De Niro's in charge as Cannes rolls out
Van Sant, Le Besco show their talents
CANNES, France — After wandering around here for a couple of days on only a few hours’ sleep, you start to notice funny things. The French eat their fries with a fork. They love their Woody Allen in whatever degree of quality it’s served. And Robert De Niro is not to be laughed at, pitied, or underestimated. This last point is the most persuasive. De Niro is this year’s jury president, and, in ceremonializing his selection, the festival made him a lovely montage of a lot of performance that took your breath away.
As we do with Allen, whose new film, “Midnight in Paris,’’ opened the festival, we spend a lot of time wondering whether De Niro still has it. Neither appears to. But the lesson at Cannes is always: Who cares if they do? There must be a word in French for that, since it’s true all over the festival’s movies. Were Catherine Deneuve American, we’d be saying the same about her. In France, why complain? They feel lucky still to have her.
De Niro’s jury includes Uma Thurman, Jude Law, director Olivier Assayas, actress and producer Martina Gusman, critic Linn Ullmann (the daughter of Liv Ullmann and Ingmar Bergman), producer Nansun Shi, and director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun.
De Niro is also the jury’s elder statesman. At least four of those people are young enough to be his children. One hopes he would do a better job than the parents in the handful of movies that have screened since the festival began in earnest Thursday morning.
Lynn Ramsay’s oppressively literal “We Need to Talk About Kevin’’ uses hypnotic filmmaking to tell that the movie has no idea how to make Tilda Swinton look like a mother bad enough to raise the sort of son who commits a high school shooting. Ramsay does know how to cover Swinton in red paint and tomato sauce.
Better is Gus Van Sant’s “Restless,’’ about two teenagers, played by Mia Wasikowska and Henry Hopper, whose mutual curiosity about death draws them into a romance. It’s Van Sant in a sweet mood. A little of his delicacy goes a long way, but not far enough to rescue the movie from its maudlin finale, even if it has made a lot of people cry.
The early days have already produced one astonishment: “Polisse,’’ directed and co-written by Maïwenn Le Besco, a force to be reckoned with (she acts, too!) who often goes only by her first name. The movie follows a crew of cops who work in the lowly child-protection division of the Paris Police Department. On the one hand, it’s every TV procedural you’ve ever seen. On the other, it’s all of those shows happening at the same exhilarating, thunderously-acted time. The movie has youth. It has blunt social politics. It has a feel for the real comedy in a gritty job.
The second week debuts movies from no less than Terrence Malick and Pedro Almodóvar. Gentlemen, you have your work cut out for you.
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com or followed on Twitter: @wesley_morris. 
