2008 Festival de Cannes: Part Four

Day 5

A diet of 5-6 films a day doesn’t leave much room for anything else. Though the speculation about possible Palme d’Or winners hasn’t really begun yet, no one is complaining about the selection of films in the competition, though opinion veers all over the place on the strongest films. Arnaud Desplechin, one of the chief progenitors of the very talky French cinema (La Sentinelle, Esther Kahn) had his feature, A Christmas Tale, in competition. The ambitious (and long) film is set in the family home of a family-at-war during a Christmas holiday. Catherine Deneuve is looking for a compatible blood donor for her rare leukemia, with her estranged son Henri and psychologically-damaged grandson. Though the interlocking stories are in and of themselves banal, what is tremendously sophisticated here is Desplechin’s overlapping style, and the rigor which Desplechin applies as an overarching mirror to the subject.

Also well received here is Linha de Passe, a new Brazilian film by Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas. Set in a poor section of Sao Paolo, this film of the aspirations and difficult life of a single mother with her four sons harks back to neo-realistic roots, and depicts rich characters whose hopes and aspirations are thwarted by the limitations and barriers imposed by society.

A surreal scene, which can only happen at Cannes: walking out of a screening of Raymond Depardon’s beautiful, moving – and very simple – documentary portrait of French peasant farmers – Modern Life. The film is full of dignity and empathy for its characters, connected to the land and the seasons and to the animals they keep. The scene on the outside of the Palais was the world premiere of the new Indiana Jones film. Huge crowds everywhere, many of those waiting for a glimpse of the stars, Harrison Ford and whomever else, now turned into objects of merchandising by wearing faux Indiana Jones hats, cleverly passed out by the studio. A special public-private moment: the audience turned into a branding mechanism – a diabolical trick of capitalism at its extreme margins. Chaz Ebert told me this morning that Mike Phillips, the film critic of the Chicago Tribune, who gave the new Indiana Jones a mixed-bad review, was deluged within an hour here by emails from angry readers (the review was first posted online) – more proof that the supposedly “critic-proof” Indiana Jones franchise can triumph no matter what. There was an opinion piece in the local daily Variety here in Cannes, basically celebrating the studio’s ebullience at having critics so marginalized that, like processed fast-food, the taste and what others think of it makes little difference.


- Facets Multi-Media Executive Director Milos Stehlik, reporting from the 2008 Festival de Cannes.