At Cannes, sun, stars, but little glow

It's the 60th anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival. So why is this year's lineup so uninspiring?

By Robert Koehler | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

from the May 25, 2007 edition

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CANNES, France - Summer always seems to arrive earlier on France's Côte d'Azur than anywhere else. But the sunny atmosphere on this small resort town's perpetually choked beachside thoroughfare isn't necessarily translating into a bright and promising competition program.

In the weeks before the annual mid-May event – the world's undisputed champ among film festivals – Cannes regulars had been hoping that 2007 would be something special. After all, the Festival de Cannes is celebrating its 60th anniversary, with an even greater level of fanfare than typically circulates around the film world's busiest and most anticipated 12-day stretch of the year.

However, as of press time, which roughly corresponds with the festival's midpoint, a sinking feeling is taking over that the Big Six-O isn't being marked by the kind of first-rate films worthy of the occasion.

Things began promisingly enough with the European unveiling of David Fincher's magnificently realized procedural thriller about information overload and obsessions, "Zodiac," along with Romanian director Cristian Mungiu's widely admired "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days," which intensively observes two young women dealing with an abortion during the death throes of the country's Communist era.

It's a measure of the overall weakness of the field that, several days after its première, Mungiu's film remains hotly discussed as a Palme d'Or (or Golden Palm for best film) candidate.

This chatter has also included two other strongly touted American entries, making 2007 a notably strong year for the US in Cannes: Gus Van Sant's superbly realized "Paranoid Park," depicted from the point of a view of a skateboarding Portland, Ore., teen dealing with the aftermath of an accidental killing, and the Coen Brothers' popular version of Cormac McCarthy's novel, "No Country for Old Men."

But like one dud wave after another rolling into shore – a condition, truth be told, that's typical of the placid French Mediterranean coast – several other bidders for this year's Palm have proven disappointing, or baffling, or both.

The only real mystery involving Raphael Nadjani's "Psalms," an Israeli drama about the disappearance of an Orthodox Jewish father that suffers from having a terrific premise and no follow-through, was why it was in the competition at all. Other entries that have met with a collective shrug (or worse) are prolific and always controversial Korean director Kim Ki-duk's "Breath" and Christophe Honore – not exactly upholding the beloved French tradition of the "chanson" musical form with "Les chansons d'amour."

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