CINEMA CAN • A D A Doing the Cannes thing BY MARC GERVAIS regory Peck, Marcello Mastroianni, logo- in-motion to laun ch each official Festival seems to be happening at Cannes. He totally Sophia Loren, Woody Allen, Gera rd entry. And more" hom mages ": to Carl Dreyer, agrees that Cannes (a las) has evolved awav Depardieu , Yves Montand , :viervl to Ha rry Langdon, to jury member Krysztof from its Festival aspect. Mos t of what rema ins of Streep, Francis Coppola, Nick Nolte, Kieslowski, and even to films featuring the Eiffel the fun -and-celebra tion past is ersatz, a phoney, Anthony Quinn, Ettore Scola, Jose Tower I The Festi val's most affectionate mediated non-e vent for the benefit of television FGerrer, Ossie Davis, Rubie Dee, Carole Bouquet, moment: Yves Montand, bestowing a special at its most trivializing. Now, everything in Sandrine Bonnaire, Sam Neill, Philippe Noiret, Palme d' or on Gregory Peck, now elderly, but Cannes is business and market. john Voigt, Jane Fonda, Fred 5chepisi, Paul Cox, still the epitome of handsome nobili ty and What film people go to Cannes for is, Chris Haywood - they (and many others) were grace. And there was the National Film Board of primaril y, to set up co-productions, find all there, on the screen or in person, maki ng it Canada, celebrating its fiftieth anniversary_. international in ves tors, that sort of thing. More very clear that the Cannes Film Fes ti va l, in its but more about that later. and more Canadians, for example, were 42nd edition, is still the premiere event in world ex pressing delight at th eir success this past May cinema, showing no sign of diminished vitali ty. QUALITY CONTROL AT CANNES in raising international money. However - and So the Festival thrives. What is espeCiall y rich It was a good year, vastly superior to last year's this, if true, constitutes an amazing development from the cinematic pOin t of view, however, is below-par exhibition, though nowhere as - when it comes to the buving and se ll ing of that the festi val has a vitality that grows out of brilliant as the Cannes offerings of two years films, the business is centring on quali tv the richness of the past, its own, and that of the ago. But before going into the film s of Ma y1 989 products, one might eve n sal' art films. If you cinemaasa whole. And so, to commemorate the (su rely the raisoll d'etreof the Festival and of this are in the business for ge nuine "B'''s (or worse), centenary of Charles Chaplin's birth, his report), a few further situating observations you now go, instead to MIFED in Milan, or grandchildren officially opened the Festiva l. may be appropriate. ma ybe to Los Angeles, or whereve r. In Cannes, Marcel Pagnol, a man who communicated his One comment concerns the continuing the best sellers now tend to be fil ms with cultural quintessentiallyLe Midi vision of France, was the evolution of the Festival toward business ambitions, be the v from Canada or from any object of a re trospective (complete with freshl y "realities " - but with a switch. As one other colmtry. All of which could mean tha't the restored prints). Jean Cocteau was ever present, perspicacious Cannes Festival habitue pointed Cannes Fes ti val, through a bizarre and circuitous since one of his Muses served as the Festival's out to me, something fascinating, and hopeful, evolu tion, is once again beCl'ming primarilv a centre promoting world film culture. Well, perhaps. Thus, even as stirring a summons as that uttered by this vear's JurI' President, Winl Wenders: may ~ot seem 'out of place : "The cinema is our common language, it is universal. \1ore threatened no\\- than ever before, it is also more necessar\' than ever. " Wenders is no doubt alluding to the flood of images noll' \\'ashing ou t th e meaningfulness of our culture (Post-modernism at its most threatening ), as he continues: "In the vast media circus that Cannes has become, it is incumbent upon the JurI' to define the iust proportions, to give pride of place to the cinema and to pwgress in cinematographic ar t, so that the tru th of the images imprinted L111 film stock mal' shine out bevond the half- truths and lies of the noisl' environment. " Going one step further towards nobilit\', in this bicentenarv vea r of the French Rel'olution and of the Decia;ation of the Rights of \Ian, the Cannes Festival created a special " Dav of Cinema and Li berll·. "No less th an 100 directors (" from Angelou polos to Zanussi"), who had presented \\'orks at Cannes in the past, films that championed freedom and human rights even at the personal risk Llf the film directors themselves, Marl Gm'ais iSl'ftl{e5sor of COIIIIUIIllicatioliS at A scene from Black Rain by Japan's Shohei Imamura. COllcordin Ullii'ersitll ill MOlltreal. SIPTUlBIR 19.9 CINEMA CANADA PAGE 19 CINEMA CAN A D A • were brought back to participa te in an all-day film, the most recent creation of Shohei seminar - a celebration, really - on the right to Imamu ra, who a fe wyears ago won Cannes' top human liberty and the right to a free cinema. award with his overrated remake ofThe Ballad of Pretty heady stuff, this. And that spirit Nayaralila. Black Raill scores high wi th its actually found its way on to the Cannes screens, unsentimentalized treatment of those victims of a fe w times, in films that harked back to the Hiroshima's nuclear holocaust who initially stridency of the '60s. Uno Broka's Fight For Us, survived, only to succumb to the after-effects shot in the Philippines, paints a frightening, yea rs later - a rather gentle reminder to those disheartening picture of the post-Marcos years, whos till live quite comfortably wi th the reality of the early hopes dashed by vicio us paramilitary nuclear proliferation. execution gangs running wil d - beyond the control of Cory Aquino, and wi th the ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST connivance of the Army. Amore muted, But now, onto the "Western world," and those sometimes humorous, ever-intelligent effort, films that always make up the vast majority of Gina My Pain, about the Maoist re-education of Cannes' more interesting offerings. That means a thirteen-year-old boy, becomes terribly that usual hit-and-run approach of choosing poignant in the light of the recent events. Spike what to see amidst the avalanche of possibilities. Lee's sparky Do the Right TIling does its sizzling slice-of-life thing about the big-city ghetto, only Scandinavia. Denmark was unable to follow up to succumb to muddleheadedness (or on the lovelycreations of the two previous years insincerity?) in its attempts to sit on bo th sides (KatiIlM, Pelle the COllqueror, and its two of the violence fence . And there was Shot DOlUll, masterpieces, Ba betle's Fea st and Hip, Hip, a very low-budget film, seen on the market by Houmil l). Sweden was represented in th e only a handful of us because the producers had official competition with WOllleli olilhe Roof, a no monel' to show it more than once. Filmed in mildly perverse, rather stylish fill de siecie study South Af;'ica by South Africans, Shot Down is a perilouslv close to the Da vid Hamilton school of sort of contemporary incarnation of the German aesthetics. Mitti Ka ssila's TIle Glory illid Misenj of expressionist cabaret '20s, dazzling in its searing Hu mall Life I found more sa tisfl'ing, exce pt for a condemnation of the social evils prevalent in certain ponderousness one tends to associate that troubled countrl' - and wi tness to the fac t with Finnish filmmaking . that there is an exp l ~s i ve movement for reform in South Africa among whites as well. Australia presented an intriguing mix. Fred Not that these four films were typical of Schepisi's A Cry ill the Dark has been around Cannes '89; the late '80s are decidedly not the 1'\orth America for a while, but is nell' toEurope. late '60s. Freedom in the contemporary cinema Predictably, it picked up Best Actress award for finds its expression in other ways, or better still, Meryl Streep, whose showy talents and focuses on other aspects of the question. The narcissistic acting s~l le continue to enthra ll a good films tend to posit freedom's desirabilityas surprising nu mber of "experts. " Two other a given. Many movies go back to the bad old Aussie films , Jane Campion's Sweetie and [an days - say, th e Nazi era (Reunioll) - in a spirit of Pringle's Sf. Petersburg, received prestige meditation, or regret, or indignation. Generally, showings, aggressively showing the "other however, it is not vas t social or political side " of Aus tralian filmmaking. Campion movements that are envisaged, but rather cultivates the absurd, the outrageous, and the personal struggles for inner fu lfillment, for ugly, while Pringle engages in a sort of achieving a sense of person. [n this more counter-culture updating of Dostoyevsky's The spiritual mode, it is rather the mass media, or Idiot. On the other hand, Ian Barry's Outback, a co ntemporary culture, or false materialistic sophomOriC spin-off of MGll Frolll SIiOWY River, values that are seen as the enemies of genuine demonstrates how awful an Aussie period piece liberty. Or so it seems in the most of the film s can really be, no matter how beautiful the that are not given over to mindless exploitation.