Out et about
In competition
Palme favourites
Sixteen down, five to go. The Cannes competition is well into its stride now, and even if the spirits of the assembled jury members and journalists might appear to be flagging, the publicists and producers are still going strong.
Earlier in the week, nothing was living up to expectation. The daily trade papers here carry polls of the critics rating the chances of each entry. Veteran reviewers, used to stately art house fare, expressed incomprehension that Robert Rodriguez's stylised, ultra-violent Sin City had been selected. Atom Egoyan's Where the Truth Lies has generated only a lukewarm response. Gus Van Sant's Last Days, about the suicide of a Kurt Cobain-like singer, was respectfully received but too bleak and minimalist to be a crowd pleaser. Young Mexican director Carlos Reygadas's Battle in Heaven, tipped by publicists as a potential Palme d'Or winner, carried a whiff of controversy thanks to its prolonged oral sex sequence, but many critics felt short-changed. Manderlay split opinion, provoking US critics to fulminate against Lars von Trier's anti-Americanism, while being greeted by at least some of the European critics as a masterpiece.
In the end, it was left to the old reliables to galvanise the festival. There was little early buzz about Michael Haneke's Hidden, but it has been leading the critics' poll in Screen International for several days - at an average of 3.3 out of a possible 4 - and looks a strong bet to win something. The Dardenne brothers' The Child didn't disappoint. David Cronenberg's A History of Violence was liked too, though the US paper Variety deemed it "surprisingly conventional". Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers is the most recent entry to challenge Haneke - reaching 3.2 in Screen's poll - even if some grumbled that Bill Murray's deadpan performance was identical to the one he gave in Lost in Translation.
There is immense interest in Wim Wenders' Don't Come Knocking, which screens today, if only because it reunites the team behind Paris, Texas. History suggests that films screening late in the festival often come away with the gongs, which bodes well for Tommy Lee Jones's directorial debut The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (a western no one seems to know anything about) and Hou Hsiao Hsien's Three Times. Still, Cannes juries are almost as inscrutable as conclaves of Vatican cardinals, and with two days to go it is still anyone's guess where the main prizes will go.
Geoffrey Macnab
On the Croisette
Trier targets Hollywood
That Lars von Trier. He just doesn't care who he upsets. Now firmly ensconced as film-making's answer to Jacques Chirac - ie, bad-boy number one in the eyes of the US - he has not only premiered a film here reminding Americans of the particularly nasty stain on their history that was slavery, but is now inviting visitors to his website (zentropa.dk) to take pot shots at the country's leading movie concerns.
The Von Trier-centred outfit, Zentropa, has embraced the internet age for quite some time, using the company website as the home base of the Dogme 95 movement. Right now it features an announcement about Von Trier's Cannes movie, Manderlay, an unapologetic statement (named "Plain as a Pikestaff") about his aborted Wagner opera project from last year, and a couple of snappy little video games.
The game that's causing all the hubbub is called Zentropa Invaders. It's a firmly retro sort of thing, modelled exactly on the Space Invaders of the 1970s, but instead of spider or crab-shaped nasties, the pranksters at Zentropa invite you to blast away at logos for Paramount and Warner Bros (10 and 20 points each). And who's that pudgy bespectacled face that intermittently skids through the upper part of the screen? It looks as though Lars himself has made his own head the big-points mother ship - at least 200 points every time you plug him between the eyes. Now that's entertainment.
Andrew Pulver
Directors' fortnight
A really close shave
What was the film that the French Minister of Culture, Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, went to see instead of Star Wars? It was a hair-razing little effort called The Moustache, adapted by author/ director Emmanuel Carrère from his own bestselling novel, and now premiering this week in the Directors' Fortnight.
The Moustache begins with a seemingly trivial question: "What would you say if I shaved off my moustache?" Marc asks this of his wife, Agnès, from the bathroom, where he's having a hot soak after work. Laughing, she agrees that it might be a good idea. So, on a whim, he begins snipping the hairs of the moustache he's always worn and shaves his upper lip clean. But when Agnès returns, she doesn't notice any change. For that matter, no one does - not a peep from his best friends that night at a dinner party, or his architect colleagues the following day. Believing himself the victim of a cruel joke, Marc angrily confronts his wife, who bursts into tears and screams: "But you know very well that you've never had a moustache!"
What has happened? We never quite know, but Carrère isn't offering any answers. "Because there aren't any," he says, with a smile. The beleaguered protagonist's sudden absence of facial hair - one small detail in everyday life - catapults him into a spiral of nightmarish uncertainties.
I know all this because I translated The Moustache into English in 1988 (it was originally published in 1986 in France). At that point, Carrère was unknown outside his native country. Since then, he's been called everything from "a French Stephen King" to "the Prince of True Lying". His books Class Trip and The Adversary were adapted to screen by directors Claude Miller and Nicole Garcia respectively, and have figured in the Cannes competition in previous years.
What prompted Carrère to move from behind his desk to the director's chair? After his first documentary - a chilling life-is-stranger-than-fiction tale called Return to Kotelnitch, in 2003 - he was impatient to take another stab at film-making. "I knew my own novel better than any other story," he shrugs, "so why not?"
Lanie Goodman