Cannes Report Michael DwyerThe weather outside is delightful and the hills were alive with villa parties all weekend, but inside the Palais at the 58th Festival de Cannes, as the event is now known, the movies in the official selection have been suffused with doom and gloom. The most discernible trend this year is towards angst, guilt, cruelty and misery, as the filmmakers have ensured that the audience, too, suffers for their art.
Even Woody Allen has been unusually sparing with the one-liners in his new film, Match Point - not that he hasn't gone all serious on us in the past, of course, and this film is much less downbeat than Another Woman or September. It breaks the Allen mould in many respects: it's his first film to run for more than two hours; it's set entirely outside Manhattan; Gershwin and Porter have been replaced by Verdi and Donizetti on the soundtrack; and there isn't a Woody surrogate in sight, although the pivotal character, Chris Wilton, gets saddled with doubts and guilt.
In his most striking performance to date, Jonathan Rhys Meyers is remarkably assured and charismatic as Wilton, a suavely ambitious young Irishman in London. A former tennis professional, he is irresistibly drawn into the affluent lifestyle of a wealthy English family. He becomes involved with their daughter (Emily Mortimer), but risks everything when he embarks on a secret affair with her brother's fiancee, a struggling American actress played by Scarlett Johansson.
A recurring theme in the movie is how much of life can depend on being in the right or the wrong place at a particular time, and how scary that realisation can be. Wilton appears to have luck in spades, which is useful given that he, like the social climber played by Matt Damon in The Talented Mr Ripley, has several serious moral flaws to conceal.
Clearly refreshed by shooting in new surroundings, Allen propels the tangled proceedings at a vigorous pace, subtly building the tension and pausing along the way to deliver a valentine to London cultural landmarks - the Royal Opera House, Tate Modern, the Royal Court Theatre.
Allen's cast is exemplary. It notably includes Brian Cox, Penelope Wilton and Matthew Goode in a movie that's a pleasure to experience from start to finish, and his most satisfying in many years. Even those who had sworn off Allen's familiar templates may be re-converted by Match Point, which would be a major awards contender at Cannes if Allen had allowed it in competition. Consistent in his firm views on this subject, he refused.
Of the competition movies over the early days of Cannes 2005, the best of a generally disappointing selection has been Austrian director Michael Haneke's thoroughly intriguing and disturbing French-language drama, Caché (Hidden). Motifs from earlier Haneke films abound - from the use and abuse of technology to the human capacity for inhumane cruelty - and are percolated into a challenging and thought-provoking moral drama.
Two of France's finest are on prime form as husband and wife in Caché - Daniel Auteuil as Georges, a smugly confident presenter of a TV books review show, and Juliette Binoche as Laurent, an enthusiastic literary editor. They live with their 12-year-old son in an affluent home where they entertain like-minded, well-heeled couples over good food and wine.
It goes without saying that this is too good to last, especially in a Haneke picture, and a creepy personal dilemma intrudes when videotapes arrive in the post - beginning with extended static shots of their home, establishing a "we know where you live" threat, accompanied by simple drawings of a child's face with blood streaming from it. Reflecting on an incident in childhood, Georges says he has a hunch as to what lies behind this personal invasion, and while we in the audience share his suspicions, he surprisingly refuses to share this information with his wife.
Anyone familiar with the cynicism and pessimism of Haneke's work will know not to expect a glibly packaged resolution. And so it is with Caché, a movie that subtly broadens its scope from the personal to the political, and achieves this so effectively that it continues to prompt reflection well after the closing credits roll.
The same can be said of Gus Van Sant's anti-narrative exercise, Last Days, which draws an impressionistic picture of a strung-out, barely coherent rock star before he takes his own life. This is not giving away an ending foregrounded in inevitability, not least because the film's inspiration is Kurt Cobain, who killed himself in 1994 at the height of his fame.
The rock star in Last Days is known simply as Blake, and played with a smouldering intensity by the adventurous young Michael Pitt. Long-haired, scraggy-bearded and eccentrically dressed to resemble Cobain's image, Pitt strikes a magnetic presence that adds immeasurably to a largely improvised, non-linear movie.
Van Sant risks alienating many viewers with an opening 15-minute sequence in which Blake wanders through a forest, takes a swim, dries his clothes and wanders back home again, muttering incomprehensibly along the way, although his mumblings were helpfully subtitled in French at Cannes.
Regardless of that, the point is that Blake is a lost soul, a young man who moves with his head stooped, as if the weight of the world lies on his shoulders. It becomes clear that everyone, including the friends sharing his home, want a part of him, and he just can't take it any more, so finally that soul departs his body, poetically taking him on a stairway to heaven.
Affirming the view that it's rough and tough at the top of the showbiz pile, Atom Egoyan's teasingly ambiguously titled Where the Truth Lies, based on the debut novel of singer-songwriter Rupert Holmes, goes behind the scenes with a fictional singing comic duo hugely popular in the 1950s. Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth are imaginatively cast as the duo whose assiduously crafted public image is founded in versatility and philanthropy, and demonstrated in an epic annual TV charity telethon.
Then they become implicated in the murder of a hotel maid (Rachel Blanchard), which remains unsolved 15 years later, when a determined but naive young journalist (Alison Lohman) revisits the case and discovers the darker side of the double act, long after they split up. This set-up is arresting, the production values are outstanding and Egoyan's regular composer Mychael Danna layers the drama with a potent genre-mixing score.
It's all the more disheartening, then, that Egoyan's time-shifting movie unravels in the second half.
A similar problem afflicts Lemming, Dominik Moll's first film since his far more satisfying 2000 thriller, Harry, He's Here to Help.
Chosen to open Cannes this year, Lemming introduces Alain (Laurent Lucas) as a fast-rising home automation engineer proudly unveiling his latest invention, a mini flying webcam. Just as he and his wife Benedicte (Charlotte Gainsbourg) are settling into their new life in a new town, they feel obliged to invite Alain's boss, Richard (Andre Dussolier) and his wife, Alice (a sublime Charlotte Rampling) to dinner.
The first sign that this won't go as perfectly as planned comes when Benedicte finds a lemming, an Arctic rodent, in the drainpipe. Then, the guests arrive extremely late. Alice, wearing dark glasses indoors, is seething with rage and explains that her husband was with one of his whores, and she throws a glass of red wine in his face.
The scene appears to be set for a witty, sophisticated contemporary spin on Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Unfortunately, after a promising first hour the screenplay goes off on to a series of irrational, patience-stretching tangents, to the point where it's hard to care a whit about the characters and their fates.
The only Japanese film in the Cannes competition, Masahiro Kobayashi's Bashing, operates from a premise likely to surprise western viewers - that Japanese aid workers held hostage in Iraq were shunned by society on their return home. The factually based film illustrates the ostracism encountered by one idealistic young former hostage, Yuko, valiantly played by Fusako Urabe, who has to carry the picture.
Six months after returning home, she is subjected to abusive anonymous phone calls, refused service in her local Spar, fired from her job, and treated with contempt by her former boyfriend, who tells her she would have become a hero had she died in Iraq.
The consequences are bleak in terms of themes, tone and visual style, but the movie never explains or examines the questions of national honour and shame that appear to have been so severely infringed by Yuko's captivity in Iraq. Contrast Yuko's experiences with those of former Beirut hostage Brian Keenan, for example, and you have the basis for a fascinating exploration of cultural differences, one you won't find touched on in Bashing.
Michael Dwyer's next Cannes report is in The Ticket on Friday
