Excitement reigns as the Cannes Film Festival draws to a close with a strong field of 21 films from 15 countries. The quality of the films this year almost proves that Cannes remains the more respected film festival in the world.
It is a tough job for the Cannes judges to come up with a winner, especially in the Best Director category and the Golden Palm, awarded for best film. At least four directors, Ken Loach, David Cronenberg, Aki Kaurismaki and Roman Polanski, have a good chance of winning. Belgium brothers, Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Russian Alexandre Sokourov have also received considerable acclaim.
Directors Loach, Polanski and Cronenberg are all former winners of the Golden Palm, and response to their latest works during the festival proved again that they are masterful auteurs in filmmaking.
Loach, who is known for his social/political criticism in his films, this year shifted towarded drama in Sweet Sixteen, a story about an unemployed boy in Glasgow who wholeheartedly helps his drug-addict mom to get out of prison, only to receive a bitter betral from the adult.
Brilliant characters, powerful acting and masterful direction have made this simple story a powerful work of social realism. First-time teenage actor Martin Compston's performance has put him in the running for Best Actor.
Another mother-son relationship, rather more Freudian in this case, is David Cronenberg's Spider. Ralph Finnes (who starred in The English Patient) plays a man who suffers from psychosis. Believing that his plumber father killed his mother to move in with a prostitute step-mom, he weaves a web of revenge in the streets of East London.
Cronenberg is less provocative in terms of subject matter and genre (compared with Crash and Naked Lunch) in Spider, focusing more on the unconscious and a sense of a hunted past. Finnes is widely tipped as a winner in the Best Actor category.
A second film dealing with a man coping with his past is A Man Without a Past by Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki, a cold romance told in a sublime way. A romance is extracted from a string of miserable happenings that occur to a nameless man, who loses his memory after being beaten up.
Roman Polanski also changed his style slightly this year with The Pianist, which tells the story of a pianist, Wladislaw Szpilman, a Jew who experiences suffering and humiliation in the Warsaw ghetto, escapes deportation and shelters in the ruins of the city. He survives with the help of a German officer who is touched by his music. It is a simple memoir-style story that neatly blends Szpilman's life, suffering and art.
Films by English auteur Mike Leigh and American documentary maker Michael Moore stood out as strong contenders early in the festival.
French director Olivier Assayas' Demonlover, a story of cyber-sex and corporate war, on the other hand, was massively critized by the French media for obvious flaws in story-telling.
Israeli director Amos Gitai's lament about the first group of European Jewish refugees to arrive in Palestine in May, 1948, titled Kedma, and Italian Marco Belloccio's The Hour of Religion failed to make much impact on the critics and the general audience.
Mike Leigh's All or Nothing, tells a story about dysfunctional families in London's housing estates where alcoholism and teenage pregnancy create a vicious cycle. But in Leigh's story, a family is reunited and gets a taste of human warmth after a son's sudden illness. The film gently combines drama, irony and sincerity with superb performances and beautiful photography.
Bowling for Columbine by Michael Moore was another eye-opening work which was the most praised work in the early days of the festival, but later found itself in the shadow of Aki Kaurismaki's A Man Without a Past and The Son by Belgium brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne.
Bowling takes a controversial look at the pathology of gun violence in America, through the lens of the 1999 Columbine high school tragedy. Moore uses footage of Charlton Heston, right-wing groups, politicians and gun-loving teens, and bitterly concludes that, in America, happiness is a warm, constitution-protected, gun.
The film is still well placed and may be the first documentary to take the Golden Palm in 46 years.
In the latter days of the festival, more fine works were screened. Palestinian director Elia Suleiman presented his bitterly humorous piece Divine Intervention about two Palestinian lovers separated at the border between Jerusalem and Ramallah. The first half of the story is a black comedy taunting the silent absurdity of people living near the border. In the latter part, a beautiful Palestinian woman turns ninjia, dodging Isreali bullets like a character for the film Matrix.
The lack of strong contenders among Chinese-language films, makes them unlikely winners of the Palm. Taiwanese director Yee Chih-yen (
This year's festival is rather like the Chinese saying "crouching tiger, hidden dragon" -- in other words, full of great talents and master works. Being able to take their casts down the red carpet to the sound of applaus and brovos has already created much emotional excitement. Yee and Chinese director Jia Zhangke (
After all, Cannes, despite the posing, glamour and vanity, is one of the few places that truly appreciates the work of filmmakers.
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