Anyone who says Cannes was a bore this year – and plenty do – is only half right. It’s true the market was slow and packed up early. It’s also true that there were marginally less people around, and they stayed for less time. But the main reason for the downbeat comments was that the competition produced the sort of movies that can’t be sold for a huge amount of money. Okay, there was Dreamworks’ animated Shreck. But that’s sold.
The truth is that art triumphed over commerce in the Festival’s most prestigious section, as it surely should at Cannes, thus satisfying the critics but producing frowns on the foreheads of the buyers, who no longer have access to a halfway decent art circuit in which to display them. It was a genuinely good competition, with at least 10 films anyone properly interested in cinema will want to see. That’s a very decent score. Elsewhere, in the Certain Regard section, the Director’s Fortnight and the French Critics Week, things were thinner. But I wouldn’t like to have been on the international jury headed by Liv Ullmann.
Parcelling out the prizes in the competition without feeling you’d left something good out must have been agony. It certainly was for the International Critics’ Jury, of which I was President this year. We only had three prizes to give. The main jury had eight or nine. Given that fact, what they did was a bit odd. The Palme D’Or to Nanni Moretti was expected. His film was a hot favourite the moment it was shown. And was indeed a good one. But three prizes to Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher? And nothing for Godard, Rivette and Oliviera, veterans maybe (the last-named 92 and the only director still working who has made silent films) but each triumphing with first class movies? Surely some mistake! Or did the jury think that they were too old and famous to need awards?
Haneke’s film, however, was outstanding, and only lost out to Moretti by one vote in the International Critics Jury; perhaps a similar thing happened with the main jury and they piled the three other awards onto The Piano Teacher as some sort of compensation. Whatever, I felt the Haneke was the most powerful, audacious and provocative film in the competition, and incidentally one of the best films about classical music I’ve ever seen as well as the treatise on sexual repression some people found profoundly shocking. But three prizes meant ignoring a lot of other good work.
Juries, however, are frequently a law unto themselves and festival awards are often more about their composition than the make-up of the programme.
It all depends, I suppose, on what you want from Cannes when it comes to deciding whether the whole circus this year was good or bad. Most of the media seemed to want gossip, and there was plenty of that, even if much of it was cobbled together in some desperation and only half true. But if you wanted films from the huge, overstuffed programme, which had critics driven almost crazy with awkward clashes in Thierry Fremaux’ otherwise commendable first festival as Director, there were plenty you either didn’t want to avoid or were prepared to bust a gut to see.
Of course, there was a fair share of disappointments (the three much heralded Japanese films in the competition were fairly dire compared to their directors’ previous work). But if you have genuinely class films from Rivette, Godard, D’Oliviera et alia and can find discoveries like the Croatian first feature No Man’s Land, (which got the Best Screenplay prize) you can’t really grumble overmuch.
But perhaps the Festival is changing, at the very moment it is trying to be all things to all men – a feast of art, a hub of film commerce and a pool full of glitz and glamour to boot. My personal view is that the cinema is changing too. As the media consistently trivialises it by concentrating on the glitz and commerce rather than the art (who wants boring old reviews when there’s a good piece of gossip about and someone goes bottom up on the beach?), so the festival is gradually becoming what it perhaps should have been all along. Which is a showcase for the best of world cinema.
I’m happy about that at a time when Hollywood, so avidly in search of box-office returns rather than quality, dominates the world’s screens more and more. Someone’s got to hold the fort for something better than that. It wasn’t a boring Cannes; just a boring Cannes for those who couldn’t care less for a cinema which isn’t predicated towards making money with movies that leave the brain dead and the mind empty.
Just for the record, my ten best Cannes films were by Moretti, Haneke, Godard, Rivette, Lynch, Danis Tanovic (No Mans Land), Zadanes Kuruk (Atanriut, The Fast Runner, the Camera D’Or winner for best first feature and a sort of latterday Nanook Of The North), Tsai Ming-Liang (What Time Is It There?, from Taiwan.), Oliviera and the Coen Brothers (who dared to make a film in black and white and with a Beethoven sonata on the sound-track and still think they’ll get their money back).
Here’s to hoping that most of them will reach the UK sooner or later. Probably later, the way things are.