2008 Festival de Cannes: Part Seven

Day 10

Laurent Cantet’s The Class (the French title, Entre les murs is more suggestive), showing to a less-than-full audience on the last full day of the festival. Everyone is exhausted. The festival market has closed and lots of people are already going home. And it’s Saturday, 8:30 a.m. The film, by this talented director of Human Resources, Heading South and Time Out is talky and intense. The co-screenwriter worked with real-life teacher Francois Begaudeau, who plays the teacher in the film himself and who wrote a book that inspired the film. The kids in the classroom are real-life, and the events in the film are based on real-life incidents. The school is in a tough Paris neighborhood, and as the confrontation between the students and the teacher develops, it exposes the cracks both in the system and in the ability of the teacher to cope. Despite the school system’s rather sympathetic approach to dealing with problem students, the film reveals the disjunction between family and social problems and the school. The film is naturalistic and intense.

Day 12

The awards: The Class won the Palme d’Or – something, given how late in the festival the film was shown – I doubt anyone really expected. It is not that it is not necessarily deserving – it’s that it is not significantly better than other films in this year’s Cannes Festival. This year, more than perhaps any other, it would be interesting to know what really went on in the jury deliberations, because the whole list of prizes seems like a series of compromises.

Lorna's Silence, the new Dardenne Brothers film, gets the Best Screenplay award – a strange choice. Benicio del Toro gets the Best Actor for Che – also strange, because his performance is pretty inconsistent (though energetic) and it is NOT a great performance. Sandra Corveloni gets the Best Actress for Linha De Passe, the Brazilian film by Walter Salles in which she plays the working class single mother of 4 boys. This IS a singularly strong performance. Nuri Bilge Ceylan gets the Best Director for Three Monkeys; Gomorra, the pretty terrific Neapolitan mafia film which handles multiple plot strands with great adeptness gets the GRAND PRIX of the Jury. The omission of Waltz with Bashir, the one truly innovative film in this year’s lineup is strange, too. Speculation is unavoidable: is the fact that it is a documentary in animation have something to do with Marjane Satrapi, who was on this year’s Cannes jury, and who is the co-director of Persepolis?


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