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Nov 20, 2008 3:21 PM CST |
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The prizes at the Cannes Festival are always the subject of much speculation. Not the least of this involves handicapping the taste of the various jury members and their cinematic politics. By the end of this year’s fifty-eighth film festival at Cannes, everyone agreed on one thing: it was not a stellar year—no extraordinary masterpieces or revelations, but the overall quality was high. One journalist told me, “No better films are being made anywhere in the world than those which are here.” The Cannes awards themselves are a strange event. First, there is the huge build up of cars arriving before the red carpet of the palais—the slow, measured walk up the stairs lined by police and dozens of photographers. One realizes, watching, that it is some kind of bizarre skill that a movie star develops just how long to stand in front of the rows of photographers before proceeding a few steps forward. The horde of the photographers is like a screaming mass. One photographer with a powerful pair of lungs could be heard screaming over the noise, “Penelope, alone! Penelope, alone!” trying to get Penelope Cruz to stand and pose by herself instead of in her entourage. The Palme d’Or went the Belgian Dardennes brothers for their film The Child. It’s the second Palme d’Or which they’ve won, and their third major Cannes award. Previous prizes went to their films, The Son and Rosetta. There is no question that these two filmmakers and brothers are extraordinary talents. The Son is the story of a young couple on the lowest bare fringes of the social ladder. As the film opens, Sonia, the eighteen-year-old girl, has just been released from a hospital. Carrying the child which she bore, she is searching for the baby’s father, twenty-year-old Bruno. Bruno is a petty thief. He is constantly onto the next deal. Two young school boys steal for him. When Sonia finds him, Sonia and Bruno spend their first night in a homeless shelter. He has been confronted by a new situation in life. We know that he is not ready for the responsibility. What Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne achieve is something very unique. They have an astonishing ability to place us inside the intensity of the relationship between Sonia and Bruno. For ninety-five minutes, we exist in this world of heightened reality as the lives of the couple and the child veer toward damnation, to illumination, acceptance, and a possible redemption. The Child, like other films by the Dardennes, is a Dostoevskian drama made up of the lives of very ordinary people, with performances which are seamlessly real. The second prize, the Grand Prix of the Festival, went to Jim Jarmusch’s new film, Broken Flowers. By everyone’s consensus, this is Jarmusch-lite, though it could also easily become Jarmusch’s most commercially successful film. Bill Murray plays an aging Romeo—a single, successful, suburban computer entrepreneur who is suddenly confronted with the possibility that he fathered a son who is now going out to look for his father. Encouraged by his amateur detective neighbor, Murray embarks on a cross-country journey to revisit his old girlfriends, trying to find the truth about this possible child. The four women, played by Sharon Stone, Frances Conroy, Jessica Lange, and Tilda Swinton, are absolutely terrific in their respective roles as Murray’s old flames. Murray’s performance, too, will undoubtedly get much praise. But there is not much difference between his persona in the film that elevated his acting stature, Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation and the new role. There are certainly many funny moments, and the film has Jarmusch’s usual ironic undercurrent. A small but devoted minority of Cannes-watchers agreed on one point: the film which was the one true masterpiece to be shown here this year went away without a single prize. This is the new film by Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-Hsen, Three Times. If a film could be perfect, this is it. The three separate episodes which make up Three Times are set in three different times of Chinese history and loosely reflect on each other. In the first episode, “Time for Love,” set in 1966, a young soldier searches for a girl he met who works in a pool hall. In the second episode, “Time for Freedom,” set in 1911, a concubine is set free by a would-be revolutionary. The last episode takes place in 2005, in the world of motorcycles and text messages, as May, the young woman, breaks from a relationship with her best friend to take up with Chen, a young motorcyclist. Little happens in Three Times; it is very slow. The second, 1911 episode is shot like a silent film, with intertitles rather than audible dialogue. Each frame, each sequence, is meticulously composed like a painting. The film works on you with its leisurely pace and its extraordinary beauty in a quiet, profound way. It is perhaps closest to the experience of connecting with a single painting in a museum or—for that matter—a church. Three Times is a work of genius, but, because it is not obvious, it was a film which this Cannes jury overlooked. This is Milos Stehlik for Chicago Public Radio’s Worldview. Worldview film contributor Milos Stehlik is the director of Facets Multimedia. |
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