Cannes is fifty seven
A.O. Scott summarizes Asia’s influence at Cannes:
What Europe was 30 years ago, Asia is today: a continent with at least a half-dozen artistically and commercially thriving national cinemas producing work in a dizzying variety of styles and genres, from challenging festival fare to populist blockbusters. Their influence is felt around the world, in the high-flying martial-arts wire work that has lately become a Hollywood cliché and, more interestingly, in the delicate urban anomie (a specialty of Mr. Wong’s) that permeates Sofia Coppola’s “Lost in Translation.”
In the same article, he reminds us of the impressive Asian representation at Cannes in 2000: “In the Mood for Love,” “Yi Yi,” “Chunhyang,” “Eureka” and “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon;” I was immediately craving both “Eureka” and “Mood” on the big screen.
On a much more serious/infuriating/depressing topic, Frank Rich discusses the Palme d’Or winner, Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11″:
Whatever you think of Mr. Moore, there’s no question he’s detonating dynamite here. […] Just when Abu Ghraib and the savage beheading of Nicholas Berg make us think we’ve seen it all, here is yet another major escalation in the nation-jolting images that have become the battleground for the war about the war.
No surprise that a French film festival selected a film so critical of Bush and his war in Iraq? But as we see here, only one of nine judges is French, with a majority being American or English. And Scott asserts that Cannes doesn’t even like documentaries, that this is one of only three nonfiction films allowed in competition in nearly 50 years.
Despite that, as Scott reported a few days earlier:
The audience at the afternoon gala screening responded with a 20-minute standing ovation that the festival’s artistic director, Thierry Frémaux, said was the longest he had ever witnessed in Cannes.
Rich kindly reminds us, if we needed reminding, that Moore is “a polemicist, not a journalist,” as does Moore himself:
We’ve had this footage [shown in “Fahrenheit 9/11″] in our possession for two months,” he says. “I saw it before any of the Abu Ghraib news broke. I think it’s pretty embarrassing that a guy like me with a high school education and with no training in journalism can do this. What the hell is going on here? It’s pathetic.
And it is.