Ken Loach's Palme d'Or winner was not the only film stressing the inability of political leaders to learn the lessons of history, writes Michael Dwyer, in his closing report from the Cannes film festival
War was the dominant theme among the movies in the official selection at the 59th Festival de Cannes. Reflecting the edginess of our post-9/11 world, film after film chronicled conflicts past and present and emphasised the inability of political leaders to learn from the lessons of history. In that context, it was highly appropriate that the festival screened the world premiere of a film actually set on 9/11, inside the hijacked airline that failed to strike its target.
That film, United 93, proved a bracing experience, directed in scarily realistic docudrama style by Paul Greengrass. It was screened out of competition at Cannes, making it ineligible for the awards presented at the festival's closing ceremony last Sunday night, when movies dealing with war took most of the major prizes.
This was not a vintage Cannes, and it started on an unpromisingly low note with the world premiere of Ron Howard's flatly unimaginative, all-too-loquacious treatment of The Da Vinci Code. Yet the event was generally satisfying with the majority of the 20 films in competition earning their place.
Rarely has there been such a lack of consensus among the thousands of media representatives covering the festival. Even the most critically reviled movie - Richard Kelly's wildly misconceived Southland Tales - found a few passionate defenders. With such sharp divisions among the media, it seemed the jury would be spending long hours in smoke-filled rooms as they deliberated on the prizes.
Chaired by Chinese director Wong Kar-wai, the jury came from very different cultural and generational backgrounds - actors Helena Bonham Carter, Samuel L Jackson, Zhang Ziyi, Tim Roth and Monica Belluci, and directors Patrice Leconte, Lucrecia Martel and Elia Suleiman. From the outset, when the jury met the media on the opening day, they insisted that there would not be any compromise choices, and the surprise for most people was that they achieved decisions quite easily.
After the awards presentation, Wong told a press conference that they started with the vote for the major prize, the Palme d'Or, and they were unanimous in their decision to give it to Ken Loach for his stirring Irish War of Independence film, The Wind That Shakes the Barley. It came as an early birthday present for Loach, who turns 70 next month, six days before his film goes on Irish release from June 23rd, and a deserved tribute to one of cinema's most uncompromising and accomplished directors.
The award was very good news for the movie's Irish co-producers at Element Films, following their award-winning successes with The Magdalene Sisters and Omagh, and for the Irish film industry in general, given that Loach's film was shot entirely in Cork and Kerry last summer and featured an almost all-Irish cast. The Irish Film Board astutely capitalised on the film's achievements and its showcase for Ireland as a film location by placing a series of attractive advertisements in the daily film trade papers issued free of charge throughout the festival.
When Loach's film won the Palme d'Or on Sunday night, it was claimed as Irish in all the media here and as British across the Irish Sea. However, as Loach told The Irish Times shortly after he received his prize, "I hope that Ireland feels that it's their film. It is their film. The co-operation we received when making the film in Ireland was remarkable."
In his acceptance speech at the Festival Palais, Loach seized upon the opportunity to draw parallels between the events depicted in his film and the invasion of Iraq. "If we tell the truth about the past, maybe we will tell the truth about the present," he said.
THE GLOBE-TROTTING thriller, Babel, which took the best director award at Cannes for Mexican film-maker Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu, precisely captures the unease in the modern world. A single gunshot fired by a very young Moroccan goat-herder seriously injures an American tourist, and the US administration assumes it to be a terrorist attack.
French director Bruno Dumont took the festival's runner-up award, the Grand Prix du Jury - which he won seven years ago for L'humanite - for Flanders (Flandres), in which an inarticulate young farmer (Samuel Boidin) goes to war in an unnamed Middle East country. Dumont laces his firmly anti-war message with features familiar from his earlier films - candid scenes of joyless, functional sex and an unremittingly bleak view of the world - in a difficult, demanding film that certainly proves more involving than his wretched previous picture, Twenty-nine Palms.
The battle scenes are staged on a much more elaborate scale in Rachid Bouchareb's powerful Days of Glory (Indigenes), which follows the fate of Algerian and Moroccan soldiers fighting on the French side in the second World War. The film commemorates the sacrifices of the North African troops in the war and angrily illustrates the racism and injustice they faced from their French fighting partners. Closing captions note the ingratitude that followed in 1959 after Africa was decolonised and the pensions of the "indigenous" veterans were frozen. The Cannes jury shared the best actor award among this fine film's excellent core ensemble cast: Jamel Debouzze, Roschdy Zem, Sami Naceri, Sami Bouajila and Bernard Blancan.
The only film to take two jury awards on Sunday night was the delightful and moving Volver, which won best screenplay for its director Pedro Almodovar and shared the best actress prize between the five women and the young girl in the principal roles: Penelope Cruz, Carmen Maura, Lola Duente, Blanca Portillo, Chus Lampreave and Yohana Cobo. Almodovar was strongly fancied to take the Palme d'Or, an award that so far has eluded him, but like Loach, his time will surely come.
After the immense promise of his recent trilogy observing a small group of characters from different perspectives and through different genres, Belgian actor, writer and director Lucas Belvaux went unrewarded at Cannes for his new feature, The Right of the Weakest (La Raison du Plus Faible), which recalls the work of Loach and of brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardennes in its deep-rooted socialist concerns.
It takes place in Liege - the setting for the Dardennes' L'enfant, which took the Palme d'Or last year - where a disparate group of men struggle with the economic consequences of unemployment in the era of globalisation. Meeting a paroled criminal played by Belvaux himself, they concoct a risky robbery scheme. This low-key, mostly compelling drama is undermined by a key plot contrivance that, however necessary for the movie's resolution, is hard to swallow.
Israel Adrian Caetano's factually based Argentinian drama, Buenos Aires 1977 (Cronica de una Fuga) charts the experiences of young men labelled as terrorists and imprisoned and tortured for months on end by the military junta. It makes for grim, unrelenting viewing until the outcome signalled in the original title gets under way, and Caetano turns up the tension as the men make a daring escape, naked during a thunderstorm. Rodrigo de la Serna (from The Motorcycle Diaries) impressively plays the central character, a goalkeeper unjustly taken into custody.
BY FAR the most ambitious Cannes entry to be bypassed in the awards, Mexican director Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth returns him to the Spanish Civil War setting of his best film, the ghost story, The Devil's Backbone. This time he blends magic realism, fairytale trappings and striking special effects for a fantasy charged by the tensions and harsh realities of life towards the end of the war.
The versatile Sergi Lopez oozes sadistic malevolence as the army captain who becomes stepfather to a young girl encountering a fantastical creature who tells her she is the princess of a magical kingdom. While elements of the film are as likely toenchant children as much as adults, its frequent scenes of startling graphic violence render it entirely unsuitable for younger audiences.
The news that Sofia Coppola's Marie-Antoinette failed to collect an award on Sunday night will not have come as a surprise to the many critics whose loud boos drowned out the tepid applause at the Cannes press screening. Coppola's slavishly hip treatment of the queen's story is preoccupied with capturing the style of the time - the camera drools over the sumptuous costumes, elegant shoes and ornate hairstyles - at the expense of establishing or explaining its historical context, so much so that the French Revolution, which is kept off camera, actually comes as a surprise when it gets mentioned. This is all the more surprising given that Coppola's screenplay is based on Antonia Fraser's authoritative biography of Marie-Antoinette.
It helps that Kirsten Dunst is thoroughly appealing in the title role, and almost convincing as a 23-year-old playing a girl who is 14 when she first appears in the film, as an Austrian princess entering France for an arranged marriage to the future King Louis XVI. He is played by Coppola's cousin, Jason Schwarztman, who is hopelessly miscast, as is Rip Torn who hams it up in a gruff Texan accent as his father.
There are some compensations in the performances of Marianne Faithfull as the teen queen's mother, Judy Davis as her imperious lady-in-waiting, and an unusually straight-faced Steve Coogan as her adviser. The film effectively catches the downside of being a royal, and all the tedious pomp and lack of privacy that entails. Even a soundtrack awash with 1980s New Romantics pop tunes proves quite amusing, as in a ball sequence where the dance music is Hong Kong Garden by Siouxsie and the Banshees.
However, far too many scenes are shot in the style of music videos featuring Adam and the Ants (whose Kings of the Wild Frontier is also on the playlist), and the gimmicks run out of steam in the movie's plodding second half before the time finally arrives for the observation to be made that the common people should be left to eat cake.
