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What is this thing called Cannes?
Grueling, crowded, complicated, unforgiving, it's been likened by a survivor to “a fight in a brothel during a fire.” A place where reputations are made and hearts are broken, fascinating and frustrating in equal parts, it has a love-hate relationship with Hollywood, yet gives out awards, including the Palme d'Or for best picture, that are the movie world's most coveted next to the Oscars. It's where Clint Eastwood might find himself watching — and enjoying — an Iranian film about baking bread, a place, novelist Irwin Shaw wrote, that attracted all of film: “the artists and pseudo-artists, the businessmen, the con men, the buyers and sellers, the peddlers, the whores, the pornographers, critics, hangers-on, the year's heroes, the year's failures.” It's where you need a press pass to get your press pass, and where those passes come in five hierarchical (and color-coded) levels of importance. Its official name is Festival International du Film, the International Film Festival, as if there were only one, so it's no surprise that, more than anything else, Cannes is big.
Normally a city of 70,000, Cannes sees its population increase by 50 percent during the twelve days it functions as the stand-alone epicenter of the international film world. Producer David Puttnam calls it “one- 14 / Festivals with Business Agendas stop shopping,” the place where business and creative types and the people who write about them congregate. “I'm quite enjoying it,” Booker Prize-winning novelist A. S. Byatt told me on her first visit in 1995. “I'm a workaholic, and everyone here is too. It's a city full of them, frantically busy. Like the ant heap.”
In a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, then, everyone is here from everywhere because everyone else is here as well, and where else are you going to run into all those people? The French pornography industry schedules its annual Hot d'Or awards to coincide with the festival, and a group of more than a hundred French railway workers/cinema enthusiasts show up annually to award the wonderfully named Rail d'Or to a deserving film. To take advantage of all this, the festival has become the world's largest yearly media event, a round-the-clock cinematic billboard that in 1999 attracted 3,893 journalists, 221 TV crews, and 118 radio stations representing 81 countries all told. And then there are the films. Don't ask about the films.
For unlike most festivals, Cannes has a film market officially attached, where international buyers swoop in to view and possibly purchase the rights to something like six hundred films displayed in thousands of screenings in nearly thirty rooms. When you add in the nearly hundred films shown at the festival proper (which is actually more like three separate festivals competing against each other), what results is a cinematic triathlon so strenuous it even exhausts the man who put it together for twenty-three years, Gilles Jacob. When the festival is over, Jacob told me once, “I go home to Paris, and I talk to no one. Not my wife, not my children. No one.”
But even saying all this doesn't truly capture Cannes, an experience Variety's Timothy M. Gray once characterized as not only impossible to describe to someone who's never been there but also “nearly impossible to describe to someone who has been there.” Because the halls of the headquarters Palais du Festival and the streets and beaches surrounding it are a circus with an infinite number of rings, anywhere you turn reveals something you can't quite believe you're seeing.
On a day chosen at random near the end of the 2000 festival, several large TVs in the Palais were broadcasting Brian De Palma's press conference, where the Mission to Mars director was seen lashing out at a questioner who had the temerity to ask about aspects of “hommage” in his work. “It's that word again,” De Palma raged, literally pointing an accusatory finger at the unsuspecting miscreant. “It's been attached to me for forty years, and no one's been able to define it. What does it mean?”
Escaping De Palma and the Palais, you nearly get run over by a roller-skating young woman simultaneously turning in circles and selling newspapers: “Nice-Matin, Nice-Matin,” she yells as the wheels grind. Turning away, you find your hand taken by a person in a giant Mickey Mouse costume who then pulls you within camera range of a man with a Polaroid who wants to be paid for the compromising photo of you and the Mouse he's about to take. Out of the corner of your eye you see a black-robed character, his face masked and hooded, nonchalantly walk by wearing a sandwich board advertising Demonium, a film few people have heard of and less care about.
You try and move away, but two women from something called Pop.com, a Web site whose ultimate purpose is as darkly mysterious as Demonium, hand you a red balloon and a lollipop. On the beach, a crowd is forming, silently watching as a kneeling young woman gets a tattoo etched onto her shoulder. Pause for a moment to watch and two people brush past, loaded down like Sherpas with dozens of heavy plastic sacks on their shoulders. Each sack turns out to be a press kit for a film called Dead Babies, including, for those who've always wanted one, a Dead Babies travel toothbrush.
With scenes like this all around, is it any wonder that the appearance of “bad boy Dennis Rodman” to promote a film called Cutaway at a party featuring “a laser show, go-go cages, ribaldry, revelry and European and U.S. DJs” causes hardly a ripple?
For many film people, a first trip to Cannes is kind of a grail, a culmination that tells you, whether you're a journalist with a computer or a filmmaker walking up the celebrated red carpet to the Palais du Festival for an evening-dress only screening, that you've arrived. For me, paradoxically, it was a beginning, the first dizzying, tantalizing glimpse of a chaotic world I wanted to be part of but wasn't sure had room for me.
Cannes was celebrating its twenty-fifth festival when I first covered it in 1971 as a not-much-older reporter for the Washington Post. Though the event had strayed from its stated goal of being “a festival of cinematographic art, from which all extracinematic preoccupations would be excluded,” it was even then a terribly exciting place to be.
Hardly any Americans made the trip in those days, and I was rewarded with a room in a smart hotel called the Gonnet located on the Boulevard de la Croisette, the city's trademark oceanfront promenade, filled even then with crowds and crowd-pleasing eccentrics, like the elderly gentleman who pounded a cowbell and exclaimed in French, “Always the same films, always the same circus. Pollution, mental and physical pollution. Nothing, nothing, nothing.”
The old festival Palais was a classic white building, small but elegant, and patrolled by a vigilant cadre of tuxedoed guards determined to evict gate crashers. I got my first taste of how surreal Cannes can be as I watched a well-dressed French interloper being almost choked to death as he was literally dragged out of the Palais by a pair of tuxedos. Yet he didn't lack the presence of mind to insist, as loudly as that chokehold would allow, “Un peu de politesse, s'il vous plait” — a bit of politeness, if you don't mind.
Because U.S. reporters, even young ones, were a rare commodity, setting up interviews was easy and casual. I spent a rainy afternoon with Jack Nicholson, listening to him defend his directorial debut, Drive, He Said, which had been screened the night before to a wave of boos. And I talked to the great Italian director Luchino Visconti, who chuckled as he told me that his visa for an upcoming American visit didn't allow him to leave New York.
“I don't know why they think I'm dangerous — maybe they think I want to kill Nixon,” he said puckishly. “I have no intention of doing any subversive actions. I don't want to kill Nixon, or even Mrs. Nixon. I just want to see the rest of the country. Write this in Washington; perhaps the president will read it.” I did; he didn't.
I didn't get back to Cannes until 1976, and the crowds had not abated. It was at a late-night debut of Nagisa Oshima's In the Realm of the Senses, whose lurid story of mutual sexual obsession leading to castration had created a ferocious want-to-see, that I got the closest I've ever been to being crushed against a wall by a surging, expectant overflow crowd. Even Oshima's images seemed tame after that.
That was also the year Taxi Driver won the Palme d'Or, and I watched, as surprised as he was, as youthful director Martin Scorcese got his first taste of how disconcertingly political European film journalism can be. Midway through the Taxi Driver press conference, a French journalist rose and referred to a scene between Robert De Niro's Travis Bickle and Jodie Foster's Iris where Travis talks about getting away from the city and spending some quiet time in the country.
“Mr. Scorcese,” the journalist asked, “should we interpret that scene as Travis turning his back on bankrupt Western industrial capitalism and insisting on a more communal, socialist model for life in the future?” Scorcese looked truly, deeply baffled. “No,” he said finally. “Travis just wants to spend some time in the country.”
That festival also gave me an insight into the thought patterns of actors, even actors turned director. Roman Polanski was in attendance with The Tenant, adapted from a novel by Roland Topor, which tells the story of a man who takes over an apartment just vacated by a woman who has committed suicide and begins to feel his neighbors want him to end his life as well. Polanski played the lead in addition to directing, spending what felt like half the movie attempting suicide in drag by jumping out of an upper-story window, not succeeding, and then crawling back up the stairs, still in drag, to leap out all over again. And again.
“Mr. Polanski,” I blurted out with what now seems like startling naïveté. “Why did you ever choose this film?” He looked at me with genuine surprise. “It's a great role for me, don't you think?” was his reply, and he meant it.
A bemused man with a rasping, infectious laugh that went along with an obvious streak of darkness, Polanski took advantage of the interview to tell a series of jokes to a receptive audience. My favorite concerned a man who came to a rabbi and asked, Polanski doing a fine Jewish accent, “Rabbi, I must know, am I going to heaven or hell?”
“The rabbi says, ‘You come here on a Saturday to bother me about things like this?’ But the man persists. ‘It's become an obsession with me, rabbi. I haven't slept for three months; my wife wants to leave me; I must know.’ ‘All right,’ says the rabbi. ‘Come back next Saturday.’
“When the man comes back, the rabbi says, ‘I prayed, I concentrated, I spoke with God, and I have an answer. First the good news. You're going to heaven; there's absolutely no doubt. Now the bad news. You're leaving Wednesday.'”
Don't misunderstand. It's not like this used to be some quiet little fishing village that regrettably got overrun by the glamoroids of the international film community. For more than 150 years, ever since Lord Brougham, a Lord Chancellor of England, was prevented by an outbreak of cholera from wintering in Nice in 1834 and spent his time here instead, Cannes has been a playground for the moneyed classes, home to regal hotels, chic restaurants, and pricey boutiques. Not for nothing is its sister city Beverly Hills.
And despite the French passion for cinema, there might never have been a festival here if it wasn't for the way the Italians under Mussolini and the Fascists ran the Venice Film Festival, founded in 1932. In 1937, Jean Renoir's La Grande Illusion was denied the top prize because of its pacifist sentiments, and the French decided if you wanted something done right you had to do it yourself.
The initial Cannes film festival (the city won out as the site after an intramural tussle with Biarritz on the Atlantic coast) was scheduled for the first three weeks of September 1939. Hollywood responded by sending over The Wizard of Oz and Only Angels Have Wings along with a “steamship of stars” including Mae West, Gary Cooper, Norma Shearer, and George Raft. The Germans, however, chose September I, 1939 to invade Poland, and after the opening night screening of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the festival was canceled and didn't start up again until 1946.
According to the genial and informative Hollywood on the Riviera: The Inside Story of the Cannes Film Festival by Cari Beauchamp and Henri Behar, the ambiance of that first festival was not much different from today's. They quote an excerpt from a French newspaper about the i946 event that could have been written last year: “Here the streets are so jammed that one would think one is still in Paris. The shops are full of stuff at astronomical prices and…on the Croisette it is a constant parade of cars. It's the rendezvous of stars and celebrities, a whole world, half naked and tanned to a perfect crisp.”
Despite its advantages, Cannes started slowly, skipping i948 and 1950 and only getting onto an annual basis in 1951. It was in 1954 that French starlet Simone Sylva dropped her bikini top and tried to embrace Robert Mitchum in front of a horde of photographers, resulting in the kind of international press coverage that secured the festival's reputation. It had no trouble holding the world's attention, one disapproving film historian writes, because it “early opted for glamour and sensationalism” by concentrating on “the erotic fantasies of naked flesh so readily associated with a Mediterranean seaside resort.”
The rival sidebar event known as the International Critics Week was begun by influential French critic Georges Sadoul in 1962, but major change didn't come to Cannes until the pivotal year of 1968. In the face of a country in turmoil, with widespread antigovernment demonstrations and upward of i0 million people in the process of going out on strike, French directors like François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard pushed for and achieved the cancellation of Cannes at its midway point.
A tangible result of this upheaval was the founding in the following year of another independent sidebar event, the Quinzaine des Realisateurs, or Directors' Fortnight, which continues to compete with the official festival for films and has consistently shown edgier fare ranging from Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It to Todd Solondz's Happiness. The Quinzaine became such a threat to the festival that one of the first things Gilles Jacob did when he took over in i978 was to start his own edgier, noncompetitive sidebar event called “Un Certain Regard.”
By the time I returned to Cannes in 1992, even more had changed. The Gonnet, my first hotel, had been converted to luxury apartments, the old Palais had been torn down and replaced by the aggressively modern Noga Hilton, and a massive new Palais had replaced the chic casino next to the city's old port. Opened in 1983 at a cost of $60 million, the five-story Palais offers state-of-the-art projection in its two main theaters, the 2,400-seat Lumière and the 1,000-seat Debussy, and has so many hidden stairways, passages, and elevators I was still discovering new ones in the year 2000.
More and more, the festival had become a city within a city, taking over Cannes completely for the duration of the event. Flowers get planted two months before opening day so they'll look their best during the festival. Huge billboards on the Croisette display posters for films that are in the event as well as those that aren't but will be released later that year. A Planet Hollywood places the plaster handprints of Bruce Willis, Mel Gibson, and other stars next to a preexisting monument to Charles de Gaulle. The front of the august Carlton Hotel, a pricey survivor of the Belle Epoque, gets a different commercial makeover every year: once it featured a towering Godzilla, once a regrettably bigger than life Beavis and Butthead complete with the sentence “Huh-Huh, You Said Oui Oui,” once a working Egyptian temple, including bandage wrapped figures and life-size statues of the gods, to promote The Mummy. No wonder a French magazine headlined one year “Trop de Promo Tue le Cinéma,” too much publicity is killing cinema.
Everywhere as well are the excesses only money and stardom can generate. Celebrity hotel guests, the New York Times reported, have been known to “require 150 hangers for their wardrobes and gallons of mineral water for their baths.” The legendary Hôtel du Cap at Cap d'Antibes, where the German general staff luxuriated during the French occupation and where I watched Burt Lancaster dive off the rocks for an ocean swim in i97i, insists that its superpricey rooms be paid for in cash in advance.
For people tired of living in hotels, vessels like a luxury barge (“be in the middle of the business, be far from the noise” for $8,500 per day for a royal suite) or the Octopussy (“world famous, 143 foot luxury megayacht” costing $15,000 per day or $80,000 per week) are available. And if a regular taxi from the Nice airport is just too pokey, there are helicopters and chauffeur-driven red BMW 1100 motorcycles to be rented as well.
For those looking for a way to combine ostentation with good works, the social event of the season is always the $i,000-a-plate Cinema Against AIDS AmFAR benefit at the nearby Moulin de Mougins restaurant. In 1995, benefit chairperson Sharon Stone started the evening with a personal and emotional appeal for more funds for research and ended it by snappily auctioning off model Naomi Campbell's navel ring for $20,000 to a Saudi Arabian prince. As the bizarre bidding went back and forth, a classic Hollywood type with more money than sense wondered aloud if Stone would throw in a pair of her panties. “Anyone who has $7.50,” the actress replied in a bravura Cannes moment, “knows I don't wear any.”
It was at a quiet breakfast on the pristine terrace of the Hôtel du Cap that Tim Robbins, exhausted after enduring a wild all-night party that had people screaming in the hallway outside his room, succinctly encapsulated the relentless duality that is finally the trademark of this unwieldy, difficult-to-categorize festival.
“Cannes is a very strange mixture of the art of film and total prostitution of film,” he said. “One of the things I remember from my first year here in i992 is walking into a room and meeting a great actor like Gérard Depardieu and then walking out and seeing this poster of a woman with large breasts holding a machine gun. The film wasn't made yet, but they already had a title and an ad concept.”
This ability to somehow combine the yin and yang of the film business, to link at the same site the rarefied elite of the world's movie artists and a brazen international marketplace where money is the only language spoken and sex and violence the most convertible currencies, is the logic-defying triumph of Cannes.
This is a festival where popcorn movies like the Sharon Stone starring Quick and the Dead and Torrente, the Dumb Arm of the Law (advertised in its country of origin with the line “Just When You Thought Spanish Cinema Was Getting Better”) share space with the work of demanding directors like Theo Angelopolous, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, and Abbas Kiarostami. Where festival head Jacob speaks with pride of attracting Madonna as well as cult director Manoel de Oliveira. Where within twenty-four hours in i997 you could have a serious talk about the situation in Sarajevo with “Welcome to Sarajevo” director Michael Winterbottom and share a press lunch with Sylvester Stallone, who displayed an easy manner and surprising charm as he mordantly dissected past fiascoes like Stop or My Mother Will Shoot: “If it was a question of having my spleen removed with a tractor or watching it again, I'd say, ‘Start up the engine.'”
Stallone also ridiculed the current crop of action films (“If you took the explosions out, 90 percent of them would not have endings; if someone stole the gasoline truck, it would be like an e.e. cummings poem at the end”) and talked of looking forward to the gathering of all the previous Palme d'Or winners that was scheduled for later that week. “I'm gonna meet those people who won't work with me,” he said, amused. “All in one room.”
This uneasy but animated coexistence between the commercial and the artistic sometimes gets highlighted in a way no screenwriter could have concocted. Opening night of the 2000 festival, for instance, started with a casual screening of Ken Loach's Bread and Roses, an earnest film dealing with the urgent problems of labor organizers attempting to unionize impoverished, often illegal workers who make marginal livings cleaning the office towers of Los Angeles.
When that socially conscious picture was over, I hurried back to my room in the aptly named Hotel Splendid and changed from a T-shirt to a tuxedo to attend the official opening night party for Vatel, a big-budget French film set amid the “it's good to be the king” splendor of the profligate seventeenth-century court of the Roi du Soleil himself, Louis XIV.
Once Vatel's story of a celebrated chef and master of revels, played by Gérard Depardieu, had ended, the audience walked out the door of the Lumière theater and directly into the most elaborate, extravagant, and undoubtedly expensive re-creation of the film's world. The entire entrance hall of the Palais had been changed, via billowing red curtains, huge paintings, multiple candles, and artfully faked stone walls, into a vintage French chateau. And that was just the setting.
I joined the disbelieving guests in evening clothes and walked slowly down corridors that had become the physical duplicates of what had just been seen on screen. Actors dressed in period costumes brought Vatel's kitchens to life: bread was kneaded, fruit was dipped in glazes, ice was sculpted, salamis and cheeses and an enormous fresh fish were displayed, and, adding just the right touch, a man rushed through the crowd clutching a goose.
At the dinner itself, white-coated waiters poured champagne from a stream of magnums as actors playing the king and his intimates ate on a stage. By the time tabletop fireworks ended the evening, the janitors of Los Angeles seemed to belong to another universe.
The key element ensuring that the bracing presence of the commercial remains integral to Cannes is the market, officially known as MIF, Marché International du Film. It started in 1959, apparently with one flimsy twenty-seat room jerry-built onto the roof of the old Palais. Now, with its own brand-new building, the 70,000-square-foot Espace Riviera, it attracts approximately 6,000 participants representing some 1,500 companies from more than seventy countries. Many Cannes regulars agree with Ethan Coen, the writer-producer half of the Coen brothers team, that without the market Cannes would be “a little too snooty.”
Every year, festival regulars keep a watch for market films with titles that go beyond the preposterous. Standouts include Biker Mice from Mars, Teenage Bonnie and Klepto Clyde (“Desperate Kids, Bonded by Passion and Crime”), Headless Body in Topless Bar, Kraa! The Sea Monster (touted as the successor to Zarkorr! The Invader), and the always popular Attack of the Giant Moussaka. One year saw a wave of kickboxing films from Korea with titles like Year of the King Boxer and Kickboxer from Hell while comedies about sumo wrestlers never seem to go out of style: Sumo Do, Sumo Don't was offered in 1992, and in the year 2000 Secret Society showcased the story of an overweight housewife somehow becoming a sumo standout.
Having these films not only for sale but also available for viewing can be a refreshing change of pace, like a dish of palate-cleansing sorbet after a constant diet of heavier, more ponderous fare. I felt nothing but elation after experiencing Jerzy Hoffman's three-hour-and-three-minute With Fire and Sword, a Polish Gone with the Wind that came complete with a handsome hero, a deranged villain, and a beautiful princess with gold braids that reached almost to the ground. Other diversions included frequent male choral singing, bare-chested Cossacks pounding enormous drums, and a sidekick with the strength of ten who has taken a vow of chastity until he cuts off three heads with a single sword stroke. “I've gotten two many times,” he says mournfully, “but never three.” Only in the market.
The market is also the place where films that are little more than a concept and a title make themselves known in the hopes of raising enough money (via preselling foreign distribution rights) to actually shoot the film. In 1976, I was part of a contingent of revelers that was ferried out to a large cruise ship, where energetic waiters encouraged everyone to take part in the Greek party tradition of breaking plates. Hundreds of pieces of crockery dutifully made the ultimate sacrifice to help create interest in what turned out to be The Greek Tycoon.
Even as the market has grown more sophisticated, that kind of bombastic showmanship has not gone away. At the 2000 festival, the talk centered on a new film from resurgent mogul Menahem Golan (“the producer and director of Delta Force, $100 million in world box office”), who flooded the city with posters, flyers, and much-sought-after T-shirts for Elian, the Gonzales-boy Story, a.k.a. “the explosive, dramatic and human story that captured the world.” Illustrated with an obviously faked photo re-creation of Elian's celebrated rescue at gunpoint, the film swore that it was “shooting now in a secret location.” Everyone considered themselves warned.
This shameless carnival atmosphere is not for everyone, and it can be especially tiring for stars and directors who are dragooned into promoting new films. Frenetically shuttled from one-on-ones with key journalists to group situations to TV setups to still photo opportunities, prime interview targets can feel like valuable private railway cars being switched from track to track as they meet literally hundreds of media representatives. It's no wonder that by the time Chinese star Gong Li got to a group press lunch in 1993 to promote Farewell My Concubine, she was so hungry she ate all the rolls off the table and asked her interpreter if she could have some of her lunch as well.
Filmmakers also don't necessarily enjoy Cannes, because, unlike famously supportive festivals like Toronto and Telluride, it can be an unforgiving, high-risk, hostile place. Boos not infrequently clash with cheers after competition screenings, so much so that even as much of a Cannes partisan as head man Gilles Jacob has admitted “the commentators are merciless. There are festivals where you can send a film thinking that if it doesn't go down well, it may do OK in the long run. That's not possible at Cannes. Cannes is very violently for or against.”
One form of dismay that is unique to Cannes is an activity I've come to call “thumping.” The seats in the Palais snap back with a resounding sound when their occupants get up to leave, so when disgruntled viewers exit a screening before a film is finished, everyone knows about it. “There is something terrifying in the new Palais,” is how a publicist quoted in their book described one unfortunate screening to authors Beauchamp and Behar. “People were so bored they started leaving after an hour in droves. In packs. It went clack clackclackclack clackclack clack. You felt repeatedly stabbed in the back. Each clack was terrifying. And it's still terrifying. Those clacks remain engraved.”
But no matter what they think about the dark and chaotic sides of the Cannes experience, even the unlikeliest filmmakers in the end are almost compelled to attend because it is so big, because so much worldwide publicity can be generated from here.
John Sayles and his producing partner Maggie Rienzi, called in one profile people who “will never be mistaken for the sort of couple who attract the paparazzi in Cannes,” show up and, yes, attract photographers. “Being here is a job,” explained Todd Solondz, who arrived with his genially twisted Happiness. “The picture doesn't sell itself, I have to sell it, especially since I don't exactly have a ‘big opening weekend' kind of cast.” Even Ken Loach, the dean of socially conscious British filmmakers, dons formal wear for the red-carpet premiers of his films. “There are bigger things to be rebellious about,” Loach reminded me, “than black tie.” “O”
So it turns out, as with any big, glamorous party, that the people who are most upset about Cannes are those who can't get in. In recent years that has meant filmmakers from both Germany and Italy, two major film-producing nations that have had enormous trouble getting their pictures accepted into the official competition, the most prestigious part of Cannes.
The 2000 festival was the seventh year in a row that German filmmakers were shut out of the competition, and they were not happy about it. “We suffer when this happens,” one German director told the Hollywood Reporter, which detailed that “since 1994, both Taiwan and China/Hong Kong have had four films each in competition; Denmark has had three; Iran, Greece and Japan have each had two; and Mexico, Belgium and Mali have each had one. During that time, Germany, which has the world's second-largest media industry and which has a newly booming feature film sector, has had none.” The reason for the snub, another director theorized, was the French belief that “France invented culture, and the Germans can't possibly participate.”
Even more unhappy, and not at all unwilling to talk about it, were the Italians when they, too, were shut out of Cannes 2000. Veteran producer Dino DeLaurentiis was quoted as saying “These snotty Frenchmen make me laugh. In an international festival, it's ridiculous to exclude our cinema.” Film director Ricky Tognazzi, retribution on his mind, said “For a year I will avoid eating French goat cheese.” Christian De Sica, son of the great director Vittorio De Sica, added the coup de grace: “As if the French didn't also make a lot of stupid movies.”
If there is one thing that is generally agreed about the official competition, it's that the selection process is baffling at best. Every Cannes veteran has his or her list of ridiculous films that were somehow let in, from the dim British comedy Splitting Heirs to the literally unreleasable Johnny Depp-directed The Brave to the even worse Steven Soderbergh Schizopolis (shown as an out-of-competition special event).
Even worse, if films with any kind of crowd-pleasing potential do get into the festival, they are often relegated to meaningless out-of-competition slots. Such was the fate of deservedly popular works like Strictly Ballroom, Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Trainspotting, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. This trend is so well known that comedy writer-director Francis Veber, the most widely popular French filmmaker of his generation (The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe, La Chèvre, Les Compères) genially told me that when he received a phone call from the festival announcing an official tribute to him in 1999, “I was so surprised I fell on my ass. Why the tribute now? Maybe they've seen my tests for cholesterol and sugar, and they think I will die soon.”
The uncomfortable truth is that for a film festival that is the cynosure of all eyes, Cannes's taste, at least as far as the competition goes, is surprisingly narrow. France is the home of the auteur theory, which deifies directors at the expense of other creative parties, and Cannes overwhelmingly favors films by critically respectable auteurs who've been there before, a usual-suspects group of largely noncommercial film-makers Variety categorizes as “heavyweight helmers.” It's proved to be an increasingly unpopular philosophy.
“High Art pays low dividends at Cannes fest” was the headline on a much-talked-about 1999 piece by chief Variety film critic Todd McCarthy that placed the auteur theory in “an advanced state of decrepitude” and lamented that “the gulf between the sort of High Art films that many serious directors want to make (and that is generally sought by fests) and pictures that will hold some sort of interest for audiences is bigger than ever.”
In the same vein, Maurice Huleu of Nice-Matin wondered if “this outpouring of work, of talent and creativity is predestined to satisfy only a few initiates.” Talking of the 1997 decision, which split the Palme d'Or between rarefied films by Iran's Abbas Kiarostami and Japan's Shohei Immamura, Huleu emphasized that the jury “may have sacrificed other considerations in the name of art, but they also did a disservice to the Cannes Festival and to cinema.”
Which brings us, inevitably, to Hollywood, that other center of the movie universe. It's the place that makes the movies the world hungers for, and though Cannes well knows the value of glamour and glitz, the festival in recent years has had great difficulty attracting top-drawer items from the bowels of the studio system. So Cannes 2000, for instance, settled for Brian De Palma's frigid Mission to Mars while even the most aesthetically rigorous French journalists and critics were wondering why Gladiator wasn't there in its stead.
There are reasons for this absence. Cannes, unlike Toronto, comes in the spring, the wrong time of year for the “quality” films studios would prefer to send to festivals. Cannes, as noted, can kill your picture, something studios don't want to risk with prospective blockbusters costing tens of millions of dollars. Cannes is expensive, especially when you factor in flying stars over in private jets. And, especially in recent years, the festival hierarchy has been unwilling to play the Hollywood game, to take trips to Los Angeles and do the kind of schmoozing and flattering of the powers that be that's necessary to overturn more rational considerations.
Also a factor is that the jury awards at Cannes can be so arbitrary and contrived, so governed by whim and geared toward advancing political and cultural agendas, that studio pictures rarely get what Hollywood considers a fair shake. For every year like 1993, when the Palme d'Or was wisely split between The Piano and Farewell My Concubine, there is a 1999, when the David Cronenberg-led jury horrified everyone except themselves by giving three major awards to the unwatchable L'Humanité. “David Cronenberg's decisions,” one festival veteran said, “are scarier than his films.” In 1992, the brilliant French-Canadian Leolo was shut out at least in part because its director, Jean-Claude Lauzon, made a provocative sexual remark to an American actress who was on the jury. “When I said it,” the director recalled, “my producer was next to me and he turned gray.” In an atmosphere like this, it's no wonder one of the best Hollywood films of the past decade, L.A. Confidential, made it into the competition and came home with nothing. Not exactly the kind of encouragment the studios are looking for.
Yet when a film hits here, when it wins a major award and touches a nerve in the audience, it really hits. Quentin Tarantino was genuinely shocked when his Pulp Fiction took the Palme in 1994 (“I don't make the kinds of movies that bring people together, I make the kinds of movies that split people apart”), but that moment was the engine of the film's enormous worldwide success. Steven Soderbergh had already won a prize at Sundance, but when he became the youngest person to win a Palme for sex, lies and videotape, he said the experience was “like being a Beatle for a week. It was so unexpected, like someone saying ‘You've just won $10 million' and sticking a microphone in your face. I didn't know how to react, I don't know what I said.” And then there was Roberto Benigni.
Benigni's Life Is Beautiful didn't win the Palme in 1998 (that went to Theo Angelopoulos's understandably forgotten Eternity and a Day); it took the runner-up Grand Prize, but it mattered not. A direct line could probably be traced from Benigni's effusive behavior that night, running on stage and passionately kissing jury president Martin Scorcese's feet, to its eventual status as a triple Oscar winner and the then highest-grossing foreign-language film in U.S. history. That indelible image of Benigni in ecstasy will likely do as much for the status and mythology of Cannes as the earlier shot of Simone Sylva going topless with Robert Mitchum did for this festival of festivals so many years ago.
