Candid Cannes
Cannes began with a tragedy and ended with a travesty, but there was plenty to engross audiences in between - especially Gaspar Noé's brutal Irreversible. Fiona Morrow hands out an alternative set of awards
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Your support makes all the difference.Biggest disappointments
Woody Allen made his first ever trip to the Croisette, opening the festival with Hollywood Ending, a wafer-thin, miserable excuse for a comedy. Playing a movie director struck down with hysterical blindness, the wizened Allen paired himself once more with beautiful, young actresses – Debra Messing and Téa Leoni – and made it almost impossible to recall how wonderful his glory days really were.
Hollywood Ending was such an unequivocal dud, that it took a few days for the critics to recover their equilibrium, hardly helped by a cluster of high-profile so-so efforts. Robert Guédiguian's adulterous tale, Marie-Jo and her Two Lovers, started promisingly but ran out of steam before plummeting headlong into a truly appalling ending. And though Amos Gitai's historical examination of the Arab/Israeli conflict, Kedma, boasted a couple of great scenes, its endless declamatory monologues from either side of the argument killed its message stone dead.
It did, at least, stick to its guns, unlike Olivier Assayas's Demonlover. A bewildering hodgepodge of a movie, which appeared to be aiming for James Bond meets David Lynch, it spent an hour building into something weirdly interesting before haemorrhaging so many plot twists and bizarre sexual trysts that it ended a spent, sticky mess. You just know someone somewhere is about to claim it as a masterpiece.
Best of the brits
The gems, of course, were still to come and for once the Brits were among that happy throng. Mike Leigh's All Or Nothing was a rich tapestry of lives beaten down by poverty and trapped by the tyranny of geography. His sterling ensemble cast – including Lesley Manville and Tim Spall, as well as a clutch of new young talent – created an emotional picture of lives wrecked by inertia and disappointment.
But better still was Ken Loach's Sweet Sixteen, a tightly drawn (and beautifully played) picture of life on the margins. Set in Greenock – a small town west of Glasgow – Paul Laverty's script deservedly took the Best Screenplay prize for his tale of Liam, a 15-year-old boy desperate to make a better life for his family, his only resource the drugs that destroyed it in the first place.
With a cast of young unknowns – led by the Scottish Third Division footballer Martin Compston as Liam – Sweet Sixteen sees Loach working at the top of his game, his defiant allegiance to social-realist cinema and working-class life producing a film full of anger, frustration and heart.
Relegated to the Director's Fortnight – though for no clear reason – Lynne Ramsay's follow up to Ratcatcher, Morvern Callar, firmly established her as a director of importance. Where some take an entire career to develop their style, Ramsay has her own unique vision already in place. With a narrative inspired as much by mood and atmosphere as Alan Warner's novel (on which the film is based), Morvern Callar inhabits similar territory to the work of both Leigh and Loach, but adds a subtle, metaphysical approach which takes it a world apart.
Top unashamed aesthetes
The Son, the latest from Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne – the brothers responsible for Rosetta – was a tremendous, controlled study of a father trying to comprehend a senseless situation. Hand-held, close-up and breathtakingly claustrophobic, it generated a tension entirely built on pain and loss.
Meanwhile, in Ten, Abbas Kiarostami continued to strip bare the artifice of cinema with his digital camera locked off on a car's dashboard, detailing 10 trips made by one woman. Her passengers range from her young son – bitterly berating her for divorcing his father – to a prostitute who takes umbrage at her well-meaning but misguided questions. The disparate pieces eventually combine to leave a lasting insight into the life of Iranian women.
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David Cronenberg confounded expectations with Spider, an uncompromisingly dark Freudian affair with a startlingly good Miranda Richardson taking three roles. It felt surprisingly small, but was perfectly formed.
Most talked-up debutantes
The best moment in Mexican Carlos Reygadas's debut film, Japon, came when the village members, who had been recruited to act, reverted to real life and began commenting on the film-making process. An extraordinarily ambitious, painstakingly crafted first feature, which marked Reygadas as a talent to watch.
Likewise, Brazilian first-timer Fernando Meirelles, whose assured City Of God grabbed the attention from the opening frame and never wavered. Some critics claimed it the best film of the festival, although its many echoes of Scorsese and Tarantino perhaps weakened that position. There's no doubt it's going to be big, however, as Miramax, embarrassed to have passed on Amores Perros and Y Tu Mama Tambien, have picked it up and plan to run with it.
Most over-praised documentary
Though roundly praised, Michael Moore's documentary about the US fascination with guns, Bowling for Columbine, was flabby, badly structured and almost destroyed by the weight of the director's ego. Nevertheless, there were some very powerful moments and the occasional flash of genius. Marilyn Manson proving himself the voice of reason, in particular, was priceless.
The one that might be better second time around
Paul Thomas Anderson delighted some and dismayed many with his follow up to Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love. Eschewing the multi-layered, epic proportions that have built him a cult following, Anderson played this one out in a mere 91 minutes. How effective his one-act love story was, rather depended on your reaction to Adam Sandler as the volatile, Jerry Lewis-esque autistic romantic lead. Sandler pulls off the darker stuff surprisingly well, although it only takes a couple of minutes of Philip Seymour Hoffman to prove who the real actor is. "Californian surrealism," I overheard one New York critic spit. "I always knew Anderson was talentless." The story, however, is still playing over and over in my head.
Quirky but deep delights
Alexander (Election) Payne's About Schmidt, was a deliciously bitter satire on middle-America. Jack Nicholson turned in a note-perfect performance as the newly retired insurance executive who no sooner declares his hatred of his wife of 42 years than she drops dead, leaving him to ponder how little he's made of his life. It's a movie that makes you hurt even when you're laughing.
The croisette's only controversy
Gaspar Noé's Irreversible, a rape-revenge story told in reverse, was audacious both in its cinematic technique and its degree of violent realism. Beginning with a horrific murder, followed by a nine-minute rape sequence, Noé's film was never going to gain general favour. Decried by some as fascist and banal, it generated the festival's only heated debates. And, shot in a country where a sizeable proportion of the population recently voted for Jean-Marie Le Pen, it was right that it did; its depiction of homophobia, racism and vigilantism was too prescient to be dismissed. Sure it was ugly, unashamedly provocative and led by the gut rather than the head, but it also laid the latent aggression of the male psyche horrifyingly bare.
Least deserving winner
Roman Polanski's The Pianist was overlong, cliched and curiously unemotional, his depiction of one man's (true) story of survival in occupied Warsaw lacked any of the inspiration so hoped for.
With David Lynch at the helm, the Palme d'Or was always hard to predict. Still, few imagined he and his jury would plump for such a thoroughly conservative choice.
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