Golden Palm at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, few in the press corps would disagree. After all, this was Haneke’s sixth appearance ‘in competition’, so in a sense he had already paid his dues and thus seemed, throughout the festival, to be a genuine auteur director in waiting. Patiently, he had given countless interviews with the press in order to enable wary journalists to discard some of their previous prejudices og his liking for the psycho-horror genre. Indeed, it was a pleasure to watch on ARTE, the German-French cultural channel, how both French and German commentators agreed unanimously that The White Ribbon well deserved everything it got at Cannes. And a critical boost up the ladder came the day before when the FIPRESCI International Critics Jury also voted The White Ribbon the best film of the festival.
To his credit, Haneke had worked hard on his visually crafted picture-book album of Calvinist moral failings in a northern German village on the eve of the First World War. Indeed, the screenplay had been laying on his desk for a long while. Originally, it was intended to be a three-part TV miniseries of both historical and socio-critical interest, a project that had to be shelved for some unknown reason. Haneke then took the trouble to do more minute research on the subject, collecting hundreds of black-and-white photos from the period. His choice of cinematographer Christian Berger as key collaborator was also essential to the project – Berger ranks as one of Europe’s finest, with a skilled eye for black-and-white photography. Also, since Haneke likes working with his own acting ensemble, the presence of Burghart Klaussner (the pastor), Steffi Kühnert (the pastor’s wife), Rainer Bock (the doctor), Susanne Lothar (the midwife), Ulrich Tukur (the baron) and newcomer Christian Friedel (the school teacher), among others, allowed him to patiently pull the best from their performances over the two-and-a-half-hour stretch.
The runner-up Grand Jury Prize, awarded to Jacques Audiard’s Un Prophète (A Prophet) (France), was also well deserved. An acknowledged master of the crime thriller in the film noir tradition of Jean-Pierre Melville (whose favorite actor was Alain Delon), Audiard drew a remarkably realistic performance out of Tahar Rahim in the role of a 19-year-old criminal sentenced to six years in prison, where his skill with languages and Muslim conversion assures him some standing with the prison mafia – enough to eventually rise to the leadership of a Corsican gang.
So far as the acting awards are concerned, the international jury can hardly be faulted for awarding Best Actor to Austria’s Christopher Waltz. Indeed, he was the perfect bad guy Nazi in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (USA) A consummate language perfectionist, he feels at home in the diction of a half-dozen languages. “I could not have done the film without him,” said Tarantino in a press interview. And you better believe it! For Waltz breathes chilling life into the film from start to finish. By the same token, the decision by Charlotte Gainsbourg to play the sacrificial lamb in Lars von Trier’s horrific Antichrist may have justly merited her the Palm for the Best Actress award, but I also respect most colleagues at the press screening had already headed for the doors before the final blood orgy.
The losers who deserved better?
There weren’t too many. Marco Bellocchio’s Vincere (Italy) on Mussolini’s career. Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock (USA), a mellow behind-the-scenes look at the 1969 Woodstock music festival, got some good press, but light applause otherwise. The success of Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank (UK) (Jury Prize), about a 15-year-old wrestling with the presence of her mother’s new lover, assures that the British director will be back in Cannes again. Both Jane Campion’s Bright Star (UK/Australia), about Romantic poet John Keats’ love interest, and Ken Loach’s Looking for Eric (UK), a soccer comedy, did little to add to their oeuvres. The same goes for Pedro Almodóvar’s Los abrazos rotos (Broken Embraces) (Spain), a rather lifeless sketch of a blind director seeking his way out of darkness.
Some competition entries belonged in other festival sections. How Lou Ye’s Chun feng zui de ye wan (Spring Fever) (China) could deserve Best Screenplay is beyond me. Maybe it was because this outright gay film had been ballyhooed effectively at Cannes as a forbidden film even without any questionable aesthetic merit. And someone will have to explain to me how Filipino director Brillante Mendoza’s Kinatay (Philippines), another egotistical romp into the subject of gay relationships, could earn him Best Director. Hopefully, this wildcat trend will have run its course come the next Cannes Film Festival.
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