Cannes

[Mark Schilling]

This is an edited version of the report on the Cannes Film Festival that I
filed for The Japan Times. I thought parts of it, particularly on Japanese
and Japanese-influenced films screened at the festival, might be of
interest to list members. Yoroshiku.

Mark Schilling


>Everyone has a different Cannes. For some the most important film
>festival and market is an excuse to party, while for others it is another
stop on
> the year's endless round of deal meetings and for still others -- not the
> majority by any means -- it is a place to see the films competing for the
> film world's most coveted prize after the Best Picture Oscar: the Golden
> Palm. 
> 	This year I wangled my way onto a panel that rated the competition films
> for the daily editions of a British film trade magazine, which meant,
>said  my editor, that I had to attend all the press screenings and phone
in my
> zero- to four-palm review immediately after. Well, a delay in getting a
> plane reservation and a mix-up at the accreditation desk soon scotched
>that  plan -- I did not see my first film until May 15, three days after
the
> festival began. I tried to play catch-up at the market screenings, but I
> ended up missing four of the 22 competition films, including "All About
>My Mother," which earned a Best Director prize for Pedro Almodovar. 
> 
<cut>
   
> 	Asian films were conspicuous by their relative absence at the awards
> ceremony. Nobuhiro Suwa received a FIPRESCI foreign press prize for his
> second film "M/OTHER," continuing a recent trend of Japanese directors
> winning minor awards at major film events. Chen Kaige's beautifully
> photographed, weakly plotted period drama "The Emperor and the Assassin"
> garnered only a technical achievement prize -- a bitter disappointment
> given the Herculean efforts by Chen and his editors to salvage his fading
> reputation by recutting what was supposed to be his masterpiece. 
> 	A better film, at least in the estimation of festival audiences, was
> Takeshi Kitano's "Kikujiro". In telling the story of a young boy's summer
> journey, together with a middle-aged hoodlum, to find his mother in the
> Shizuoka countryside Kitano shifted from his patented brand of deadpan
> violence in the direction of goofball slapstick and gentle
>sentimentality. Some of the sterner-minded critics judged the film a
sell-out, but it
>drew laughter and applause at its press screenings -- and became a media
> front-runner for a festival prize. The jury, however, opted for art
>insteadof entertainment, leaving Kitano out in the cold.  
> 	 Asian influence was also evident in several of the non-Asian
> competition entries. One such was Jim Jarmusch's "Ghost Dog: The Way of
>the Samurai," a typically Jarmuschian (read: ironic) examination of an odd
> corner of America life. The hero, a black hitman played with appealing
> earnestness by Forest Whitaker, scripts his every move according to that
> classic manual of samurai behavior, "Hagakure." This, as might be
>imagined, leads to ludicrous consequences, especially when the hitman
tries to >pay fealty to his "lord" -- an elderly Mafioso who once saved his
life in a
> street dustup. Jarmusch's riffs on this conceit becomes strained,
> particularly in a final confrontation between the urban samurai and his
> master, but the comedy, especially to those who know what he is sending
>up, is mostly delightful, while never descending to mere mockery of the
>samurai and his ideals. There is something to this code of honor stuff,
Jarmusch
> seems to say, though without, as is his usual enigmatic way, telling us
> exactly what that something might be. 
> 	Likewise Japanesque was Peter Greenaway's "Eight And A Half Women,"
>which buries a story vaguely based on Fellini's "8 1/2" in a blizzard of
>dialogue and imagery that virtually defines the word "pretentious." When a
wealthy
> Geneva businessman is plunged into melancholy by the death of his wife,
>his son, who is managing eight and a half pachinko parlors for him in
Kobe,
> tries to console him by recruiting a harem of women to take her place --
> and never shutting up. Greenaway's ideas about Japan, and Japanese women
>in particular, are little more than exotic clich?s, despite their surface
sophistication. >One imagines that he prepped for the film by reading the
more smartly shallow >articles in inflight magazines. 
> 
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