Art for Cannes' sake

With the manufactured hysteria over The Da Vinci Code now little more than a fast-fading hangover, the 59th Cannes Film Festival has begun in earnest. And just as they do every year, the programmers have proved that in between the critical grandstanding and the public-relations hyperbole there actually is room for art, or at the very least some satisfying films.

The first few days here have not yet produced any revelations, but filmgoers have again been able to tour the cinematic world, passing through Paris on the way to Paraguay and Tiananmen Square, where the politics are almost as hot as the sex.

Sex and politics are on full boil in Lou Ye's (婁燁) Summer Palace (頤和園), an engrossing, estimably ambitious epic about the generation of Chinese students who came of age brutally in 1989 when army tanks took aim at protesters agitating for democratic reforms. Lou Ye, whose previous features include Suzhou River (蘇州河) and Purple Butterfly (紫蝴蝶), which also played in competition at Cannes, pins his story on the slim, lovely shoulders of Yu Hong, a sensational Hao Lei (郝蕾), a young student whose senti-mental education mirrors that of her fast-changing country. Initially despondent over leaving her boyfriend back home, Yu eventually opens herself up to another student, Zhou Wei, played by Guo Xiaodong (郭小冬), the man who will become the enduring passion of her life and the spark for much of that aforementioned sex.

The trade papers have been running contra-dictory dispatches about Summer Palace, which may have been offered to Cannes without the film-maker's knowledge and without the sanction of Chinese censors. A Chinese producer claimed that Lou Ye would soon be on a plane back to Beijing, though he did appear at his news conference Thursday, and a representative for the film offered me placid assurances that the director was staying put. It would be a shame if this behind-the-scenes wrangling got in the way of the film, which beautifully blends the political with the personal much as Flaubert does in Sentimental Education, his moral history of a generation set against the backdrop of revolution, and Philippe Garrel does in Regular Lovers, his film about May 1968 and its aftermath.

The French touch is further evident in Summer Palace with its brief shot of the young Antoine Doinel running on the beach at the end of The 400 Blows. In this context Francois Truffaut's touchstone image, which speaks as much to the struggles faced by its young director as those of the character, is eloquently moving. It is also instructive because while Summer Palace was made in China and nods in the direction of the filmmaker's contemporary Jia Zhangke (賈樟柯), it is an internationally inflected creation, as much a European art movie as a Chinese one. (It was partly financed with European money and partly takes place in Berlin.) Much like the Paraguayan film Hamaca Paraguaya, which is screening in Un Certain Regard, where the directors are generally younger or more experimentally minded, a film like Summer Palace certainly complicates the very notion of a national cinema.

Directed by Paz Encina and paid for by money culled from more than a half-dozen countries (the Netherlands, Spain and, oddly enough given its economic straits, Argentina), Hamaca Paraguaya centers on two elderly peasants who are waiting for the rain much as Vladimir and Estragon wait for Godot, though with far fewer jokes. Watching this attractive exercise, which unfolds with great deliberation and without a single camera movement, I was again reminded that art-house cinema has as many of its own cliches and narrative tropes as Hollywood does. Encina's film, which takes place in 1935 during wartime, looks and sounds very good, and there is something intellectually bracing about a film that forces you to either accept its leisurely rhythms or hit the exit.