FOCUS:

»You can always find films in the sidebars that are better than the worst films in the competition« — ran the flip statement of a veteran critic in a trade newspaper at the close of the this year’s Cannes film festival. Taken at face value, there is nothing new in this offhand conjecture. Year after year, the favorite game of critics on the Riviera is to pour their likes and dislikes, their largesse and enmity, into the voting lists and roundup reports. It’s a way to let off steam, to second-guess the programmers, to slam a film in the competition by praising a discovery in a sidebar.
But which sidebar?
Altogether, there were a half-dozen sidebars at the updated 58th Festival de Cannes, to wit: Out-of-Competition and Special Screenings (15 entries), Un Certain Regard (23 entries), Directors Fortnight (21 entries), Week of the Critics (15 entries), Cannes Classics (31 entries), Short Films and La Cinéfondation (27 entries, both section under the same jury).

This lineup does not include a half-dozen more adjuncts — those films and events programmed autour de la sélection (around the official selection), as noted in the catalogue. Thus festivaliers were confronted with another bundle of attractive choices: Tous les cinémas du monde, or World Cinemas (focusing this year on seven invited filmlands), L'atelier du festival, or Festival Atelier (18 young filmmakers), La séance des enfants, or The Children’s Screening (French director Michel Ocelot’s Kirikou), La leçon de cinéma, or Cinema Master Class (conducted by Senegal’s Ousmane Sembene), La leçon d'actrice, or Acting Master Class (conducted by French starlet Catherine Deneuve), Musique à Cannes, or Music in Cannes (with Music Master Class conducted by British composer Patrick Doyle), La journée d’Europe, or Europe Day (a gathering of 25 European cultural ministers), and the indispensable Marché du film, Cannes Film Market.

Furthermore, since the Directors Fortnight and the Week of the Critics programmed shorts and restored prints in their respective programs, as well as feature films and master classes of their own liking, the term »sidebar« now seems entirely out of fashion. Rather, they were »festival events« with a distinct profile and a growing clientele of followers, thanks to some extend to the benefices of the internet. The same can be said of the Cannes Classics program — indeed, the most exciting »sidebar« at thus year’s Cannes festival.

Cannes Classics

»Ask the professed cineastes in our audience if they could note the difference between a digital projection and the screening of a restored 35mm print, and most would not be able to make the distinction,« said Van Papadopoulo, the programming head of Cannes Classics under the aegis of artistic director Thierry Frémaux. Altogether, a round dozen of the forty films screened in the section were digitally projected. Furthermore, Cannes Classics maintains close working connections with world-wide cinematheques to book the latest restored classics on the market: the Film Foundation (founded in 1990 by Martin Scorsese and seven other American filmmakers), Cinémathèque Française, British Film Institute, Amsterdam Film Museum. According to Papadopoulo, »the quality of digital restoration and digital projection is advancing so rapidly that the next decade will witness a corresponding digital revolution on a broad technical scale.«

Tributes to Jean Renoir and James Dean were highlights of this year’s Cannes Classics. The restored print of Renoir’s Indian classic, The River (1951), thanks to the Film Foundation, was accompanied by still photos out of the Kobal Collection. As for the James Dean tribute, the 50th anniversary of his death was marked by Michael J. Sheridan’s insightful documentary, James Dean: Forever Young (USA), programmed together with a restored print of Nicholas Ray’s East of Eden (1955) and Elia Kazan’s Rebel Without a Cause (1955), the latter digitally restored and projected.

This year, the Salle Buñuel under the roof of the Palais became the official venue of the Cannes Classics program. More often than not packed to the last seat, extra screenings had to be scheduled to handle the crowds. Among its many attractions were restored prints and digital projections of Luis Buñuel’s Los Olvidados (Mexico, 1950), Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali (India, 1955), Jean Renoir’s La fille de l’eau (The Whirlpool of Fate) (France, 1925), Michael Powell’s Black Narcissus (UK, 1947), Robert Bresson’s Les anges du péché (Angels of the Streets) (France, 1943), Yusujiro Ozu’s There Was a Father (Japan, 1942), and the recently discovered and restored print of Sam Wood’s Beyond the Rocks (USA, 1922), starring Rudolph Valentino and Gloria Swanson in their only appearance together on screen.

Just as popular were the documentaries on filmmaking. One in particular was a standout: Frederick Baker’s Shadowing The Third Man (UK), crediting British novelist-screenwriter Graham Greene as a key factor in the making of Carol Reed’s The Third Man (UK, 1949), the film noir classic recently voted the Best British Film of the 20th Century in a BFI poll. Other documentaries on cinema that well deserve to make the rounds of international festivals were André S. Labarthe’s John Cassavetes (France), Marie Nyrerod’s Ingmar Bergman Complete (Sweden), Jean Pierre Limosin’s Kitano Takeshi Unpredictable (Japan/France), and Jean-Luc Godard’s video collage Moments choisis des histoire(s) du cinéma (Choice Moments in the History of Cinema) (France).

Special Screenings

In the wake of a Golden Palm last year for Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 (USA), the documentary apparently became the keystone of the Special Screenings section at this year’s Cannes. And for many critics the most important film of the festival was Adam Curtis’s The Power of Nightmares (UK), a balanced three-part BBC documentary running just under three hours that came across as a powerful sequel to Fahrenheit 9/11. This BBC mini-series is packed with so much well researched and ably documented information on The Rise of the Politics of Fear (the film’s subtitle) that it stifles the imagination. Introduced personally at Cannes by Thierry Frémaux and French director Bertrand Tavernier, Adam Curtis in The Power of Nightmares traces the myths and realities of two parallel-running harbingers of global terrorism. In the East there is Islamic Extremism preached by Egyptian theorist Said Qutb (executed in Cairo in 1966), then propagated throughout the Islamic world by his disciple Ayman Al-Zawahari (founder of the terrorist Jihad organization). In the West there is American Neo-Conservatism taught by American philosopher Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago, then integrated into government politics by Republican stalwarts Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle. Although the twain shall never meet, one would not exist in the public’s mind without the other.

Each episode in Adam Curtis’s The Power of Nightmares can pretty much stand by itself. In the first part, Baby, It’s Cold Outside, he traces the roots of each movement back to the immediate postwar years. In the second part, The Phantom Victory, he chronicles the Afghanistan uprising under the Mujaihideen rebels in the 1980s. And in the third part, The Shadow in the Cave, he debunks the myth of Osama bin Laden as the mastermind of global terrorism. Of course, a documentary of this range and depth is open to probing criticism, particularly in regard to such generalizations as »neo-conservatism versus progressive liberalism« on the American political stage. Also, a continuation of the documentary series would be welcomed, if only because to demonstrate the tactics used by the Bush Administration to win last year’s election via the so-called »war on terrorism« slogan. But according to Curtis, the BBC documentary has yet to be broadcast on American television.

Another documentary that drew unstinting praise from the critics was Jan Kounen’s Darshan (Embracing) (France/Germany/Japan). The French filmmaker, who specializes in spiritual rituals and practices, takes the viewer to Kerala in southern India to the doorstep of Amma, a healer of body and soul. Recently awarded the Gandhi-King Prize (for peace and non-violence), this short woman in her early fifties with a serene smile, radiant personality, and warm embrace for the afflicted has also been bestowed the privileged title of &raquomahatma« (great soul) in Hindu tradition. Although one can criticize the film on aesthetic grounds, the sheer fact that Amma, within the short period of 15 years, has graduated from a meager temple following in 1979 to a sweeping charitable enterprise today that now numbers hospitals, orphanages, houses for the homeless, and other benefices for the needy.

Similarly, two more striking documentaries focused on cultural traditions as mirrored in everyday life. In Fatih Akin’s Crossing the Bridge — The Sound of Istanbul (Germany/Turkey) the German-born, Turkish-descent director (and jury member at Cannes) electrified audiences by taking the musical pulse of a city that straddles the Orient and Occident, benefiting from the creative input coming from both sides of the Bosporos. And in Rithy Panh’s Les artistes du Théâtre Brûlé (France/Cambodia) the director gathers a group of actors around him to work on a project that would depict the everyday reality of the Cambodian people as they struggle to rise from the tragedy of genocide to regain a sense of dignity and a restored national identity. The film can be viewed as the coda to his S21 — La machine de mort Khmère Rouge (S21 — The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine) (2002), a French-Cambodian coproduction that documented the horrors experienced by the Cambodian people under Pol Pot and the brutal Khmer Rouge regime (1975-79).

Un Certain Regard

When Christoph Hochhäusler’s Milchwald (This Very Moment), his diploma film at the München TV and Film Academy (HFF), premiered in the Forum at the 2003 Berlinale, the director was hailed by a Le Monde critic as a major talent on the German film scene. Subsequently, his second feature, Falscher Bekenner (Low Profile) (Germany), was invited to Cannes and was again well received by critics, thus confirming his status as a leading talent on the German film scene. Hochhäusler (born 1972), who studied architecture at Berlin’s Technical University before enrolling at the HFF, is a filmmaker with a stylistic vision: »Space is very important to me. In my opinion filmmaking is not so much about images as about views and space. I prefer to maintain a distance between the viewer and the characters. I don’t want the audience to identify with them.« In This Very Moment, a psychological drama about a mother abandoning her young children in Poland just across the German border, the underlying theme is the motivation that spurs the mother in the story to make wrong decisions. In Low Profile the theme has been expanded to portray the suffocating manners of a suburban family to push their 18-year-old son towards an acceptable job upon graduation. But just plain bored, Amin will have nothing to do with the real world. Instead, he uses the Internet to make random claims of responsibility for an accident he has witnessed, then ups the ante by including crimes he has been reading about. The game becomes an obsession and he feels important — until, one day, the tables are turned. Konstantin von Jascheroff gives a strong performance as an under achiever who escapes into a world of his own and can’t find his way out.

Similarly, Benjamin Heisenberg’s Schläfer (Sleeper) (Austria/Germany), a debut feature by another graduate of the HFF München, portrays the dilemma of an introspective young research scientist at a München institute who is asked by the German secret service to spy on an Algerian colleague for nebulous security reasons. For a while, Johannes (Bastian Trost) prefers to steer clear of what he feels is a »sleeper« syndrome — in fact, he even makes friends with the personable Farid (Mehdi Nebbou) while collaborating on a mutual project that signals advancement in the department. Meanwhile, they both fall for Beate (Loretta Pflaum), a waitress on the rebound from a broken relationship. The upshot comes when Farid gets both the girl and the boost up the ladder, prompting Johannes to lie to his security contact and trigger Farid's arrest by the police. A one-dimensional tale that moves at a snail’s pace — until sparked by a bomb that goes off in the city — it’s the theme with its nooks and crannies that makes Sleeper a puzzler worth mulling over.

Kornel Mundruczo’s Johanna (Hungary/France/Germany) picks up where the Hungarian cult director’s previous short film, Joan of Arc on the Night Bus (2003), left off. In that episode of an omnibus film titled A Bus Came... Mundruczo fashioned a rescue drill for a bloody traffic accident into an oratorio in which Joan (Orsola Toth), together with victims and rescue crew, break into operatic arias. In Johanna the arias (score by Zsofia Taller) continue with same Joan of Arc/Orsola Toth arriving at the hospital in a coma and a pool of blood, the depressing emergency ward lensed in funeral greens and the surgical operations smeared in scarlet red colors. As the arias continued, we discover that Johanna is a drug addict who, upon rising from her coma, proclaims she is now miraculously cured. Deciding on the spot to dedicate her life as a nurse, she finds she can hand on her miraculous powers to terminally ill patients by lying down next to them in bed. All goes well, until a doctor with an ache to share her bed too is rebuffed by the beautiful Johanna. She is then medically disposed of, her body stuffed into a bag and thrown upon a garbage dump to be incinerated. Of course, Honneger’s Jeanne d'Arc au bûcher (Joan of Arc at the Stake) comes to mind, which alone assures a sophisticated audience for Mundruczo’s experimental film-opera. But the text for Honneger’s mystical oratorio were penned by the poet Paul Claudel.

Mexican films in all the sections at Cannes were the talk of the festival. Thus it seemed only natural that Amat Escalante’s Sangre (Blood) (Mexico/France) should receive one of the International Critics (FIPRESCI) Awards. Leaning heavily on the Latin American liking for a daily diet of sitcoms on television (télé-novellas), this low-budget minimalist exercise in family melodrama sketches the tawdry existence of the couple Diego and Bianca, whose only relief from their menial jobs is watching the evening soap, to be followed by a bout of sex on the kitchen table. When Diego’'s daughter from a previous marriage arrives on the scene, the father decides to hide the news from his jealous wife until his numbed conscience can find a way out of the predicament. But when his daughter commits suicide in a seedy hotel, Diego’s troubles have doubled. The dilemma leads to a surprising twist: he bags the corpse and brings it to the city dump, only to experience another jolting pang of conscience that will drive him in yet another direction. A debut feature with low-key acting performances, Blood introduces a talented young director to keep an eye on in the future.

The Prix Un Certain Regard, awarded by a jury headed by American director Alexander Payne (About Schmidt, Sideways), went deservedly to Cristi Puiu’s Moartea Domnului Lazarescu (The Death of Mr. Lazarescu) (Romania). Completed just in time to meet the festival deadline, thanks to the intervention of the Romanian Cultural Minister by awarding a subsidy grant over the heads of a stubborn film commission, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu chronicles the night route of a fatally ill retiree from his flat to one hospital after another in search of a doctor to perform the necessary emergency operation. But due to equally important needs to care for victims of a fatal highway accident, combined with registration technicalities and the general reluctance of overworked hospital staffs to accept him as a patient, Mr. Lazarescu (Joan Fiscuteanu) doesn’t make it to the operating table in time. Accompanying him along the way, however, is one who does care: Mioara (Luminita Gheorghiu), the ambulance nurse, who stubbornly refuses to take no for an answer. Running at two-and-a-half-hours, and shot with a digital camera to capture the depressing blues and greys of hospital wards, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu scored as one of the high-water marks of the entire Cannes festival.

The close of the Un Certain Regard program was one of those rambunctious affairs that nearly left veteran Spanish director Benito Zambrano in the wings. First, Thierry Frémaux introduced jury president Emir Kusturica, who then took his bows with the subject of his work-in-progress documentary: Argentinean soccer legend Diego Maradona. When it finally came time for Zambrano’s Habana Blues (Spain), it only confirmed once again that Havana is the ideal location setting for films about Cuban music, Cuban musicians, and the Cuban »sound«that would make a pair of childhood friends and pop stars internationally famous. Their dream is to find a Spanish (preferably woman) producer who will discover them and take them to Spain — save that Ruy also happens to have a wife with two children, a long suffering mate who is just about fed up with her philandering husband. Tito, too, would have to leave his doting grandmother, with whom he has been living all these years in the family villa. The fun, of course, is in the build-up to the forthcoming »one last concert« before a home crowd of fans and friends and family.

Directors Fortnight

Awarded a FIPRESCI (International Critics) Prize at Cannes, Ryoo Seung wan’s Jumeoki unda (sometimes spelled Ju-meok-i-woon-da) (Crying Fist) (South Korea) features two well-known Korean screen personalities in a wide-screen, dolby-digital boxing yarn that racked up two million admissions within two months after its release. Ryoo paired veteran actor Choi Min-shik (the lead role in Park Chan-wook’s award-winning Old Boy at last year’s Cannes festival) with Ryoo Seung-beom (the director’s brother and alter ego in his action movies) in this offbeat story about two deadend boxers who eventually meet in the ring in a showdown that neither of them really want to happen. Indeed, the buildup to the actual bout at the end is where the action is, rather than the showdown itself. Gang Tae-shik (Choi Min-shik), a former boxing medalist at the Asian Games over a decade ago, is now a pudgy 40-year-old whose only source of income is to stand on street corners as a human punching-bag. For ten bucks, anyone can get off his anger and frustration by hitting him in the face for one minute, women get two. Now completely down on his luck and owing money to angry creditors, Gang decides to enter a publicized light-weight boxing match, if for no other reason than to recover his sense of dignity. His opponent in the ring will be Yu Sang-hwan (Ryoo Seung-wan), a former juvenile delinquent and brawling street-fighter who has been advised to take out his anger in the ring rather than on innocent people. By way of an adept cross-cutting technique, the parallel stories build tension by delineating the reasons why these »crying fists« are destined to meet each other in the first place. Following the Cannes launch, Crying Fist should make the rounds of international festivals and affirm director Ryoo Seung-wan as a leading Korean filmmaker.

One of the most innovative filmmakers working today in Central and Eastern Europe, Lithuanian director Sarunas (better: Sharunas) Bartas, backed again by Portuguese producer Paulo Branco, returns to Cannes for the third time with an entry in the Directors Fortnight: Seven Invisible Men (Lithuania/France/Portugal). Shot on location in the Crimea in the south of the former Soviet Union, it picks up on a recurring theme that seems to haunt the director through a string of his previous films, each dealing with loners and outcasts in a shattered human condition. In Three Days (1991), awarded the Wolfgang Staudte Prize by a Forum jury at the Berlinale, we follow youths wandering aimlessly around Kaliningrad (formerly Koenigsberg), once the splendid Prussian capital and now an urban ruin. In Few of Us (1996) the focus is on a girl as she journeys across southcentral Siberia to an isolated shack in the Sayan Mountains near the Mongolian border, a region inhabited by the native tribe of Tofolars. In Freedom (2000), shot on location in Africa and invited to Venice, the outsiders are youths involved in drug traffic and illegal boat trade. Nothing much has changed thematically in Seven Invisible Men. After a car theft at the outset, the protagonists of different ages and backgrounds find themselves in a shack in the middle of nowhere. Each has experienced a bitter loss or simply feel robbed of their rights, whether it be marital, economic, political, or otherwise — in any case, enough to set them against the law and force them into an isolated exile. As an evening of drinking and fighting progress, it escalates to the inevitable clash. A metaphor on a fragmented and disintegrated society, the setting need not be the Crimea, but just about anywhere in ex-socialist Europe. The irony in Seven Invisible Men, however, is that the outcasts have retreated to a landscape of breathtaking beauty.

Levan Zakareishvili’s Tbilisi-Tbilisi (Georgia) marks the return of the veteran Georgian director to Cannes after an absence of 13 years. His They (1991), programmed at the 1992 Directors Fortnight, was accorded considerable praise in the press as a breakthrough film just as Georgia was about to wrestle independence back from the disintegrating Soviet Union. Inspired by Pär Lagerkvist’s Barabbas (published 1950), it followed the Swedish Nobel Prize winner’s original theme by telling the story of a modern-day Barabbas (named »Barabadze« in the film), who is unable to purify himself of past sins as a drug-dealer and ends up joining a mafia upon being released from prison. Despite the critical success of They, Zakareishvili was unable to find the funding to make another feature, due mostly to the country’s economic crisis and the ongoing war in the Abkhazia district. When he hit upon the idea to make a film about a young filmmaker struggling to make a movie, he mirrored his own dilemma — indeed, Tbilisi-Tbilisi was shot and reshot over the years before it was finally completed. In Tbilisi-Tbilisi Dato (Georgi Maskharashvili) broods over his screenplay when not drinking with his friends, while his wife keeps bread on the table by teaching music at the conservatory. Given a chance to shoot a couple scenes from his script, he pays tribute to the struggles of friends and colleagues to make ends meet. One of these is an old professor who had taught him screenwriting and is now reduced to selling produce at an outdoor market. Robbed of a future, young people pick pockets or prostitute themselves or join street gangs. Among the refugees from Abkhazia is a mute beggar girl whose parents were killed in the conflict. From his string of interlocking stories about the everyday in Tbilisi, Levan Zakareishvili has pieced together a poignant and moving film-diary of life in what is still one of the cultural capitals of Europe, steeped in tradition and rich in artistic expression. Tbilisi-Tbilisi may well herald a comeback in Georgian cinema as well.

Week of the Critics

The ongoing romance between Cannes and Georgian director Otar Yoseliani (whose address is currently in Paris) goes back to 1968, when Yoseliani was introduced to the Week of the Critics audience in the Salle Bazin of the old Palais des Festivals by the late French critic Louis Marcorelles. His film, When Leaves Fall (1966/68), a gentle tale about a lad whose nonchalant life-style reflected traditional Georgian mores rather than conformist Soviet work ethics, had already been shelved for two years with little chance for release — had not French critics put in a good word for both the director and the film with Goskino in Moscow. Shortly after its screening at the subsequently aborted Cannes festival (due to the student revolt on the streets), When Leaves Fall was awarded both the Prix Georges Sadoul and the International Critics (FIPRESCI) Prize. Taken together, these awards helped considerably to launch Yoseliani’s career as an authentic auteur. This year, the French critics invited Otar Yoseliani to serve as the parrain (godfather) at the 44th Semaine International de la Critique. And once again, When Leaves Fall was back on the screen to the delight of visiting cineastes. The story? Niko (Ramoz Giorgobiani), a youth living in Tbilisi, is unexpectedly given an important job in a wine factory. The young man makes friends with older workers, who in return like his unorthodox manner and his respect for traditional ways of producing wine. The day comes, however, when the factory management orders him to put inferior wine on the market to meet a dubious economic plan. Niko is the only employee who refuses to go along with the scheme. He breaks a keg of wine and spills its contents onto the street. I can still remember the spontaneous applause that erupted from the audience at that Cannes screening 37 years ago.

Ron Holloway