My 20th year of going to the
Cannes Film Festival. This doesn’t mean much, of course. There are people who have been coming for much longer, though the ranks of those who remember the 1960s (the grand old days when the press was taken out on picnics or boat rides to the Mediterranean islands off Cannes – a practice obviously discontinued more than 20 years ago) are now very thin.
O’Hare Airport, and airline personnel are unintentionally becoming like French bureaucrats. The first reponse: “c’est impossible.” When I ask to change my seat, the plane is full (not true) and the basic first response means: “Get out of my face and go away.” In ten minutes, ask another agent, and of course it is all possible.
Everyone I’ve talked to says that this will not be a great Cannes. Perhaps they are right, but how do they know? Something has changed at the Cannes Festival during 20 years: the gulf between the true lovers and connoisseurs (this is a positive term, not a derogatory one) is wider with each year. The circus surrounding the arrival and departure of stars gets ever-more maddening and obscures the fact that a serious, artistic cinema is what is really at the core of the Cannes Festival.
Cannes is more and more of a market. That is, in itself, a good thing. Films need to be sold so that they can go into distribution and be seen elsewhere. The producers need to find ways of recouping the cost of production from ticket and television sales, from DVDs and perhaps from downloads to someone’s cell phone. But this is no longer a viable formula. In fact without the subsidies of multiple government-sponsored agencies, most art films in Europe (and elsewhere) would never be made.
I once had a very animated discussion (close to an argument) in Buenos Aires, I think, with two women each of whom headed one of these “filmmaker funds” which awards grants or production assistance to filmmakers, and
Philippe Bober, the very talented producer with commitment and vision to very intelligent filmmakers (among the filmmakers he works with are
Ulrich Seidl,
Roy Andersson and
Cristi Piuliu). The argument focused on the “pitches” that filmmakers are asked to present at various festivals or markets to “sell” their films to prospective producers. This is of course an American construct – pitching some studio head with one-liners like “a feminist
Indiana Jones” or “
Sex and the City in rural Iowa.” It’s parodied in the films “
The Mistress” and
Altman’s “
The Player.”
The problem, we argued (we being myself and
Philippe Bober), is that most interesting, even great films, can’t be reduced to this kind of formula. A talented young filmmaker is not necessarily a great pitchman or salesman. Introspective artistic abilities – creating sensitive, complex characters – does not fit into 10 minute sales presentations, no matter what “training” of future filmmakers in this pitching game is offered. We ended up by discussing
Lisandro Alonso, the very talented Argentinian filmmaker of “
Los Muertos”, whose films are slow, minimalist, with very little plot (or sometimes dialogue) – and ultimately beautiful and profound. You can’t reduce them to a formula. Ultimately, to find a filmmaker like Alonso, you have to have trust in his ability, buttressed by what you know of his previous work.
This divide of films which can be packaged and merchandised (and the whole agent game which brings actors as “properties” to the project) and those which can’t is a wider and wider wall of separation at Cannes.
For me, the possibility that art films can continue to exist largely depends on committed or knowledgeable people, the “enablers” of art cinema. They are not many, and perhaps not all well known. Perhaps they are producers, like Bober (and he is a young guy). Or they are like
Pierre Rissient, a kind of festival advisor, promoter, godfather.
Eric Khoo, the Malaysian filmmaker of “
Be With Me” whom Rissient brought to the West (a wonderful, extraordinarily moving film) is one. His second film is playing at Cannes this year.
Carlos Reygadas, for me the most interesting Mexican filmmaker and one of the most exciting filmmakers anywhere, started out at Cannes with
Japon. Last year, his beautiful
Silent Light, his third feature, set among the Mennonite community of Mexico, won a prize at Cannes. Each of his three features (
Battle in Heaven was the second film, also shown at Cannes) is different in style, which makes him difficult to pigeon-hole and sometimes confounds his critics.
Lucrecia Martel, whose claustrophobic first feature
La Cienaga I also saw at Cannes is back this year with her third feature,
The Headless Woman. In her first two films (
Holy Girl was the second feature), Martel found a whole new narrative language, a new way of oblique storytelling, at once perverse, terrifying and mysterious. Both Reygadas and Martel exist and work because they can piece together co-productions between producers in their own countries and European entities – Arte, the French-German arts public television channel being a principal participant.
What all this is about, ultimately, is belief in the artist. That’s what the Cannes Festival is about, more than anything else, and that’s what, for me, makes it interesting, enervating, exhausting, and occasionally joyous. It’s not the world premiere of the new
Steven Spielberg Indiana Jones.
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Kornel Mundruczo’s Delta.
Also, much awaited, the new film by Lucretia Martel (The Holy Girl), The Headless Woman.
The Clint Eastwood film, first called Changeling, now The Exchange – a period drama set in 1920s Los Angeles, based on the kidnapping of a 9-year old boy from a single mother (Angelina Jolie) and her struggle to get the corrupt LAPD to investigate. A melodramatic script with Angelina Jolie pouting her lips at every opportunity – the narrative careens all over the place, and if nothing else, the film reveals the limitations of Jolie’s acting range.
