Cannes, France—Most years, reports from the Cannes Film Festival tend to focus on the egregious: Who whiffed; what tanked; how the hell did that even get financed, much less selected for world cinema’s most prestigious annual showcase? Perhaps that’s simply because it’s so bracing to see a much-anticipated movie from a critical darling greeted with a lusty chorus of boos. At the festival’s 60th anniversary last month, however, griping and grumbling were in remarkably short supply. Not only was there no flaming disaster, but one film after another proved to be almost kinda magnifique. Even the specially commissioned omnibus feature, Chacun Son Cinéma, to which 30-plus world-class directors each contributed a three-minute reflection on their chosen medium, boasted an unprecedented ratio of hits to misses. The final segment was an ironic fillip by Ken Loach in which a father and son are so disillusioned by the crap clogging up their local multiplex that they decide to watch a soccer match instead; by the end of Cannes 2007, you were almost ready to tell them to take heart.
That’s not to say there were no speed bumps, of course. As is often the case, the most conspicuous disappointment was placed right up front: Wong Kar-wai’s My Blueberry Nights, starring Jude Law and singer Norah Jones, opened the festival with ... well, I was going to say “with a thud,” but that makes this wispy, inconsequential romance-cum-road-movie sound far weightier than it actually is. Soggy with mock-philosophical voice-over and cutesy-poo banter, Wong’s first English-language effort had longtime American fans wondering whether they’d been snowed by subtitles in the past, especially since Blueberry Nights is essentially a gender-reversed remake of the director’s much-beloved Chungking Express (1994). They needn’t worry: It would have been just as irritatingly precious (and, it must be said, just as staggeringly lovely) in Cantonese. Likewise, Béla Tarr’s excessively mannered The Man from London, though shot in the master’s patented snail-crawl style, in no way diminishes the majesty of his 1994 triumph, Sátántangó. Adapted from a Georges Simenon crime novel and featuring Tilda Swinton (badly dubbed into Hungarian) in its supporting cast, Man from London appears to be Tarr’s art-damaged notion of a commercial enterprise. In this somber, scarcely populated black-and-white universe, however, stumbling onto a suitcase full of money looks exactly the same as suffering an acute attack of acid reflux.
Give the Coen brothers that same suitcase full of stolen money and watch the genre sparks fly. Their latest film, No Country for Old Men, transforms Cormac McCarthy’s tersely written tale of a drug deal gone horribly wrong into one of the most relentlessly gripping cat-and-mouse sagas in recent memory, pitting a cagey cowpoke (Josh Brolin, suddenly a great actor) against an implacable killer (Javier Bardem, still a great actor). A brilliant return to form after two lackluster comedies, the film does stumble slightly in its final third, when the Coens gamely attempt to do justice to McCarthy’s poetic pessimism; it’s tough to pull off a deliberately inconclusive ending when you’ve spent the entire movie pulling the narrative strings as taut as you possibly can. Still, reviews were rapturous, and it came as a major surprise when the jury, headed by director Stephen Frears, ignored Old Men, despite handing prizes to nine of the 22 films in competition.
Indeed, American films as a whole got the shaft. Zodiac, making its international premiere at Cannes, went home with nothing, as did the expanded version (nice lap dance!) of Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof. Even Gus Van Sant’s magnificently moody Paranoid Park, a far more potent and expressionistic portrait of adolescent angst than his Palme d’Or-winning Elephant, had to settle for the pathetic “60th Anniversary Prize,” which the jury made a point of noting was awarded in honor of Van Sant’s entire body of work.
Pretty much everyone agreed, however, on the excellence of the obscure Romanian film 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days, which wound up receiving the Palme this year. A grim tale of two college-age women struggling to procure one of them an illegal abortion at the tail end of the Ceausescu era, its depiction of the wanton cruelty of anyone with a smidgen of perceived power is forcefully conveyed via a series of deftly choreographed long takes. That’s more or less the default art-movie style these days, and nobody put it to more astonishing use this year than Mexico’s Carlos Reygadas, whose Silent Light, which won a Special Jury Prize (third place, basically), was as close as the 2007 edition of Cannes came to a full-blown, for-the-ages masterpiece. Set in a Mennonite community and spoken almost entirely in an archaic German dialect, this simple yet overwhelming story of a marriage threatened by adultery opens and closes with two of the most astonishing images ever captured on film: a rhymed time-lapse sunrise and sunset, with Reygadas’ camera pivoting down from pitch-black night sky and tracking slowly into the soft orange glow at the far horizon, then following the same trajectory in reverse at film’s end. In between, Silent Light achieves a truly monumental synthesis of the physical, emotional and spiritual. It’s hard to grumble about a festival when it serves up movies that leave you speechless.