Inside Cannes: Part Four

Facets Executive Director Milos Stehlik is at the Cannes Film Festival. His observations will appear on Facets Features all week! Today, he ruminates on Cannes congestion and Takeshi Kitano's latest!


A paralysis hits the streets of Cannes on Sunday when the local people mix with 40,000 visitors on the streets. It takes a half hour to get someplace that should normally take 5 minutes. A Turkish journalist friend complained to me that there is not enough time left between screenings, particularly since the one philosophy everyone at the Cannes Film Festival quickly learns to subscribe to is “hurry up and wait.”

Wait in long lines, segmented and stratified by the color of your badge; wait to cross the street because of entourages of cars (the police make you wait); walk blocks to get around a particular blockage caused by who knows what.

Yesterday, waiting at the cashier of Monoprix, the French department store chain, with one person ahead of me, something happened. The young cashier picked up the phone and called someone. Then, minute after minute went by. I thought she had run out of change. But no one came. Finally, she shrugged her shoulders and said, "Blockage."

Back to the Turkish friend: All the films are too long. She is absolutely right. There is almost no such film as a 100, 105 minute, let alone a 90 minute film. Virtually every film is over 2 hours long. It would almost always be a better film if it were shorter. Her explanation for it makes very good sense: “No more 35mm. So no more producer watching the production costs mount. In one word, it’s HD--high definition digital filmmaking.”

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Takeshi Kitano’s Outrage--not one of his best films--seems hastily put together. It is difficult to keep track of the shifting alliances and disalliances between the various yakuza clans vying for control. Beat Takeshi, who plays an old-style yakuza on the downward slide, is his usual stone-faced self, but seems oddly tired.

Outrage pushes the violence level to an extreme degree. Among Kitano’s contributions to the repertoire is a particularly nasty number done on a yakuza client with a dentist’s drill, and the number of fingers which are chopped off as apologies for infractions seems like a growth industry. But the violence seems an odd substitute for the irony and edgy attitude which made the early Kitano yakuza films like Violent Cop and Boiling Point so fresh and exciting.