Canne Film Festival: Friday, May 23, 2003

As this year’s festival draws to a close thoughts are turning to Sunday night’s awards and what will win the Palme d’Or, despite the fact we still have a handful of competition films left to see, including Peter Greenaway’s The Tulse Luper Suitcases Part 1, The Moab Story and Bertrand Blier’s Les Cotelettes. According to those critics’ polls that run in a number of the trade papers published daily in Cannes during the festival, the current favorite is Lars von Trier’s Dogville. Sometimes these polls are notoriously unreliable, as happened several years ago when Pedro Almodóvar’s All About My Mother led by a mile only to be beaten by Rosetta under David Cronenberg’s leadership.

Nevertheless, von Trier looks fairly certain to walk off with another Palme d’Or come Sunday, although there is substantial support building for both the Turkish entry Azuk, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s beautifully composed study of loneliness, and Denys Arcand’s Invasion Of The Barbarians, a semi-sequel to his The Decline Of The American Empire, an acutely observed, touching look at life itself that revolved around a womanizing former lecturer dying of cancer (Remy Girard) and his final weeks with his all but estranged son (Stephane Rousseau) and friends. Both films more than deserve to share in the spoils on Sunday. Unlike either Claude Miller’s La Petite Lili, a pleasant enough reworking of Chekov’s The Seagull set in Brittany where several French film folk and their offspring while away a warm summer, and Lou Ye’s visually impressive if confusing Chinese entry Purple Butterfly, a tale of anti-Japanese underground fighters in 1930s Shanghai starring Zhang Ziyi, that was marred by Ye’s opaque approach to storytelling.

A potential spoiling however might be Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River which screened Friday. Based on the novel by Denis Lehane, this dark and morally ambiguous tale of child abuse, violence, friendship and family ties starring Sean Penn, Kevin Bacon, Tim Robbins and Laurence Fishburne, marks Eastwood’s best work since Unforgiven. Meanwhile, early favorite Samira Makhmalbaf’s At Five In The Afternoon appears to be something of an outside bet now, certainly for the Palme itself, though she will probably not walk away from the evening’s festivities empty-handed.

On the acting front, both Charlotte Rampling and Ludivine Sagnier from François Ozon’s intriguing Swimming Pool are possible contenders alongside Nicole Kidman for Dogville and newcomer Agheleh Rezaie, for her fantastic performance as an ambitious woman in a post Taliban Afghanistan who dreams of being her country’s president in At Five In The Afternoon. Paul Bettany is certainly has a chance at Best Actor for Dogville, as must Sean Penn and Tim Robbins for their sterling work in Mystic River. And should Nuri Bilge Ceylan not scoop the Palme d'Or for Azuk, he must surely be in with a shot for best director and the Camera d’Or, the award for best first feature.

Thursday night saw the 10th AMFAR party, the lavish Cinema Against AIDS event in Le Moulin De Mougins hosted by Dame Elizabeth Taylor and Miramax honcho Harvey Weinstein.  Items up for auction on the night—including a private screening of Cold Mountain for you and 50 friends together with Jude Law, Nicole Kidman, Renée Zellweger and Anthony Minghella—raised in excess of $1.3m for charity.

More Cannes Coverage:
Day Eight:
Where would Cannes be without a little scandal?
Day Six:
Dogville is another of the audacious and imaginative experiments that we’ve come to expect from Lars von Trier—bold, provocative, challenging, and compelling.
Weekend Wrap-Up:
One of the joys of Cannes is uncovering those movies that don’t come equipped with a multi-million promotional budget but yet still hope to make a splash.
Day Two:
The biggest splash was made by The Matrix Reloaded which screened on Thursday night on the back of some mixed stateside reviews.
Day One:
The 56th Cannes Film Festival opened on Wednesday with Fanfan Le Tulipe, an ever-so-disappointing period piece starring Vincent Perez and Penelope Cruz.