report date: May 13, 2001

By JOHN HARKNESS

CANNES - Caught yet another French movie, The Pornographer, a story of father-son reconciliation in which the father (Jean-Pierre Léaud) must come to terms with his son's Gen-Y angst and the son (Jeremy Renier) must come to terms with his father's career.

It hasn't much to recommend it apart from the almost always compelling Léaud as an over-the-hill and out-of-touch filmmaker still trying to bring a bit of art to the porno trash he's still grinding out after almost three decades. It is, however, yet another mainstream French film that contains hard-core sex, the third or fourth I've seen, and it struck me that I've never actually seen anybody in any of these films who's enjoying the sex. (I don't mean I expect the actors to show unbridled joy while naked, humping and surrounded by eight to 15 crew members, but they are actors - they could act as if they were enjoying it if the directors wanted them to.

In Catherine Breillat's Romance, Caroline Ducey played a character on a voyage of sexual discovery but acted as if she were being broken on the wheel. In Baise-moi there was a whole theoretical thing about sex and violence going on that precluded the depiction of any kind of actual sexual pleasure. In The Pornographer, director Bertrand Bonello sets the sex in the context of the making of a porn film, but the whole thing is keyed to the degradation not of the actors, but of the director. His plans for the film are violated by his evil hack of a producer, who countermands every direction before the shooting of the scene.

For all the talk about the French as sensual and hedonistic - a stereotype I don't buy for a second (I suspect the opposite is true) - their filmmakers seem incapable of thinking up a scenario wherein characters might just, oh, I don't know, enjoy fucking. Or perhaps they can't come up with a scenario wherein they could get actors to have sex in a mainstream film without the proper theoretical framework.

INVISIBLE - The Man Who Wasn't There is the third of the Coen brothers' homages to/pastiches of the great hard-boiled writers. Miller's Crossing is so close in tone to Dashiell Hammett's The Glass Key, it's a wonder Hammett's estate didn't sue, and The Big Lebowski is a fractured take on Raymond Chandler. The Man Who Wasn't There is the brothers' James M. Cain movie, a tale of blackmail, adultery and existential chance that lifts from a bunch of sources, notably The Postman Always Rings Twice.

It's a project that indulges Ethan's taste for rococo period dialogue (see his story collection The Gates Of Eden) and gives cinematographer Roger Deakins free rein to create a perfect simulation of middle-period noir cinematography, with crisply detailed images and pools of shadow. There's a starkly considered performance by Billy Bob Thornton in the title role, Ed Crane, a man so inconsequential that he needs to be re-introduced to people he's just met. On the other hand, it's not quite a thriller and it's not really a comedy, exactly, and and it doesn't have a kick-ass soundtrack like O Brother, Where Art Thou? It's unlikely to take home a prize or even to inspire much affection among any but the hardest core of Coen fans - the ones who liked The Hudsucker Proxy. (As Coen fans go, I'm pretty hardcore, but that's a leap even I've never been able to make.)

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