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?

from the May 25, 2007 edition

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That's not to say that there isn't some fascinating and thought-provoking work on display. Audacious Mexican director Carlos Reygadas has triggered many a conversation with his latest, "Silent Light," a visually and metaphysically stunning work about the little-known Mennonite farming community in northern Mexico.

Michael Moore returned to Cannes with his most thoroughly assured, crafted, and – horrors! – journalistic documentary "Sicko," which convincingly argues that America needs and deserves a vastly better healthcare plan than today's privatized system.

Faced with potential legal action by the US Treasury Department for transporting American citizens to Cuba, Moore noted at a press conference that he was far more concerned that he has "seen no candidate for President call for removing profit from the healthcare system," than being fined or arrested.

Moore amusingly compares the US system with that of, among other countries, France – whose generous medical care is on display in Julian Schnabel's visually interesting but otherwise standard "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," involving a fashion magazine editor (French star Mathieu Almaric, a frequent face on Cannes screens this year) suffering and striving to recover from a debilitating stroke by writing his autobiography with help from therapists.

Biopics and true-life tales fill the festival's lineup, ranging from Marjane Satrapi's uneven "Persepolis," an animated adaptation of her autobiographical graphic novel series about growing up in Iran under the Islamic revolution; Michael Winterbottom's potent, involving account of the kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl, "A Mighty Heart," starring Angelina Jolie in her richest performance in several years; to Spiros Stathoulopoulos's "PVC-1," based on the case of another actual, bizarre terrorist act.

Even "Zodiac" belongs in this group, since the film is based on the book by Robert Graysmith (a leading character in the film played by Jake Gyllenhaal).

Outside the doors of the festival's huge complex, the Palais, teeming crowds hunt for tickets to screenings, which aren't open to the public at large.

They usually fail in their efforts, but they were in for a weekend treat when U2 performed live on the Palais's red carpet in advance of the premiere of a short version of "U2-3D," a concert film slated to open later this summer.

The mob scene around the red carpet can be so extreme that it seems as if many hundreds of folks actually live there for the better part of two weeks to catch glimpses of everyone from Brangelina to a roster of previous Palm winners invited for the 60th birthday bash, including the world's oldest active filmmaker, Manoel de Oliveira, who beats Cannes in the age department by 38 years.

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