Thursday, May 18

CANNES, FRANCE - There are two kinds of film critics. The optimist looks to the future and, despite all evidence to the contrary, sees endless possibilities. The pessimist looks at the past and develops impossible standards.

The optimist prowls the theatres at a film festival in hopes of discovering the new Wong Kar-Wai. The pessimist can't imagine why the optimist would bother, as the old Wong Kar-Wai wasn't all that great anyway. Overheard along the Croisette 1 - "I'm kind of hoping the Coen Brothers isn't any good. Isn't that terrible? Hoping a movie will suck so you don't have to stay until the end."

Day One - Normally, the Salle De Presse, where I'm sitting right now typing this, is easy to get to - in the main nontheatrical doors, up a flight of stairs, two hard lefts and there you are. Today the staircase is interdict. They're throwing the opening night party IN the Palais, which means that short-term reno is the order of the day.

The first set of security guards thinks I mean the Club de Presse and sends me up to the fourth floor so I can empty my mailbox, but one cannot get down from there. So I go back down and get sent to the back entrance. That just brings me back to a flight of stairs I can't use. This time I run into someone who actually knows where I'm supposed to go - back outside, up the stairs to the Salle Debussy - from which I've just left the screening of Vatel, and then outside along the terrasse, through an empty room, back out onto the terrasse and then into the press room.

Overheard along the Croisette 2 - "I really liked the Edward Yang film (Yi Yi). I couldn't stay awake through it, but I really liked it." Missing Impossible - Mission Impossible 2 is the one that got away. Word from almost everywhere is that the festival wanted M:I 2 for either opening or closing night, but that Paramount said no. Hollywood Studios are, apparently, leery of premiering big films at Cannes because of the potential for bad buzz. Look what happened, they tremble, to Godzilla. Well yeah, look what happened to Godzilla. On the other hand, look what happened to Thelma And Louise, still the best closing film in my Cannes memory. It certainly demonstrates the one-off mentality of the studios. I can't think of a single critic who was looking forward to Godzilla. It was, after all, a product of the universally reviled Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich, creators of Independence Day. Most critics I know are actually looking forward to M:I 2 - it's a John Woo movie. Have to see it when I get home. So instead the Festival opened with Vatel, a bloated, dramatically challenged film about a French chef, and is closing with Denys Arcand's Stardom. The biggest star in the film is Dan Aykroyd, which is not exactly the same as having Tom and Nicole ascend the steps on Closing Night.

STRANGEST CREDIT - After Not I, Neil Jordan's short film adaptation of Samuel Beckett's monologue, one finds this credit - Stand-in for Julianne Moore. Not an unusual credit, but what we see of Moore, aside from a single shot of her entering and sitting at the start of the film, is her mouth in extreme closeup.

Day Five - Have taken to power napping in the lobby of the Noga Hilton. Very comfy couches. Have also taken to napping in Noga Hilton theatre. This was not a choice, but sometimes it just happens. Like during Chantal Akerman's The Captive, an adaptation of Proust's Albertine Prisonniere. Akerman-does-Proust is coma-inducing as a concept, but the heat rises in the Noga, and the balcony is somewhere over 25C. Walk out or pass out. Overheard along the Croisette 3 - "Eureka is great. It's very slowly paced, but it's great." The very slowly paced part is one thing. Eureka, a Japanese film in the Competition, is 217 minutes long. That is not a typo; that's 217 minutes. As in Longer by half an hour than ANY Kevin Costner movie. Longer than Godfather Part 2. Longer than The Seven Samurai.

Day Seven - There are two kinds of film festival parties. I know, this goes against everything I've always said about how all film festival parties are the same. There are parties without music, where the suits get together in a bar or restaurant, get some actors for window-dressing and shmooze. Then there are parties with music, where 45-year-old producers and 55-year-old distributors get their 32-year-old publicists to organize a party, which they do by hiring a hot DJ to do really phat techno mixes REALLY loudly with an eye to impressing 20-year-olds who won't be at the party in the first place except as executive arm candy. The first kind of party is bad, though the food may be good. The second kind of party is unspeakable, though it is fun to watch suits try to have discussions in between the beats.

The Toronto Festival/Ontario Film Development Corporation party, held as always at the Grey D'Albion Beach, is the first kind of party and therefore kind of dull - it generally is, because it's pretty much the same people every year and there isn't a terribly strong Canadian profile in Cannes at the moment. The team that brought Les Fantomes De Trois Madeleines to the Fortnight should have slunk home in shame by now, and the Stardom crew is yet to arrive - meaning that the party was the usual assortment of hacks and flacks. Worse still, the food was dreadful - some hors d'oeuvres, some little tiny desserts. Some way to kick off the 25th anniversary of the Toronto Film Festival. Hi! We're 25 and we can't afford full-sized tartes.

Overheard on the Croisette 4 - "I no longer know what I'm seeing. I just know where I have to be and how long it is."

Day Nine - After seven days of "art," I shuffle down the hill for Ang Lee's out-of-competition special Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which promises martial arts, Chow Yun Fat, Michelle Yeoh and lunch at the Carlton Beach with the stars, director, producer and 50 or so of their best friends in the North American press. OK, I admit it, I would have gone to the screening even without the promise of lunch.

A stunning film in the grand tradition of martial arts movies with amazing wire work from the principals - particularly Yeoh and her chief antagonist, Zhang Zi Yi - a great romantic seriousness and the kung fu tavern fight to end all kung fu tavern fights. All the stars I have available. Best movie I've seen at the Cannes festival this year. The folks at Sony Entertainment can do with that what they will.

Anyway, Michelle Yeoh comes into the Carlton Hotel's Beach Restaurant looking every inch (about 63 of them) the move star in an embroidered blue silk pants outfit. Ang Lee looks as if he should be bussing the tables. If the names are not entirely familiar, Michelle Yeoh was Jackie Chan's partner in crime fighting in Police Story III: Supercop and kicked some serious butt opposite James Bond in Tomorrow Never Dies. Ang Lee is the Taiwanese-born, American-schooled director of The Ice Storm, Sense And Sensibility, Ride With The Devil and The Wedding Banquet.

They are effusive in their praise for one another. Yeoh compares the film, which is entirely in Mandarin, a language she doesn't speak, with playing Shakespeare. Lee calls Yeoh "the only actor who's ever made me cry while I was shooting a scene."

What's unusual is that Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is a top-notch action movie directed by a great actor's director who was smart enough to hire Yuen Woo-Ping - whose credits as a martial arts choreographer go all the way back the original Drunken Master movies and up to Jet Li's Fist Of Legend and The Matrix - to organize the film's unique fight scenes. Well, unique up to a point. "Fight scenes in martial arts movies are a pretty standard group of set pieces,"Lee notes dryly. "There's the one-on-one fight for the climaxes. There's a group fight, which is always a mess and doesn't really allow for great stunt work. Then there's the tavern fight, where the action doesn't have to match, so you can just let the star give a great bravura performance and take on as many opponents as the film can afford.

"The problem with most action movies is that, usually, really good actors can't move like that and action stars can't act." Which brings us to Yeoh and Chow-Yun Fat, strung up on wires and flying through the air. Yeoh, who tore her ACL during her first big action scene - she landed badly off a kick - and had to undergo surgery while the film shot around her, says the production decided to take full advantage of the fact that the wires can now be digitally erased from the film by using thicker wires, allowing the actors to do more elaborate stunts. "But because you feel more confident, you have to be more careful. Your timing has to be perfect, otherwise it looks terrible, and you can also injure yourself on your landings - you're running in the air and trying to catch the edges of rooftops. I've done a lot of wire work, and you can break your ankle." This is Lee's second big action movie, and he says that what he learned on his first, last year's underrated Ride With The Devil, is that even in an action movie the characters are everything. "When we were previewing Ride With The Devil, I realized that whenever the character got more than three feet from Toby (McGuire), people were bored."

Yeoh, for her part, learned that her director was a dogged perfectionist. "You do the fight scenes very fast, and you have to, and you have to show power when you punch or kick. If you do a series of six or seven punches, and the fifth and sixth punch were weak, he'd stop us and do it again. And the dialogue? Ang would call 'Cut' and say, 'Michelle, the third word of the fourth sentence, you really didn't stress the first syllable like you should.' I told him if he thought swinging the sword was so easy, he should try it."

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Past reports

• May 18
• May 20