AUTEURS are in and newcomers and the Hollywood studios are out in the official competition at the 49th Cannes Film Festival, which opened last night with the new Patrice Leconte film, Ridicule, set in the court of Louis XVI and preceded by a new Mickey Mouse short from Disney, Runaway Brain, Only one movie from a major Hollywood studio (Michael Cimino's Sunchaser, his first film in six years) and only one first time director (the Italian, Mimmo Calopresti, with The Second Time) are included among the 23 pictures chosen to compete for the prestigious Palme d'Or this year.
Instead, Gilles Jacob, the festival's director since 1978, has opted for movies directed by proven talent with the emphasis on art house favourites. His final selection includes the latest work from, among others, Chen Kaige, David Cronenberg, Joel and Ethan Coen, Bernardo Bertolucci, Robert Altman, Andre Techine, Stephen Frears, Hou Hsaio Hsein and Mike Leigh.
It is very early days indeed at this point to be hazarding any predictions about the outcome of the Palme d'Or and other key festival prizes. However unless the jury (chaired by Francis Coppola) takes leave of its senses amidst the hype and hysteria of the world's major film festival, Mike Leigh, or one or more of his team, looks certain to be recalled to Cannes to pick up a prize or two on closing night next Monday week.
Three years ago, Leigh's Naked received awards for best actor (David Thewlis) and best director, Leigh's first film since then, Secrets And Lies, which has its world premiere in Cannes tonight, is the culmination of all this gifted, improvisational director's achievements in one deeply satisfying whole as he draws on many, of his previous preoccupations for a spellbinding serious comedy. It also marks the most optimistic film to date in the canon of a director whose despair and pessimism never raged more forcefully than in Naked.
Secrets And Lies opens on a funeral. We learn very, little about the person being buried before it cuts to the prelude to a wedding only to shift the focus from the newly weds to the photographer for whom they are posing The explicit connection between both occasions gradually becomes clearer as we glean more and mere information about the movie's protagonists,
Timothy Spall, in a remarkable performance, plays that photographer, a man thriving in his work and unhappy in his marriage to a tense, depressed woman played by Phyllis Logan. The photographer's sister (Brenda Blethyn) is a lonely, unmarried woman toiling in a cardboard box factory and living with, her recalcitrant daughter (Claire Rushbrook), who works as a street cleaner. The film's pivotal character is an assured young black optometrist (Marianne Jean Baptiste), whose adoptive mother was buried in the opening funeral sequence and who is seeking the identity of her birth mother.
"We're all in pain, why can't we share our pain?" asks the photographer towards the end of Secrets And Lie, which acutely confronts the secrets people keep from each other and the lies we tell ourselves to shut things out of our lives and memories. Strong on incidental detail and laced with a dark sense of humour, Mike Leigh's movie is a deceptively simple story.for our times which proves as riveting as a thriller. In an exceptional cast, Brenda Blethyn is outstanding in an emotionally raw and poignant performance.
How Secrets And Lies will fare over the 12 long and hectic days and nights of Cannes is in the light of the often odd and clearly compromised decisions issued by festival juries down the years anyone's guess. With, Coppola as president, this year's eclectically selected, jury includes actors Nathalie Baye and Greta Scacchi, the brilliant Canadian based director, Atom Egoyan the Polish screenwriter and regular collaborator of the late Kieslowski, Krzysztof Piesiewicz the accomplished German lighting cameraman, Michael Ballhaus, who worked with Fassbinder before moving to the US and lighting many Scorsese films the Japanese costume designer, Eiko Ishioka the Italian novelist, Antonio Tabucchi the veteran French critic, and the Anh Hung, whose most recent film, Cyclo, is reviewed above.
Even before the festival opened the hoopla was under way when I arrived at Nice airport on Wednesday afternoon. Nathalie Baye, who was on the same plane from Paris, was surrounded by photographers, a TV crew and autograph hunters and she obliged all of them while she waited for her baggage to arrive on the carousel. Bemused to be recognised, the very boyish looking Tran Anh Hung gave the media team an extra bite at the cherry.
That early veneer of glamour soon disappeared as torrential rain lashed the windows of the taxi to Cannes. Bad weather is even worse news than bad movies at Cannes everything happens within a square mile of the small Cote d'Azur town, the traffic is at a snail's crawl on the sunniest of days and getting about on foot is much the most sensible way. Getting soaked to the skin time and again just heightens the tension for everyone at a frenetically paced event which only stops when you force yourself away from it for sleep.
HAVING given priority to purchasing a parapluie, the next stop was the Festival Palais to collect accreditation. The mood of the media was downbeat. "The Altman movie is rubbish," hissed a leading French critic, who had seen a preview of Altman's Kansas City in Paris.
The biggest moan, not for the first time, was where, are the stars echoing the diatribe in the trade paper, Screen International, that festival director Gilles Jacob has been in "an unforgiving frame of mind" this year, "rejecting almost every US film thrown his way, result ink in yet another competition section devoid of star power The speculation is that this year's festival is merely a holding event that Jacob is reserving his arsenals of star power for next year's mega high profile 50th anniversary celebrations.
Some of the British journalists' were warming up for the perceived controversy of the festival, Some Mother's Son, a drama of two Belfast women with sons on the H Block hunger strike in 1981. They are played by Helen Mirren and Fionnuala Flanagan, and the director is Terry George, the Northern Ireland writer who shared an Oscar nomination with Jim Sheridan for the In The Name Of The Father screenplay. Sheridan, who produced and co-wrote Some Mother's Son, will be in Cannes this weekend to fight the flak at the film's world premiere.
Some Mother's Son is screening in the official festival side bar section, Un Certain Regard which opens today with another potential controversy, former critic Mary Harron's cinema directing debut with I Shot Andy Warhol, starring Lili Taylor as Valerie Solanas, founder of SCUM (the Society for Cutting Up Men), who shot Warhol at close range in June, 1968, and Jared Harris, son of Richard, as Warhol himself.
