The 50th Cannes film festival was one of the least memorable in years. DEREK MALCOLM loved and loathed the hype, and the line-up of films
SYLVESTER STALLONE wished it could go on for ever. Shock-jock Howard Stern said, surveying the scene, “And they think I’m weird!” Most of the rest of us packed up to leave the 50th Cannes festival with a sigh of relief.
The films could have saved it. But it was not a vintage year, even though the British did more than honorably with Michael Winterbottom’s intelligent Welcome To Sarajevo and Gary Oldman’s emotional tour de force Nil By Mouth, both in competition. Sometimes it seemed, amid the celebrations and the parade of stars doing 10-minute interviews with a dozen weary journalists at a time, that the movies were just a tiresome afterthought.
Even so, there were pleasures. Curtis Hanson’s LA Confidential was an exotic and well-performed translation of James Ellroy’s book, painting Fifties Los Angeles as a corrupt and garish purgatory where even the virtuous have ulterior motives. Ellroy liked it, as did audiences. It remains to be seen what the LA police think about its depiction of a department riddled with graft.
If that was the most commercial offering, the least was Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, dubbed “this year’s Crash”. Tucked away in a competition slot that betrayed some nervousness on the part of the selectors, this devastating film left me shaken for hours.
Haneke, the prize-winning Austrian director of Benny’s Video, calls his story of the vicious kidnapping of a holidaying couple and child an “anti-Tarantino film”. And it sets out, in appalling if largely unseen detail, to show its watchers what violence is really like.
Reversing all the clichs of the thriller genre, this is a brilliantly controlled and devastating piece of film-making, designed to make us think again about the nature of screen violence and our often careless reaction to it. It makes Crash look sentimental.
The other controversial film had a great deal less to recommend it. Mathieu Kassovitz’s Assassin(s) tried to say the same sort of thing about violence but failed abjectly.
The great hopes for Canadian director Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter, tipped as a masterpiece and the likely Palme d’Or winner, were not borne out. This was merely a decent film, culled from Russell Banks’s book about a lawyer’s attempt to push a small British Columbian community to seek financial revenge after a hideous bus accident kills 16 children. Ian Holm plays the lawyer, but though this is the most emotional movie a highly original film- maker has yet given us, it is not the cleverest nor the most convincing.
Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm, a Seventies odyssey based on another novel, was another strong favourite, certainly proving the Taiwanese director of Sense And Sensibility is happy anywhere he can make intelligent movies. It isn’t quite hard enough but tries to concentrate on character and detail in a way most Hollywood films have unfortunately abandoned.
There were some terrible mistakes in the competition line-up – chiefly Johnny Depp’s wearisomely inadequate directorial debut, The Brave, in which Marlon Brando has an unconvincing cameo as a snuff-movie fiend and Depp wanders about as a young American Indian. If this was insufferable, the veteran Francesco Rosi’s The Truce was just plain dull – light years away from his best work, like the Sicilian epic Salvatore Guiliano. It stars John Turturro as an Auschwitz survivor liberated by the Russians and wandering through a devastated Eastern Europe looking for succour. The film’s worthy subject matter is one thing; its tired execution another. Perhaps it came too late for a director who took 10 years to find the finance.
Yet another disappointment was Nick Cassavetes’s She’s So Lovely, an extraordinary romantic fable about a kooky girl (Robin Wright) married to a mentally unhinged husband (Sean Penn) that was written by John, Nick’s famous father. How he would have accomplished it one will never know, but this mixture of tragedy, comedy, sentiment and laughs misfires in practically every direction.
Outside the competition, the Brits marched on to some purpose. John Madden’s Mrs Brown – about Queen Victoria’s relationship with her Highlands servant John Brown – was made for the BBC but quickly snatched up by Miramax for transatlantic cinema release, and proved to be almost as good as some Americans think.
Another British success was Udayan Prasad’s My Son The Fanatic, written by Hanif Kureishi and set in Bradford where a taxi driver, played by one of India’s best actors, Om Puri, is driven to distraction by his fundamentalist son and an affair with a young prostitute.