The Talkies / Cannes Artists
Bawer, Bruce
THE TALKIES CANNES ARTISTS by Bruce Bawer Thursday, May 10 much. As I peruse the list of screenings by filmmakers who are young or "dif- spective distributors, and you've got a This is it: I'm on...
...Thanks to Fellini, and David Lynch...
...It's appropriate that we see Daddy reading To the Lighthouse, a novel that does much the same thing for another seaside family...
...he's tempered his shrillness...
...It's a human film—honest, wise, serious...
...as an selections...
...talky role that requires him to be Yet one can't easily dismiss an insti- something he's not...
...After a certain point the film doesn't go anywhere or change pitch...
...This elegant display could not be more removed from the press screenings, which begin every morning at 8:30 and for which we all show up in T-shirts and shorts...
...Equally insistent is Michael Seresin's romantic, softly lit photography...
...Denis Lenoir's cinematography is breathtaking...
...Today's morning film: Night Sun, a remarkable work directed by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, whose Padre Padrone won the Palme d'Or in 1977...
...Sunday, May 13 In the morning, Alan Parker's Come See the Paradise...
...Turns out they're earning college credit by attending screenings here...
...Wednesday, May 16 O n the flight back to New York I plunk down my twenty francs and watch Back to the Future Part Tivo...
...He exudes a tired, gentle elegance, rather reminding one of Herbert Marshall in a Somerset Maugham movie...
...It's obvious none of them knows what xenophobia means, but they try to answer anyway...
...At times, the movie recalls an aggressively sentimental AT&T commercial...
...minutes I keep wondering: Why is he Though most of these are worthy films, acting as if he can't act...
...She ends up living very well, with a maid, a car, and a regular schedule of dinner parties...
...But his big hits were two political dramas: Midnight Express (1977), about an American teen in a Tbrkish pen, and Mississippi Burning (1988), about civil rights workers and Dixie racists...
...Peter Viertel (who tution that routinely presents work by co-wrote with James Bridges and Burt the planet's most distinguished direc- Kennedy) based his original novel on tors...
...Consider the U.S...
...As I peruse the list of screenings by filmmakers who are young or "dif- spective distributors, and you've got a This is it: I'm on the plane from (or "seances") in Le Monde, it all seems ferent" or working in obscure corners veritable torrent of celluloid...
...This shared attitude doubtless helps explain the attraction of these two films to those who make the selections here: increasingly, it's clear that nothing appeals to the powers at Cannes quite like a put-down of Hollywood...
...These episodes emphasize bizarre and tragic turns in his friends' lives, most of which we're not prepared for...
...Bruce Bawer is The American Spec- Not a bad idea for a movie...
...Its production values make, say, Rodrigo D. look primitive...
...Appropriately, the color is lush, the lighting radiant, the camerawork stately (no jerky movements, no abrupt cuts): the Tavianis render church, palace, and nature alike as holy places, as if to repudiate Sergius's Spartan outlook, his concentration on otherworldly things...
...At the post-screening press conference, Eastwood avers that he didn't base his performance on Huston (!) and says he shares Wilson's disdain for Hollywood's cautiousness...
...Simply put, he's an arrogant, self-dramatizing big shot whom people regard as "bigger than life" because his fame, wealth, and host of tolerant hangers-on make it easy for him to gratify his every asinine impulse...
...34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1990 Shoot the Moon, about a crumbling marriage between Albert Finney and Diane Keaton, was (despite the boom mike that hung down into several shots) satisfying, because Parker stuck close to home...
...I'm reminded that Cannes is mostly about people coming from all over the world to unload distribution rights to spaghetti westerns and Kung Fu movies...
...How bizarre that all these dinner-jacketed sophisticates should be lining up for a film celebrating Colombian street gangs...
...I look up larbin: "flunky...
...winners duced—is not among them...
...It's a part you could see a young Shirley MacLaine playing...
...Daddy shows Carolyn a villa (in Cannes...
...Yet it's a thoughtful film, dignified and deliberate...
...there's simply not enough drama...
...Yet he congratulates himself on them: "Most American directors are not interested in a movie with some political backbone...
...Gaviria says his movie is about the "war" between the kids and the cops —but if there had been more "war" in the picture and less desultory criminality (with no cops in sight), it would have been a lot more dramatically gripping...
...Eastwood says that, yes, thanks to environmentalism, Viertel's story has taken on new meaning...
...The film chronicles her visit with intelligence and compassion, splendidly capturing the rhythms of the family's lives and the textures of their relationships...
...I'm different from them because I'm not an American, and can step outside a situation and see it with a little more clarity...
...Every film outfit you can name, from Miramax to Sovexportfilms, has a berth here...
...Compared to the press, he comes off as a voice of sanity and moderation...
...This meters per hour—as if rushing a ship-never been greater...
...A promising setup...
...It's all quite funny (especially a running gag about Federico's inability to remember his lines), though Federico remains something of a closed book throughout and though the film's five writers couldn't come up with an ending...
...I fall asleep about half an hour into the picture and awaken to find the window shades up and the sun streaming in...
...Yet she's unsatisfied—and thoroughly ungrateful to Milan, whom she tortures with sadistic mind games and ultimately betrays...
...This year, alas, there are a few his experience as a script-polisher for such films that I won't get to see: I'll John Huston on The African Queen...
...One character, a magician, keeps saying "hocus-pocus...
...No, not so long as a Driving Miss Daisy can get made and become a hit...
...be arriving several hours too late for Here, as in Viertel's novel, Wilson the opening picture, Akira Kurosawa's becomes obsessed, soon after arriving Dreams, and leaving several days too in Africa to make the film, with the early to catch new movies by Godard, desire to kill an elephant...
...it's a nice scene,but doesn't resonate with anything else or advance the plot...
...The glasnost difference...
...Everything is spelled out...
...bourgeoisie and its glory days, and exalts poor folks over rich bigots...
...The man from Variety begins his question: "Given the arch-conservative climate in America right now . . . " And a European wonders why the "racist scenes are somewhat weak"—meaning that Parker doesn't show enough violent acts against Japanese-Americans...
...As a flamof the last twenty years: M*A*S*H...
...The press seems to love the idea that three actors have died violently...
...But the tator 's movie reviewer...
...Dumped by her beau, aneurotic young Prague woman named Dana (Ivana Chylkova) cajoles a friend's docile boyfriend, Milan (Karel Roden), into marriage...
...it is clear that he intended this film to be about the elemental mystery of a heroic soul's attraction to sin...
...Ironically, the movie itself keeps a certain distance from its subject...
...And—equally unwisely—Eastwood has chosen to imitate Huston's characteristic inflections and physical mannerisms, which are miles from his own natural ones...
...finances imperiled, people's lives enIn fact, there'll be altogether too dangered: yet Wilson refuses to behave responsibly...
...the beautiful soft lighting and muted orange-andblue Me d'Azur palette are utterly appropriate to the film's gentle, pensivetone...
...Then I realize: the list confirms an unmistakable pat- maybe he can't act—not in this kind of tern of rewarding U.S...
...Another journalist asks if the film's message is partly en-vironmental...
...Yet mostly they're simpatico...
...To be sure, in a moment of anger, Pete does call Wilson "the most egocentric, irresponsible son of a bitch I've ever met...
...to Bertrand Tavernier's Daddy Nostalgie...
...Nor do I understand why this frivolous movie is at Cannes, supposedly a showcase for serious cinema...
...to the immense Grand Auditorifiance against Hollywood ways and urn Lumiêre at the Palais to see the new means...
...Quel rebelled He discusses Zimbabwe, where the picture was filmed: "You'd never know there'd been a war there...
...As he tells Pete Verill (Jeff Fahey), the sensible, Nick Carraway-like Viertel character, he doesn't think of himself as being in show business, but rather considers himself "a lousy little god" who creates his own worlds without a thought of box-office potential: "To write a movie you must forget that anyone's ever going to see it...
...She tells him he was a "ghastly" father, but adds: "You make me laugh—and dream...
...Daddy observes that they share "a great talent for life," and warns her that "the sweetness of life is terribly perishable...
...Black Heart was in- I spired by John Huston, Artificial Paradise—directed by the Yugoslav Karpo Godina and written by Branko Vucicevic—concerns the early life of director Fritz Lang...
...This, I gather, is meant to be hilarious...
...It's recognizably Russian in its grimness: the weather is gray, and the protagonist is in prison, harassed by a grotesque fellow inmate...
...36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1990...
...It's about two friends, actors in a troupe that's touring Italy with The Cherry Orchard...
...But no mat- this obsession, the shoot is held up, its ter: there'll be plenty to see...
...I n the afternoon I sit through twenty 1 minutes of John Waters's campy Cry Baby...
...But its use here is thoroughly sentimental: Tavernier is trying to force a degree and kind of emotion on the film that it hasn't earned—and, for that THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1990 35 matter, hasn't seemed to be aiming for...
...The people were very up...
...The Wall...
...scriptwriters have miscalculated: rather THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1990 33 than adapt their protagonist to East-wood's laconic style, they have chosen to give him reams of garrulous, Huston-like dialogue...
...The movie's ensemble feeling carries over...
...and tells her a story about it...
...yet in his proud aloofness he is guilty of vanity, learning ultimately that service to God demands not isolation from but involvement with mankind...
...This pleases him...
...Monday, May 14 At 8:30 a.m...
...Another reporter wonders if the film is meant as an indirect comment on today's "economic racism" against the Japanese...
...rather than build to a riotous finale, it tapers off, running out of ideas and energy...
...After Inoi, a surprisingly polished Czechoslovakian comedy, Cas Sluhu, whose French title is Le Temps des Larbins...
...there's a nice symmetry, too, to the trinity of temptresses (Nastassja Kinski, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Patricia Millardet) whose brushes with Sergius drive him, step by step, from human contact...
...Like Lang's pictures, it's heavy on stylization: every so often, the actors in realistically rendered scenes will suddenly strike melodramatic poses, deliver their lines in stilted fashion, or die theatrically...
...As Eastwood claims not to have imitated Huston, so Parker insists that "I don't intentionally make controversial films...
...To be sure, the and one apiece from Great Britain, year, the series called "La Semaine In- ment of life-saving medicine to a disfestival (which this year runs twelve Czechoslovakia, Poland, China, Japan, ternational de la Critique" ("Critics' aster area...
...He's up to much the same thing in Paradise, a well-edited, too-pretty movie set on the West Coast during the thirties and forties...
...UnC annes is beautiful, despite the editor of France's Studio magazine "parallel" series, which, though Certain Regard," seventeen...
...Doesn't it matter that his social views are simpleminded and slickly expressed, that his jokes have no wit or moral bite, that he glories in the tawdry and trashy...
...It seems to please the press, too: that the movie has a trendy political angle apparently makes for more interesting copy...
...Afterwards, I join the huddled masses outside the Palais and look on while hundreds of formally attired mesdames et messieurs mount the red-carpeted stairs of the Grand Auditorium Lumi&.e to watch, God help them, Rodrigo D. There is a uniformed honor guard, and classical music is playing...
...La Quinsion, impenetrability, and gloominess, tion, there are nine non-competing zaine des Realisatures" ("Directors' and for looking warily upon the san- films that are also considered "official Fortnight") offers twenty...
...In addi- Week") offers seven movies...
...New York to Paris, traveling sev- quite baroque...
...A Swedish woman complains about the film's females...
...One is put off, too, by the press kit's exploitation of the fact that three kids who appear in the film have since died violently...
...The press conference for DaddyNostalgie proves to be the most literate and lively thus far, and the most free of political cant...
...What a shock...
...Various scenes exist for the sole purpose of showing (a) how much Wilson hates anti-Semitism, (b) how much he hates racism, (c) how much of a ladies' man he is, (d) how much of a man's man he is, (e) how gutsy he is, (f) how much he loves to play practical jokes, (g) how much he loves to shock people, (h) how little he cares about money...
...It's a beautiful selfish life...
...Eastwood—who, though American and popular, is revered by many European cineastes as a master of symbolically resonant simplicity—plainly shares most of his character's views...
...Palais des Festivals, nerve center of the America, Cannes is something of an were founded in the early sixties and Add to that the dozens of other films city, looms like a cathedral...
...The result is one of the most unsuccessful attempts I've ever seen by a major star to stretch his range...
...Interestingly, at the post-screeningpress conference, Parker pretty much admits his puerility—and does so with an odd populistic pride: "I'm pretty happy with how simpleminded I am...
...Sere-sin never misses a chance to shoot the lovers in the vicinity of a sunbeam penetrating a haze of dust...
...I'm getting older and more subtle," he suggests...
...The movie d'Or...
...films for being role, anyway...
...Yet we don't see her magic, and don't see Jack responding to it...
...First there are the nine- of the globe...
...The film closes with one of my favorite songs, "These Foolish Things," and the rendition by Birkin's untrained voice has an extremely sweet quality...
...Movies, he says, should always reduce life to its fundamental terms: love and death, good and evil...
...The story is simple: after a heart attack, the elderly Daddy (Dirk Bogarde), English by birth, returns from the hospital to his Cote d'Azur villa and his tight-lipped French wife, Miche (Odette Laure), to whom he complains: "You never speak English to me anymore" Knowing that his days are numbered, his middle-aged daughter Carolyn (Jane Birkin), a screenwriter, comes down from Paris for a few days...
...The lavish bayfront suspect...
...The particulars, too, often seem arbitrary...
...Perspec- Friday, May 11 guine, the accessible, the popular...
...Ghastly...
...boyant 1950s film director named John Taxi Driver, Apocalypse Now...
...Dirk Bogarde does a masterly job of capturing Daddy's sad, remote dignity, his spiritual and physical fragility, his matter-of-fact egoism and his quiet air of regret...
...In both movies, Parker assailed social wrongs on which virtually no one would disagree with him —but he used those wrongs as a basis for glib attacks on American mores and on the U.S...
...We know Jack adores Lily not because there's chemistry between them (there isn't) but because he keeps telling her so: "They can break both my arms and legs and it could never hurt me as much as losing you, Lily...
...But this seems to be claiming too much...
...Yet, compared to films like Daddy Nostalgie and Night Sun, how slick it seems, how spiritually hollow—all special effects and no human content to speak of...
...What to make of this U.S.-based British writer-director...
...But Tavernier (A Sunday in the Country, Round Midnight) doesn't do enough with it...
...To make matters worse, the scriptwriters invariably drive home their points in lumbering, one-by-one fashion...
...Try to fit that on a marquee...
...days) is notorious for rewarding preten- Colombia, and Burkina Faso...
...It's as if Godina wants to remind us of film's artificiality, its ritualistic function...
...I walk out after about a half hour, and I'm not the first to do so...
...The Fesfor a week...
...I suspect it's because Waters mocks the U.S...
...A quick circuit through the exhibition hall at the Palais...
...And the performances are marvelously sensitive and discerning: Jane Birkin, who's familiar to French audiences but almost unknown in the US., is very touching as the brittle, ardent Carolyn...
...someone asks Parker...
...At 8:00 p.m., a very different pack of juvenile delinquents...
...Eastwood cites his feminist credentials...
...sex lies, and videotape...
...You have a happiness inside of you that makes you so beautiful, as if you had a little bag of magic that only you could dip into...
...The star is strikingly handsome, and is shot throughout (often barechested) in fashion-magazine poses, with lighting and photography to match...
...Indeed, the endings of both films involve a pointedly ironic implication that true film artistry derives from complex spiritual experience of a sort that cannot flourish within the U.S...
...The other has a better idea what's expected of him: "All my friends are dead," he says woodenly...
...Later, at a sidewalk cafe, I overhear three Ivy Leaguers...
...It's a fine film—its tone just right, its psychology convincing...
...Set in a 1950s high school, it's a retread of Hairspray without the redeeming presence of Divine: if the earlier movie was dopily funny, this one is just dopey...
...Now and then he sheds a single tear...
...Who are these tuxedoed glitterati...
...The new film, based on Tolstoy's story "Father Sergius," concerns a virtuous young baron (Julian Sands) who, upon learning that his fiancee was the czar's mistress, becomes a monk, then a hermit...
...The three Japanese-American actors on the panel are asked whether there is an "increase in xenophobia in America toward Asian-American actors...
...Rodrigo D: No Futuro is a Colombian movie about lower-class Medellin teens for whom crime and drugs are a part of daily life and gainful employment and sexual fidelity are alien concepts...
...Tavernier says it's about a failure who "discovers through his daughter what he'd lost...
...Among these are three eligible for a prize called the Camera tival employee at the wheel drives at The Cannes Film Festival is now in apiece from France and the U.S., two d'Or (which in 1984 went to Jim Jar- breakneck speed—upwards of 120 kilo-its forty-third year, and its prestige has apiece from Italy and the Soviet Union, musch for Stranger than Paradise...
...Nonetheless, as if to insist on their passion, Randy Edelman's musical score swells up soppily at each of their dozen-odd parting and reunion scenes...
...Funny to hear all this talk of fates and love and humility while photographers crowd the dais, shoving past each other to get a good shot of Nastassja Kinski...
...But when it comes to making sociological points (his main goal here), director Victor Manuel Gaviria's touch is about as subtle as that of the heavy-metal music these kids adore...
...political system...
...Parker: "No...
...He struggles against fleshly temptations...
...And Miss Chylkova is first-rate: though her character might have come off as completely unsympathetic, she makes one pity Dana even as one laughs at her frantic, flagrant selfishness...
...GQ goes to the Gulag...
...During the first few Paris, Texas...
...Then there hundreds of billboards promoting writes, "It is a place where the films associated with the Festival Interna- are several short films...
...Later, a cryptic 18-minute Soviet film, Inoi by Sergei Masloboichtchikov...
...Mid-conference, one of them gets up and bums a cigarette off somebody offstage...
...These series pices of the FIF or one of its wings...
...We know Jack has principles because somebody says "You've got principles...
...one reporter wants to know all the details, and everyone eagerly takes them down...
...This thought comforts me...
...Are the French right, then, about American movies...
...And one of the things it sentimentalizes is Depression-era leftist radicalism—as if the whole experience of the thirties (and of 1989) hadn't taught us anything...
...He says that Paradise is "much softer in attitude than some of my previous films"—and he's right...
...A delinquent (Johnny Depp) falls for a rich girl (Amy Lo-cane...
...I don't get it...
...In a genre still dominated by committees and juries...
...Daddy and Carolyn make an interesting pair...
...Interesting footnote: Maurice Huleu, reviewing Daddy Nostalgie in Nice-Matin, writes that Bogarde is "right out of a Somerset Maugham novel...
...Tuesday, May 15 R eading Cannes pieces in several French publications, I notice that the word Americain generally carries with it an automatic sneer...
...The New Movie should head for the Carlton, suite 643...
...Then there are four tives du Cinema Francais," seven...
...Saturday, May 12 f White Hunter...
...studio system...
...At the press conference afterwards, the Tavianis justly describe the film as a brief for "religion without religiosity," for faith in what takes place between people, for recognition of the miracle of love and the mystery in all things...
...Why not just call it Superman V? Because then everyone would be reminded what bombs III and IV were...
...but too often this movie doesn't go along with him, and insists on finding deep spiritual significance in what is merely a celebrity's self-indulgence...
...F laws notwithstanding, though, I'd 11 see Daddy Nostalgie again in a minute...
...At 2:30 to the English director Ken Murray's 1871...
...Nobody challenges him or requests an explanation: radical-sounding statements are taken for granted here...
...Certainly this movie does its best to disorient: its episodes, unchronologically arranged, reach back into Lang's youth and are linked only by the device of a middle-aged Lang, newly arrived in Los Angeles in 1935, relating his biography to a young admirer...
...tion for prizes...
...His only foundation is his friendship with the earthy, extroverted Dario (Diego Abatantuono)—who, unbeknownst to him, has taken up with Vittoria...
...With its grittily realistic photography and cast of real-live Medellin JDs, the film feels evocative and authentic...
...It's an arresting, if not quite coherent, piece of work which, like the Eastwood film, presses upon us its disapproval of Hollywood...
...The questions are predictable "How much do you feel constrained by commercial pressures...
...Parker's reply: there weren't that many such acts...
...he manifestly understands history in terms of sentimental-liberal cliches...
...but they tend to be movies that has its virtues, but the performance by offer a dark, seditious vision of Amer- Eastwood—who also directed and proican society...
...Like Tliirne, it's a study in romantic fixation and betrayal...
...Carolyn is high-strung, easily hurt, and fearful of responsibility...
...At one point, Lang (played with wit and authority by Jurgen Morche) asserts that it's foolish to go into the past because "time disorients...
...Meaning, that is, in a bleak and subversive...
...Federico (Fabrizio Bentivoglio) is aloof and self-absorbed, a melancholic type whose abandonment by his lover Vittoria (Laura Morante) drives him to despair...
...And he fields questions...
...the films in these series From Paris I fly to Nice, then proeral thousand miles to watch movies teen "official selections" in competi- that represent directorial debuts are ceed to Cannes by minibus...
...Total: over everyone from Costa Gavras to Arnold that please the public are systematically tional du Film, have their own selection eighty movies shown under the aus- Schwarzenegger...
...TWo of his "heroes," by the way, flank Gaviria on the dais, and the look in their eyes is frightening: sullen, glazed, unblinking...
...Wilson, he's awful...
...Some are obviously American filmmakers, Tokyo movie merchants...
...He's done offbeat films about kids: Bugsy Malone, Fame, Birdy, Angel Heart...
...His politics are at the level of protest music lyrics (it's no surprise that he directed Pink Floyd...
...Jack McGurn (Dennis Quaid), an Irish-born union organizer (without a trace of brogue), marries Lily Kawamura (Tamlyn Tomita), a second-generation Japanese-American, only to be separated from her after Pearl Harbor by her consignment to an internment camp...
...In the evening, some welcome comic relief: a screening of Gabriele Salvatores's Arne, a sort of Italian counterpart to Doris Dorrie's Men...
...she has a child's desperate need to know whether Daddy still loves her mother (the household bilingualism serves as an apt symbol of their marital near-estrangement), and her memory of his neglect during her childhood still stings...
...n the afternoon twenty-six small I planes circle over the Bay of Cannes, towing a set of banners announcing that anyone interested in distribution rights to Superman...
...But the film falters not only because of Eastwood's acting but because Wilson is simply not the heroic soul that Eastwood thinks he is...
...Yes, some stateside movies have Clint Eastwood movie, White Hunter, won Cannes's top award, the Palme Black Heart...
...I don't give a damn about your great beautiful life," Carolyn snaps when he waxes nostalgic...
...the movie continually reminds us of its own magical quality, of the power of film's hocus-pocus to enrich one's conception of the nature of reality...
...It's a puerile movie, and it makes one conclude that if Parker's kid pictures are better than his political films, it's because he has a childlike mentality...
...At 8:30 enemy fortress, a stronghold of de- afterward, supposedly to exhibit work shown in other venues, mainly to pro- a.m...
...He doesn't move far enough beyond documentary into art: the script (by Gaviria and two others) meanders, repeats itself, and is ultimately boring...
...It puts Paradise in perspective to see it in Provence, where fifty years ago the Vichy government was helping ship Jews off to camps—and not detention camps, either...
...Missing...
...Press conference for Rodrigo D. Gaviria asserts that the Medellin teens in his movie are "heroes, not criminals"and calls the police "political whores...
...Others look far too young, and have that distinct Riviera look: dainty, olive-skinned, raffin...
Vol. 23 • July 1990 • No. 7
