By Preston Wilder
CANNES is only half-over at time of writing (the awards will be handed out tonight), but already many of the big guns have come out, and critics have weighed in accordingly.
Some are unhappy, especially in the English-language press: “Where is the Cannes of the past?” lamented veteran critic Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. “The Cannes of great joyous movies and silly starlets and larger-than-life characters and long, lazy lunches on the beach? How did it get replaced by this melancholy impostor, this festival of murder and nihilism and hopelessness?”
Steady on, Roger. In a way, the sentiment is understandable: at the moment, the two overwhelming favourites for the Golden Palm are a pair of films with only a few things in common. Both are made by directors with prefixes in their surnames – Dogville by Lars Von Trier, Elephant by Gus Van Sant. Both are set, very pointedly, in America. And both are relentlessly depressing.
Elephant is the easier one to describe: this is Van Sant’s film on the Columbine high-school killings from a few years ago, set in a high-school on the day when two students go on a shooting spree. The film follows a selection of kids through the last few hours before some of them (maybe all of them) are due to be killed – and that’s really all it does, making for a film some critics have described as “terrifyingly elegant” and “a symphony of trajectories, hallways and motion” while others (mostly the American ones) have denounced as vile and exploitative.
Dogville has also proved divisive, not least for what’s been perceived (in some quarters) as its rabidly anti-American message: “Von Trier indicts as being unfit to inhabit the earth a country that has surely attracted, and given opportunity to, more people onto its shores than any other in the history of the world,” fulminated Todd McCarthy in trade paper Variety.
Many have cried ‘masterpiece’, but audiences are expected to have trouble with the film’s austere aesthetic – it’s shot without sets, on a stage that’s almost completely bare – and gruelling narrative, said to be almost as punishing as Von Trier’s previous film, Dancer in the Dark (only this time with Nicole Kidman in the Bjork role).
Kidman has been in Cannes to publicise her movie, as has Arnold Schwarzenegger – albeit only long enough to stand in front of a Terminator 3 poster and announce “I’m back” – and The Matrix Reloaded also opened with a bang (albeit not in Competition). Generally, though, the mood has been sombre, as reflected in the critics’ favourites.
Uzak, a Turkish film, has been widely liked – its director, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, is a rising star in the arthouse world – but its style is quiet and minimalist. At Five In the Afternoon by Samira Makhmalbaf is getting good reviews, but it’s a grim drama on the lives of oppressed Afghan women. Just about the only bit of fun seems to be Ewan McGregor in the Scottish neo-noir Young Adam, much acclaimed and very commercial – but, again, not in Competition.
And the winner is …? Lars and Nicole must be favourites (for Golden Palm and Best Actress, respectively), but I guess anything can happen. Find out tonight …
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