Rumor had it that the 10-member jury, which included Gerard Depardieu, Jamie Lee Curtis and directors Pedro Almodovar and John Boorman, all favored different films. So they spread the kudos around promiscuously, satisfying no one. “Howards End” and “The Player” were the clear critical favorites among the competition films, but director James Ivory had to be content with a newly invented consolation prize-the 45th Anniversary Festival Prize-for “Howards End” (he didn’t look too happy about it). Robert Altman got Best Director for “The Player”–the only award that got the closing-ceremony crowd to its feet. Tim Robbins wasn’t on hand to accept his Best Actor award for that movie. His own film, the striking political satire “Bob Roberts,” was eligible for the Camera d’Or award for best first film, but lost out to “Mac,” by another actor turned director, John Turturro.
The choice of “Mac”–Turturro’s earnest tribute to the working-class ethos of his carpenter father-seemed consistent with the other awards this year. Quiet films with humanistic, positive values, like the Italian Grand Prize winner, Gianni Amelio’s restrained neorealist tear-jerker “The Stolen Children,” won out over more experimental works. Utterly overlooked by the jury was Jean-Claude Lauzon’s wildly imaginative “Leolo,” an earthy, surreal and deeply felt account of a dysfunctional Montreal childhood that included such scandalous scenes as a boy raping a cat. Such outrageousness did not fit the Zeitgeist. It seemed that the penitent, morning-after spirit of the ’90s had arrived even in Cannes, where mornings after usually come with a hangover from a wretched excess of festival parties.
It was ironic that this should be the year the Yanks didn’t win, because no recent Cannes festival had been so dominated by the American presence. From mainstream Hollywood movies like “Basic Instinct” and “Far and Away” (the opening- and closing-night films) to small, independent efforts like Hal Hartley’s absurdist “Simple Men” and Quentin Tarantino’s violent “Reservoir Dogs,” the 17 U.S. films invited to the festival outnumbered those from any other country.
For better and worse, America has the most vital movie industry at the moment, and its stranglehold on the international market is making European filmmakers nervous and angry. (On a panel at Cannes, Wim Wenders called for strict European quota regulations against Hollywood imports, and a ban on certain violent films.) Germany, France and Italy seem to be in the creative doldrums; only a single film from Japan was invited. The fall of the Iron Curtain has dealt an economic knockout blow to Eastern European cinema (only the Russians are in high gear), while the new European unity has resulted in the “Europudding” movie, a bastardized international product that tries, and fails, to compete with Hollywood. The one foreign film that ignited a bidding war among the distributors in Cannes was a madly silly, crowd-pleasing piece of Australian camp, “Strictly Ballroom,” a tongue-in-cheek musical romance about a ballroom-dancing competition.
The batch of new American movies drew a mixed response. While the press laughed at the adolescent sexuality of “Far and Away,” the black-tie crowd gave a standing ovation to Gary Sinise’s reverential remake of “Of Mice and Men” with John Malkovich. David Lynch did not fare so well. Two years ago he was the toast of the town. This time, the same press audience that cheered “Wild at Heart” jeered at “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.” A “prequel” to the TV series, about the sordid fall of Laura Palmer, this long, shapeless film will seem redundant to fans of the show and incomprehensible to initiates. Though it has flashes of the brilliance that has made him Hollywood’s premier surrealist, Lynch is mining barren ground. What once seemed avant-garde, suddenly, in the context of Cannes, looked positively derriere.
