Every writer who complains about the quality of movies in general risks being accused of snobbery. Unlike critics, who often seem to be happiest when they are most disappointed and vice versa, most people just go to the movies to have a good time. But that is exactly my point: What we want from movies is not just distraction, diversion or passing amusement. We want satisfaction.
And this comes in many different forms. Most accounts of the box-office dip note that the numbers in recent years have been skewed upward by a few anomalous blockbusters. Last year the crowds flocking to The Passion of the Christ made the season appear hotter than it was, and in 2005 Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith will probably have a similar effect on the numbers for the first half of the year. Whatever else they may have in common, these are both movies that audiences cared enough about to want to see in theaters, sometimes more than once. They are also, not incidentally, independent films, made under the auspices of their directors' production companies (Mel Gibson's Icon and George Lucas' Lucasfilm) without studio oversight or interference.
Which brings me back, somewhat circuitously, to Cannes, where cinema is understood to be the director's art, and where the disconnection between global film culture and the American audience can seem especially stark. Despite some loud grumbling (including some from Emir Kusturica, president of the competition jury, who complained afterward about the poor quality of the selections), Cannes was full of movies that were challenging, interesting and in various ways satisfying. It was therefore troubling to read, at the end of the festival, an article in the Hollywood Reporter in which several executives complained about how few of the films were worth buying for American distribution. Part of the fault, it seemed, lay with audiences who shy away from anything they think will be difficult or disturbing. The article probably made me madder than it should have because it represented longstanding conventional wisdom about the commercial viability of the kind of movie that is a staple of the international festival circuit and an exotic specialty on American screens.
But some of us persist in hoping that the conventional wisdom will be refuted. Each of us came home from Cannes with a list of movies that fueled our solitary rapture, our angry debates, our sleepless nights: Michael Haneke's Cache; Hou Hsiao-hsien's (侯孝賢) Three Times, Carlos Reygadas' Battle in Heaven. As of this writing, two of those -- the Reygadas and the Haneke -- have been picked up for North American distribution. With any luck, they will be arriving at US theaters sometime before next spring.
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