Cannes shows its serious side
By Peter Malone MSC
6 June 2008

Liam Cunningham as Fr Dominic Moran, left, and Michael Fassbender as IRA prisoner Bobby Sands

The Palme d'Or went to Entre Les Murs ("The Class") from socially minded director Laurent Cantet. While it shows many problems in contemporary French classrooms, it ends in quite an upbeat mood. This was not the case with most of the films in competition.

During the ecumenical prayer service in the Anglican church in Cannes the president of the ecumenical jury listed some of the subjects that audiences had been presented with. They included a great deal of poverty, dysfunctional families, Middle East conflicts, murders, the Mafia, child abduction, police corruption and racism. This made for a very serious festival.

However there was a fine amount of interesting cinema. The opening film, Blindness, based on the novel of Nobel Prize winner José Saramago and directed by Fernando Meireilles (The Constant Gardener) was an allegory about society going blind and becoming self-destructive. Julianne Moore plays a God-like figure who does not go blind and is able to help all the afflicted. In contrast, the closing film What Just Happened? is a moderately amusing parody of Hollywood with Robert de Niro as a harassed producer. The film within the film starred Sean Penn and had a climax during a Cannes Festival; Penn was the president of this year's jury.

Waltz with Bashir was a fascinating Israeli documentary about war in Lebanon in the 1980s. What made it different was the fact that it was an animated film that had first been shot on video.

Clint Eastwood was in Cannes again, this time with The Exchange, a finely crafted story of an abduction and police corruption in Los Angeles, 1928. The Dardennes brothers, who have won the Palme d'Or twice, won the screenplay award for Le Silence de Lorna ("The Silence of Lorna"), a topical EU story of illegal migrants and gangs who organise often violent schemes to get round the law.

The press decided that this was not a stand-out festival and that it was impossible to predict the winners. The Grand Prize was a surprise. It went to Gomorra, a hard-hitting film showing the Naples suburb Scampia, where the Camorra rules mercilessly. There were five separate stories which made watching the film sometimes quite confusing as the screenplay moved from one to the other in bits and pieces. Another confusion difficulty was that one young thug looked the same as another. The international jury must have been absorbed by Italian society and politics because it gave its Jury Prize to Il Divo, a quite satirical portrait of veteran politician Giulio Andreotti (not an easy film for those unfamiliar with the subject).

The Argentinian Sandra Corveloni won the award for Best Actress with her hardworking mother-of-four in Linha de Passe ("Line of Passage") - it was a commendable choice. The choice for Best Actor, on the other hand, was a surprise: it went to Benicio del Toro for his performance in the much-anticipated Che, directed by Steven Soderbergh. This was a mammoth four-and-a-half-hour film, the first part showing the Cuban revolution, the second, much less interesting, showing Che's attempts to foster revolution in Bolivia. Soderbergh seemed to make Che less charismatic than we might imagine and, in the second part, he sometimes disappears.

This year the Philippines and Singapore were included in the main competition - a good thing in principle, but the two films could not match the quality of most of the other films. Serbis from the Philippines showed the squalid side of Manila and the sex trade; My Magic from Singapore was sad but had a much more humane approach, with an alcoholic magician father trying to do the best for his young son.

The Ecumenical Prize is always an interesting gauge of the dramatising of values. This year's winner was the Canadian film Adoration, directed by Atom Egoyan (who won the prize in Cannes in 1997 for The Sweet Hereafter). Egoyan tackled a huge range of themes including family relationships, education, appearances and reality, theatre, fact and fiction and imagination as well as racism and contemporary terrorism. The film unfolded gradually. What seemed coincidences were not. Some found the plot too confusing, but for those who appreciated it, it was a very satisfying film.

However, in the Un Certain Regard section they gave their prize to the British film about the Maze Prison and Bobby Sands, Hunger, directed quite strikingly by the Turner Prize-winning artist Steve McQueen. He also won the Camera d'Or for best first feature. Of great interest is a 23-minute sequence (most of it in one take) where Bobby Sands and Fr Dominic Moran discuss the pros and cons of his stances across a prison table. Despite the static photography, this conversation is moving and stimulating.

Forget about the critics: this year, Cannes was full of great films.