Focus: the offbeat and risky
Hollywood films take a back seat at Cannes
CANNES, France - Indiana Jones came stomping into town, and so did Woody Allen, yet the 61st Cannes Film Festival is turning out to be the least American-centered in years.
For one thing, the Allen movie is a playful, high-minded tourist's love letter to the Barcelona of Gaudi and Miro; if Scarlett Johansson makes up one corner of the film's humid ménage a trios, it should be underscored that Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz make up the other, more acute angles.
For another, "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" was made without Hollywood money. As Allen pointed out at a packed Cannes press conference Saturday, he shot the film in Barcelona mostly because the financing came from there. "If someone had called me from Rome or Venice, or Stockholm, or God knows where, I probably would have agreed to do it just as readily," the filmmaker said. (Asked whether the threesome plotline represented the director's personal fantasy, Allen drily noted that "it's hard enough to get one person.")
More to the point, Hollywood and its players big and small are casting a much smaller shadow than in previous years. Business is slow, with fewer films getting snapped up for US distribution; Warner Bros.' recent shuttering of its boutique labels, Picturehouse and Warner Independent, along with financial troubles at other small companies, has thrown a pall over the usually upbeat mood. The weak dollar doesn't help; even the high-flyers are tightening belts this go-round.
While "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull," which premiered here Sunday, is the 800-pound gorilla - and as such was breathlessly awaited by the international media and just as quickly dismissed as irrelevant - other Hollywood-bred films are getting back-loaded to the final days of the festival: Steven Soderbergh's twin Che Guevara movies ("The Argentine" and "Guerilla"), Clint Eastwood's "Changeling." Celebrities are being whisked into town for PR conferences and back out again, allowing few close-up sessions with the press.
In this void, the movies for which Cannes was invented and is still necessary are flourishing: the offbeat, the risky, the challenging, the obscure - and the French. "Un Conte de Noel" ("A Christmas Tale"), from France's Arnaud Desplechin, has probably received the most rapturous response of any Cannes '08 entry to date and is one of the few to close a deal for US distribution (through IFC).
For good reason: The film is ragged but thoroughly engaging, a home-for-the-holidays comedy-drama given a revitalizing shot of humanist eccentricity. Starring Catherine Deneuve as a Parisian matriarch diagnosed with leukemia and looking to her family for a bone marrow donor, "Conte" plays like a long, character-stuffed novel you can't put down. It's very French (someone's wife sleeps with another man and no one seems bothered by it, including the children), and one of the inside jokes is watching Mathieu Amalric and his "Diving Bell and the Butterfly" costar Anne Consigny play a brother and sister who heartily detest each other.
Another pleasure is watching Deneuve cast opposite her own daughter, Chiara Mastroianni - playing a daughter-in-law Deneuve's character doesn't much like. More and more, Mastroianni has the mournful beauty of her late father, Marcello Mastroianni, and her performance is one of the many gems in this rambunctious, imperfect joy of a movie.
Other domestic sagas playing at Cannes are more concerned with less fortunate lives. "Linha de Passe," a collaboration between Brazilian filmmakers Walter Salles ("The Motorcycle Diaries") and Daniela Thomas, offers a poor Sao Paulo clan as an allegory for the country at large. Of the four sons of a housemaid (Sandra Corveloni), one is a soccer player, another a devout Christian, a third a burgeoning criminal, and the fourth a dark-skinned boy obsessed with finding his father. The film is extremely well made and unremittingly bleak; to be otherwise, one senses, would be the worst sort of lie about the state of the nation.
Family squabbles are also at the heart of "Service" ("Serbis"), an unconvincingly erotic fly-on-the-wall account of an extended clan running a soft-core movie palace in a province of the Philippines, and "Boogie," a Romanian drama about a young married man reverting to bad behavior during a night out with friends. Despite the presence of Anamaria Marinca of last year's Golden Palm winner "4 Months 3 Weeks and 2 Days" as the title character's wife, "Boogie" is one of the few recent Romanian films that doesn't take its realism to bigger and more abstract levels.
More provocative is Germany's "Cloud 9" ("Wolke 9"). If this tale of infidelity and heedless sexual passion were cast with 20-year-olds or 40-year-olds, it might seem like old news. The hausfrau (Ursula Werner) having an affair, however, is in her late 60s and her lover (Horst Westphal) is a robust 76. Think of it as "The Joy of Senior Sex" or "Frau Lindner's Lover," since the filmmakers explore the sensuality of physical love and the natural world as ripely as D.H. Lawrence ever did.
In a culture that says only strapping youth and firm skin can or should be contemplated, the explicitness of the sex scenes mark "Cloud 9" as a rebel yell. The film takes one too many melodramatic turns, but Werner is remarkable as an old lady struck with savage adolescent longings, and it's nice to run across a movie that tells younger audiences where to stick it.
There are movies from the Pacific Rim and from all points of South America, from Kazakhstan and Canada. There's a film from and about Palestine: "Salt of This Sea" ("Milh Hadha al-Bahr"), about a Brooklyn-raised Arab (the stunning Suheir Hammad) who visits Israel to sift the ashes of her former homeland for memories of her grandfather's life prior to 1948. The debut film by writer-director Annemarie Jacir, "Salt" is a visually striking, narratively wobbly affair with more heart and fire than sense, and it's hampered by a main character who grows increasingly annoying as the film progresses.
But self-knowledge can be hard to come by, as James Toback's "Tyson" makes clear. The documentary, which relies on interviews with the retired boxer and on well-picked archival footage, may be the saddest film at this year's Cannes. It's a pained confession that resolves nothing, a penetration of mystery that reveals only further mysteries. By the end of the film, the tragedy is that Mike Tyson, an old man at age 40, seems to have acquired self-knowledge but not genuine wisdom; he has renounced the animal within but seems uncertain with what to replace it.
Toback met with a small group of reporters on Saturday and, in discussing the film, mentioned that after seeing it for the first time, the fighter commented, "It's like a Greek tragedy. The only problem is that I'm the subject." Tyson and his director were also present at the screening the previous night, the fighter with his children, Toback with his aura of truculent near-genius. The audience cheered Tyson, rather too easily, as a survivor. The movie's point is that he has survived only himself. That didn't make his appearance in the alien world of Cannes any less touching.
