Fear and loathing on the Riviera

The stars were dazzling, but the films were sombre at this year's Cannes festival, says Laurence Green The sun cast a luminous glow over the tranquil waters of the Mediterranean; the yachts were securely moored in the harbour, their colourful masts flapping in the breeze. and the predatory paparazzi were busy hunting down their elusive prey along the Croisette.Yes, you've guessed it, the 56th Cannes International Film Festival was in full swing.
Initial fears that Chirac's stubborn stance over the Iraq war would keep film makers, stars and buyers — particularly from America — away proved unfounded. The festival once again rolled down the red carpet. crowds clamoured daily around the Palais des Festivals and the celebrities attending included Elizabeth Taylor. Nicole Kidman, Clint Eastwood, Tim Robbins and Meg Ryan (who was on the jury).
Undoubtedly the most eagerly awaited entry among the 20 in competition in this 11-day event was Lars Von Trier's Dogville. A female fugitive arrives in the isolated township of Dogville in the Rocky Mountains on the run from a group of gangsters. She is given refuge and in return agrees to work for the community. .However when a search party closes in, the people of Dogville demand a better deal and the fugitive learns the hard way that in this town goodness is relative and there is a price to be paid. But she has a secret — and it is a dangerous one.
Von Trier, never an orthodox director, chose to film this quintessentially American tale on a dark studio stage in his native Denmark with fragmented interiors of houses — a bedroom here, a living room there — and streets indicated merely by name but on which are driven real cars. The camera tracks from one home to another and from one set of individuals to another. The effect is initially bizarre and seems to militate against the realism of the story and the playing. However, gradually we get drawn into Von Trier's bold vision and engage with the characters who seem like a cross section from the movies of the Thirties and Forties and the novels of John Steinbeck.
The performances by Nicole Kidman, Paul Bettany, Lauren Bacall. Ben Gazzara and James Caan are all commendable and the story is eloquently narrated by John Hurt.
This film was the clear favourite to win the prestigious Golden Palm. But that honour went to Gus Van Sant's powerful and disturbing Elephant. The film unfolds on an ordinary day in an American high school — a boy develops photographs in the school darkroom, another arranges for his brother to collect his inebriate father, a girl refuses to wear shorts and receives hostile comments from the other girls and a boy is bullied in class — and ends with a Columbine-style massacre that has become an all-too-familiar event in American society.
Van Sant adopts a quasi-documentary style approach with the camera tracking down corridors and capturing snippets of conversation and convincingly builds up a picture of everyday lives in progress before the shocking climax which comes from totally out of the blue. The film does not attempt to explain the motivation of the two teenage killers or to offer any form of judgement for their actions. This of course makes what happens all the more chilling.
Take a political fable, add a parody of a crime thriller, mix with a touch of surrealism and the result is Raoul Ruiz's baffling but absorbing That Day, shown in competition. The story (if that is the word for it, since logic gets thrown out the window) concerns a young woman who thinks tomorrow will be the best day of her life. Inadvertently she kills her entire family, who, it transpires, had hired a killer — a lunatic released from an asylum — to execute her. The two policemen assigned to the case, meanwhile, decide to wait .. and wait.
Ruiz begins by taking a realistic approach, then deviates from this path to take swipes at society and its ills. There is more than a nod to Bunuel here. most notably in the banquet of the damned sequence. The performances are good, particularly the one by that veteran of French cinema Michel Piccoli and it is truly the work
of an original film maker.
If you can imagine Chekhov updated to the 21st century and transported to rural France,. you will have some idea of the flavour of Claude Miller's La Petite Lili (also in competition), which is freely adapted from The Seagull. However, a basically intriguing concept sadly goes off the rails about two-thirds of the way through, as, although Miller manages to convey the contemporary nature and universality of Chekhov's theme, his version moves towards a different denouement. Nevertheless, there are compensations; the film is beautifully shot and there are striking performances from Robinson Stevenin, Nicole Garcia, Bernard Giraudeau and the lovely Ludivine Sagnier in the title role.
Britain only had one entry in the official selection, Peter Greenaway's strange but haunting The Tulse Luper Suitcases Part 1: The Moab Story, which covers 60 years of the Twentieth century from 1928 with the discovery of uranium in Colorado up to 1989 and at the end of the Cold War. Greenaway employs a range of technical wizardry — superimposed images, split screens, newsreel archive footage — often to great effect, but this remains for me a triumph of style over substance.
Another British film, Roger (Notting Hill) Michell's BBC-funded The Mother, made some impact outside the official festival. Written by Hanif Kureishi, this is an affecting tale of love and loss, grief and fleeting happiness with an excellent central performance by Anne Reid.
A witty and truthful ode to family, friendship and the meaning of life is how you could describe Denys Arcand's polished Ixs Invasions Barbares which centres on a hospitalised, middle-aged man whose ex-wife, son and former mistresses gather at his bedside as his past is relived.
This follow-up to Arcand's breakthrough film The Decline of the American Empire is no great shakes visually but has a strong script (also by Arcand) with well defined characters. The humour, especially, has irony and bite. "You know what your hell will be like?" says one character to our protagonist. "You'll be locked in with all the women you seduced and forced to listen to them for all eternity!"
Rdmy Girard as the man at the centre of all the female attention and the rest of the splendid cast help bring this intelligent, thoughtprovoking film vividly to life. It was a worthy winner of the Best Screenplay Award.
0 ther entries which made an impression were Clint Eastwood's dark, compelling Mystic River and Alexander Sokurov's dreamlike Father and Son. about the intense bond between a father and his son, which received the Special Jury Prize.
The Ecumenical Prize was awarded to Samira Makhmalbaf's At Five O'Clock in the Afternoon, which evokes the tension between tradition and the modern world in an Afghani family, and focuses on the roles of women in building a new society. For me, though, the best film at Cannes and winner of the Grand Prix (second prize) was Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Distant, an intimate and moving study of loneliness and frustration.
A photographer who is haunted by the feeling that the gap between his life and ideas is growing, finds himself obliged to put up in his apartment a young relative who has left his village looking for a job aboard a ship in Istanbul.
That, basically, is the storyline but Turkish director Ceylan is more concerned, with character and motivation than plot and, with a minimum of dialogue, provides an illuminating insight into the lives of his two main characters, gradually peeling away emotions and revealing untapped depths.
Marvellous performances from Muzaffer Oalemir and Mehmet Emin Toprak, who both shared the Best Actor Award, and stunning visuals — snow is used here as a recurrent motif to mirror the bleakness and isolation of the protagonists — made this little gem of a film a memorable experience.