Cannes, France
The applause came first: strong and vigorous, in stark contrast to the wan, almost furtive clapping that had greeted other films at this year's Festival de Cannes. Then, yes, a handful of people booed—Europeans, mostly, to judge from the slightly nasal quality of the vowel sound. The Grand Théâtre Lumière, Cannes' showcase screening facility, seats upwards of 2,400, and it was packed to the rafters that early Wednesday morning; I'd estimate that perhaps a dozen folks voiced their disapproval. Nor does a lusty boo in France necessarily signify anything more than "I cannot believe you are applauding this patent mediocrity." Nonetheless, the boos were duly reported by those in attendance and subsequently picked up, removed from context, magnified and trumpeted by those who were not. Which is why, if you know one thing about this year's festival, it's that everyone despised Marie Antoinette.
Granted, Sofia Coppola's much-anticipated follow-up to Lost in Translation received no prizes from the jury, headed this year by filmmaker Wong Kar-wai (In the Mood for Love) and including the likes of Tim Roth, Samuel L. Jackson and Ziyi Zhang. That's hardly surprising, though, since Marie Antoinette was the most perversely apolitical film in a Competition lineup notable for its pointed engagement with turmoil and strife both past and present. Ken Loach's stirring The Wind That Shakes the Barley, surprise winner of the Palme d'Or, chronicles the birth and eventual blood-soaked fracturing of the Irish Republican Army, but it's not particularly hard to guess why a committed leftist like Loach would decide that now is the time for a movie about a country strugging to rid itself of foreign occupation. Thankfully, the film itself never hectors, simply watching in clear-eyed sorrow as good men will themselves to commit atrocious acts.
War, terrorism and prejudice dominated the other awards as well. Second place, which Cannes dubs the Grand Prix, went to Bruno Dumont's Flanders, which cuts back and forth between a group of cretinous French soldiers killing and raping their way across some unspecified desert nation and the passive, wanton and evidently delusional coquette who awaits their return. Like Dumont's previous films, which include Twentynine Palms and Humanité (the latter also won the Grand Prix, in 1999), it will appeal only to those who share his view of mankind as cruel and animalistic. Meanwhile, those who find solace in the view of mankind as fragmented yet mysteriously interconnected will likely dig Babel, in which Mexico's Alejandro González Iñárritu, who took home the Best Director prize, once again tracks multiple crises radiating from a single traumatic event—in this case, a bullet fired without malice by two Moroccan kids at a tour bus full of white folks, including Cate Blanchett and Brad Pitt. Written, like Amores perros and 21 Grams, by Guillermo Arriaga, Babel takes their conceit global, unfolding simultaneously in Morocco, Tijuana and Tokyo; still, it's starting to feel a tad stale.
Equally musty, yet strangely beloved by most who saw it, was Rachid Bouchareb's Days of Glory, an earnest, by-the-numbers tribute to Algerian soldiers who fought bravely for France in World War II despite being treated as second-class citizens; its rugged all-male ensemble was collectively cited for Best Actor, perhaps because no single performance was all that memorable. Likewise, Best Actress went to pretty much the entire cast of Pedro Almodóvar's estrogen fest Volver, which includes both the director's current muse, Penélope Cruz (who can be quite tolerable when acting in her native language) and his original muse, Carmen Maura. Opening with a spectacular tracking shot of widows and daughters obsessively polishing cemetery headstones, Almodóvar's lovely, perfectly judged film paints an infinitely tender portrait of the dead's influence over the living, and confirms that he no longer requires frenetic activity or shock effects to coax laughs from outlandish material (murder, incest, a ghost). Many critics, including this one, considered Volver the finest film in Competition, and assumed that Pedro would at long last be Palmed. Instead, he had to settle for Best Screenplay, and I had to remind myself that gentle human comedies rarely stand a chance against Big Issues.
Which brings us back to the alleged decapitation of Marie Antoinette, a film so resolutely apolitical that it doesn't even bother to show us what befell its title character when the Revolution reached Versailles. What Coppola does instead is arguably far more interesting: Tossing history-textbook niceties aside, she conveys the confusion and alienation the teenaged Austrian princess must have felt at being bartered into a foreign land by trapping bubbly, vivacious Kirsten Dunst in a stodgy costume drama. This conceit has its limitations—I neither applauded nor booed, for the record—but it produces a number of arresting moments, many of them heightened by Coppola's use of '80s pop tunes (Gang of Four, The Cure, New Order) in lieu of the usual baroque noodling. And the widely disseminated report that the Cannes audience was united in loathing is simply false.
Only one movie succeeded brilliantly at wedding superior entertainment and cogent political subtext. Alas, it wasn't in Competition, most likely because the festival bigwigs weren't prepared to put their imprimatur on a film about a giant mutant tadpole. Quickly snapped up for U.S. distribution, Bong Joon-ho's giddy yet overwhelmingly bleak The Host (playing in the Director's Fortnight—basically the Cannes equivalent of Slamdance), in which an eccentric family attempts to recover a little girl from the maws of an amphibious behemoth, keeps shifting in weird, funky directions, but its opening set piece, which rivals Spielberg in top form for virtuosic mayhem, suggests that Hollywood's hegemony over big-budget action cinema may finally be coming to an end. Now that's worth applauding.