There comes a time, in the middle of every Cannes festival, when everyone asks themselves the same question. What’s the film we’re all talking about? What has grabbed us by the lapels? In previous years, it’s been Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, or Gaspar Noe’s rape-revenge nightmare Irreversible, or Michael Haneke’s surveillance thriller Hidden.
And this year? To be honest, the 2006 competition had no great film like that. It wasn’t Ken Loach’s The Wind That Shakes the Barley, the Palme d’Or winner; although warmly and respectfully received, Loach’s movie did not set the Croisette aflame. Andrea Arnold’s Red Road was an impressive drama, especially good for a first feature, but it, too, was not a white-hot topic.
The awful truth is that the film that really did dominate people’s conversations was the hog-whimperingly terrible Da Vinci Code, which kicked off the festival, giving the proceedings the adrenaline-shot of glamour that the organisers crave.
Loach’s movie was a deeply considered and intelligent revisiting of one of Ireland’s most painful wounds: the civil war that followed the 1922 treaty with the British. At first glance, this looked like a movie without any urgently contemporary message for its audience. But it did offer food for thought. It powerfully showed how an imperial power can effectively sub-contract the prerogative of violence to its former subject peoples after a notional withdrawal. Will this be the endgame in the Middle East?
Rightly or wrongly, The Wind That Shakes the Barley did not have a fraction of the praise lavished on the festival’s hottest properties: Alejandro Gonzalez’s Inarritu’s Babel and Pedro Almodóvar’s Volver. Almodóvar has always been the popular choice. He was known to have been dejected when his movie Bad Education failed to win at the 2004 festival, and getting only the best screenplay award for Volver will have been another blow. (The best actress prize, awarded collectively to its female cast led by Penélope Cruz, was well judged.)
Inarritu’s Babel was a film with no small opinion of itself. It had style and sweep, and was massively ambitious, featuring a global ensemble of characters. But there is what appears to be a massive, outrageous plot hole in its ”Japanese” segment — a plot hole that simply insults the intelligence.
Otherwise, this was a festival that cultivated a new generation of world-cinema leaders presenting work that, although startling, fascinating and sometimes excellent, stopped short of the masterpiece level.
Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette was regarded as a pleasant bonbon of a film. It looked ravishing, but was unkindly dismissed in many quarters as another ”poor-little-rich-girl” film. Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Climates was a pitiless examination of a middle-aged man who is unable to find intimacy or commitment with his partner. It was an elegant piece of work, but without the brilliant compassion and wit of his earlier film, Distant. The Italian director Paolo Sorrentino came up with A Friend of the Family, a terrifically stylish, angular fantasy about a hideous moneylender, written with neo-Jonsonian spleen and wit. It had a fantastic performance from 67-year-old Giacomo Rizzo, who really did deserve the best actor prize. This was instead awarded to the male cast of Days of Glory, Rachid Bouchareb’s heartfelt and Spielbergian World War II movie.
The French films were particularly ropey. Nicole Garcia’s ensemble comedy Charlie Says had a terrific turn from Jean-Pierre Bacri but lacked bite. And Xavier Giannoli’s When I Was a Singer featured a truly awful performance from Gerard Depardieu.
So: a good Cannes, but not a great Cannes. For my money, the best films were out of competition: Paul Greengrass’s magnificent United 93, about the passengers who fought back on 9/11, body-slammed every film in the competition. And Douglas Gordon’s gloriously funny and audacious Zidane: A 21st-Century Portrait, following the footballer over 90 minutes, was the most purely enjoyable event at the festival. It had bespectacled cineastes crying out: ”Zizou!” I can’t wait to see it again. — Â