E-Mail This Article to a Friend Cannes d’or This year’s festival is award worthy BY GERALD PEARY
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"What they do they do better than anyone else in the world," a critic pal noted as we walked away after the 2005 Cannes Film Festival world premiere of what would emerge, days later, as the winner of the 2005 Palme d’Or: Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardennes’s L’enfant/The Child. In other words, less is all! The Dardennes brothers’ miniature fictions (La promesse/The Promise, Rosetta, Le fils/The Son), shot hand-held on the avenues of nowhere Belgian industrial towns, hold universal truths. These are vivid, unsentimental, unforgettable portraits of the urban have-nots of the globe as they scrape by in often petty criminal ways. Life on the lumpen margins, wiggling at the bottom, here on earth, from Bombay to Boston.

I can’t imagine that many at Cannes felt gypped when this year’s Official Jury — which included actors Javier Bardem and Salma Hayek, filmmakers Emir Kusturica (the jury president), John Woo, and Agnès Varda, and Nobel Prize novelist Toni Morrison — went for L’enfant. It was the second victory (Rosetta won in 1999) for the filmmakers, whose Robert Bresson–inspired œuvre, though distributed in the USA, is barely known even to discriminating American filmgoers. L’enfant is the story of Bruno, a jumpy, excitable 20-year-old who steals and barters on the streets, accumulating cash to get through the day, barely noticing that his 18-year-old girlfriend, Sonia, has had his baby. As this child floats into Bruno’s consciousness, he dimly thinks, "Merchandise!" He hits the sidewalks to sell it!

"Bruno lives in the immediate," Luc Dardennes explained at a Cannes press conference. "The story is a mirror of our times. It’s difficult to find a center of gravity today, not just for Bruno but for everybody." Jean-Pierre Dardennes: "Our film is not about paternity. It’s about a character who’s not really there, a lightweight, a bit like a child." So, which character is "the child"?

The jury’s runner-up award, the Grand Prix, was also a popular choice: Jim Jarmusch’s bittersweet road movie Broken Flowers, with Bill Murray as a middle-aged guy who goes on the trail of old girlfriends Sharon Stone, Jessica Lange, Tilda Swinton, and Julie Delpy. "I would like to say quickly that I do not believe in competition for artistic works," Jarmusch noted in his acceptance speech. You can imagine he was ambivalent at having triumphed at Cannes over cinéaste colleagues he admires, men like Wim Wenders and Atom Egoyan, and Taiwan’s Hou Hsiao-hsien, whom he called in his speech "my teacher."

At the Broken Flowers press conference, Jarmusch seemed relieved that much of the attention and most of the silly questions were directed at Murray. This American-star presence at Cannes was manna for journalists thirsty for big-name sound bites. "When I was a kid, you scared me with Ghostbusters," a Latin American journalist blurted out. "You’re safe now. We got rid of them," Murray said. "How do you like being at Cannes?" another reporter enquired. "I think every one of you should be screamed at by the ‘feeding pen’ [of photographers] while being photographed," Murray replied. "But I will be excited to walk up the Red Carpet. I hope I look well!"

One critic asked a question actually pertinent to Broken Flowers. "How did the minimalism of your acting match the minimalism of Jim Jarmusch’s direction?" "An excellent question, a bonbon question," Murray joked away. "Minimalism comes from the erosion of my skills. I have less and less to give all the time."

On to the 2005 Official Jury prizes, which this year were invariably on the mark.

Best Director: Austria’s Michael Haneke for Caché/Hidden, a paranoia-inducing political thriller (it won the FIPRESCI International Critics Prize for Best Film in Competition) about a smug French TV host (Daniel Auteuil) who finds his family’s apartment under siege from a clandestine videographer.

Best Actor: Tommy Lee Jones, as a lonesome, revenge-obsessed cowboy in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, a contemporary-set Western that evoked, for nostalgia-minded film critics, the cowpoke classics of Fritz Lang, Budd Boetticher, and Sam Peckinpah. Were such critics stretching? Jones, who also directed the film, fessed up to repeated viewings of Peckinpah’s Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974). The Three Burials also nabbed a Best Screenplay award for Mexico’s talented Guillermo Arriaga, who had written the scripts for Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Amores perros/Love Dogs (2000) and 21 Grams (2003).

And a gratifying choice amid Cannes’s Eurotrash glamor: Best Actress to chubby, middle-aged Israeli cabaret performer Hana Laszlo, off-the-cuff and endlessly amusing in Amos Gitai’s Free Zone. Therein, she drives a taxi transporting a young Jewish-American (Natalie Portman) into Jordan, where they meet and entertainingly squabble with a middle-class Palestinian (Spain’s Carmen Maura). "Let’s give power to the women," Israeli filmmaker Gitai said at Cannes. "Maybe things will change in the Middle East."

Was there minor carping about the Official Jury selections? If you felt that Caché was the finest film, then the Best Director award to the Haneke was a mere consolation prize. The New York Times’ A.O. Scott believed that the best film at Cannes was Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Three Times, the same actor and actress — Chang Chen and Shu Qi — dramatizing the same love story in the cinematic styles of 1966, 1911, and 2005. And many were sorry to see David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence, a smartly conceived rendition of a mock-pulp graphic novel, return to Canada undecorated. This one extends Cronenberg’s career-long obsession with pent-up rage and bloodlust, as a nice-guy, small-town-America restaurant owner and family man (Viggo Mortensen) finds himself hounded by three tough criminals (headed by Ed Harris) who claim to know him from old Philadelphia days.

What’s up? The most confident and centered of filmmakers, Cronenberg had fun at Cannes confronting the hysterical photographers’ pack with his own still camera and flash, shouting at them, "Don’t be shy!" The hetero Canadian director also turned heads during a formal photo shoot by mischievously kissing his male actors on the mouth.

Gus Van Sant’s Last Days, a semi-verbal spinning of the final hours of a Kurt Cobain–like rock star, is absorbing to watch (credit Harris Savides’s superb cinematography) but perhaps a pinch disappointing with so little narrative: it’s in the Gerry (2002) and Elephant (2003) monosyllabic mode. Wim Wenders’s Don’t Come Knocking, starring and written by (overwritten by) Sam Shepard, is a handsome, sumptuous movie about a desperately lost movie star suddenly seeking family connections. It’s tender despite being far too "lost-father" theme-heavy. Lars von Trier’s Manderlay, his non–Nicole Kidman sequel to Dogville (2003), is less pretentious than its predecessor and, I’m happy to report, much shorter. But its Cannes screening also caused far less controversy than did Dogville. Even Trier seemed surprised that nobody at the press conference challenged what they’d all seen on screen: an idiosyncratic political tract about slavery on an Alabama plantation in the 1930s from a white-guy Dane.

What does Trier, who has never been to the USA, know about American racial issues? If there were objections to how he makes his black characters complicit in their own enslavement, these weren’t expressed by the Cannes fourth estate. There was little room for criticism after cast member Danny Glover, who lectured the gathered on international racial politics, had given Manderlay his endorsement.

There were two films in the Competition that I appreciated far more than many of my critic compatriots: Batalla en el cielo/Battle in Heaven, by the Mexican filmmaker of Japón (2002), Carlos Reygadas, and Where the Truth Lies, from veteran Canadian director (Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter) Atom Egoyan. Reygadas’s tale is a transgressive, intentionally grotesque story of a lumbering, middle-aged Mexico City chauffeur who has a death-trip affair with the rich girl he drives about town. Batalla en el cielo reminds one of Werner Herzog’s Stroszek (1977) with its acorn-brained protagonist on a suicide trip. With its conscious, effective echoes of Buñuel and Rossellini, this is a stirring, disquieting work.

Egoyan’s film is based on Rupert Holmes’s witty, urbane 2003 roman à clef imagining the sexually steamy behind-the-careers of a randy 1950s comedy team obviously based on Martin and Lewis. Egoyan has personalized Holmes’s story. The first part of the movie, set in garish Miami nightclubs and New Jersey Mafia haunts, is superbly zesty and stylish, virtuoso scenes you’d dream of getting from Scorsese yet haven’t gotten since GoodFellas (1990). The dénouement is a ghost-ridden, claustrophobic Egoyan family drama, his Exotica channeled through a frigid mummy Hitchcockian mother. Finely chilled!

Screening Out of Competition was Woody Allen’s Match Point, which was shot in London with an almost all-English cast. Critics divided along nationality about the merits of this saga of an amoral Irish tennis teacher (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) whose aspirations to money, power, and status lead him on to brutal deeds. Some French observers proclaimed Match Point a masterpiece; some Americans (me among them) decided that, though flawed, this is Allen’s best film in some years. But in line with other British critics, Jonathan Romney complained to me, "It’s a fantasy London I don’t recognize, about a social structure that doesn’t really exist. Perhaps it will be much more convincing to the US."

Woody himself? "The film came out pretty well, I thought," he said at Cannes, "and I’m usually a harsh critic of my work." How well? Allen is said to be asking $7 million for the American rights.