Same old song for Cannes?
Fast selection seems short on new voices
Since Fremaux took over the reins from (now fest prexy) Gilles Jacob in 2001, the world's largest and most prestigious movie festival has been sending out mixed signals that have the world's legions of festwatchers scratching their heads.
After minor tinkering with Jacob's well-established formula -- auteur pics mixed with Croisette faves -- during his first two years (adding animation and documentary), and the "Brown Bunny" year of 2003, when the fest faced an onslaught of criticism, Fremaux announced last year's lineup as "like it or hate it, my program." Result was a high-wire act of genre fare, hardcore art movies and accessible midrange pics that seemed to point the fest in a fresh, more risk-taking direction, with several Croisette regulars, such as Mike Leigh, publicly cold-shouldered.
It didn't satisfy everyone, but it at least showed Cannes was rolling up its sleeves and coming down from the mountain to get to grips with the evolving face of international cinema. The publicity generated by Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11," and Quentin Tarantino's presence on the jury, helped disguise much of the program's structural indecision.
However, this year's selection -- at least on paper -- looks like a retreat to the old norms, with little in the way of any personal signature and a Competition that, with a few exceptions (notably, Johnnie To's triad drama "Election"), shows little variation from the Jacob years.
It's also appears that, with the exception of Gus Van Sant (back with the edgy Kurt Cobain-inspired drama, "Last Days") and possibly Tommy Lee Jones' modern Western "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada," the fest is no longer a point of discovery for groundbreaking U.S. fare.
Cannes still appears to operate in a self-contained world driven by small critical cliques, local industry concerns and increasingly, fear of competition from other fests, notably Venice, now programmed by the wily, knowledgeable and title-hungry Marco Muller.
The result is a lineup that is, at least at first glance, a puzzling tangle of contradictions.
The sudden return of three favorite auteurs -- Wim Wenders ("Don't Come Knockin' "), Hou Hsiao-hsien ("The Best of Our Times") and Amos Gitai ("Free Zone") -- whose last movies were rejected by Cannes and subsequently nabbed by Venice, appears curious, to say the least.
Do Palme d'Or competitors Michael Haneke, Jim Jarmusch, David Cronenberg and Atom Egoyan still represent the cutting edge of artistic achievement, as they did a decade or more ago? An affirmative answer is inevitably clouded by the reality that, outside a small audience constituency in France, their following Stateside and elsewhere is largely driven by middle-aged critical cliques rather than broader arthouse auds.
Then again, Cannes still supports the occasional promising filmmaker more in tune with the contempo market, such as Dominik Moll, whose ensembler "Lemming" arrives with high hopes after his 2000 hit, "With a Friend Like Harry."
Past or present? Cutting-edge filmmaking or aging auteurs? Critical cliques or market realities?
These are questions that have increasingly dogged Cannes since Jacob stepped back in 2000. And they're questions that Fremaux, or somebody at 3 rue Amelie, has yet to answer clearly -- especially in an international festival playing field that's more ruthless and competitive than ever.
