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report date: May 15, 2001By JOHN HARKNESS CANNES, FRANCE - There's something vaguely dispiriting about the historical weight of the Competition this year. In part, it's the realization that the survivors of the French New Wave are now in their eighth decade - Jean-Luc Godard is 70 and Jacques Rivette is 73, and both have films in Competition - but also because, in their ways, they're retreading familiar ground. Godard's Eloge De l'Amour purports to be a film about the stages of love, but it's really about the difficulties faced by a young director who's trying to make a film about the stages of love. Thirty years after Tout Va Bien, and he's still chewing over the same problems and the same atrocities, though in Tout Va Bien he was worried about Vietnam and in Eloge De l'Amour he worries about Kosovo and the homeless. At the same time, Eloge may be the single most beautiful film in competition at the festival, its plangent black-and-white images of Paris almost shocking in an era when young filmmakers seem addicted to the rawness of the hand-held. (Whatever one says about the hand-held work in Godard's early films, it was never raw, which leads to a secondary question - Why is it that when most of the Dogme-influenced directors work with natural light their films look lousy, but when Godard and his great cinematographer, Raoul Coutard, shot with natural light they came up with exquisite images?) Rivette's Va Savoir! also goes over territory we know from L'Amour Fou, La Belle Noiseuse and The Gang Of Four - the relationship between theatre and life, the fascination with classical art forms and the difficulty of love between creative people (here, as in L'Amour Fou, between director and actress.) In Va Savoir! an Italian theatre company is presenting Pirandello in Paris, and the star, Camille, returns home to confront her past in the form of Pierre, her old lover, while Ugo, her current lover and director, searches in a private library for a never-published play by the Italian author Goldoni. Rivette was always the most elegant of the Nouvelle Vague directors - his style has the airiness of light Truffaut, but he combines it with Godard's theoretical intelligence. Out One and L'Amour Fou are modelled on paranoia and emotional terror, and Céline And Julie Go Boating is to literary theory what Godard's post-Weekend films are to political theory in the cinema. Va Savoir! isn't bad - it's the sort of film a really bright student, drunk on Rivette's films, might make. IT'S COME TO THIS - So many media, so few interview subjects. My friend Diane Carson, covering the festival for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and I were having steak frites when two overly enthusiastic young Englishmen wandered up and asked if we wanted to be in their movie - some digital video thing about a desperate young man pitching his project around Cannes. So there's a bizarre chance that I may actually be in a movie, though I'm not sure that something on hand-held DV shot in a Cannes restaurant actually is a movie. The next day, I'm talking to someone in the Palais when a couple of young Japanese women ask if I want to go on a Japanese quiz show and answer questions about the Cannes film festival. People who are taking moving images of me at the Cannes Film Festival are definitely desperate. SPEAKING OF DIGITAL VIDEO - I caught The Anniversary Party, which was co-written, co-directed and co-stars Jennifer Jason Leigh and Scottish actor Alan Cumming (the evil manager in Josie And The Pussycats, the hapless documentary filmmaker in Spice World), about a married couple's meltdown in front of friends (Kevin Kline, Phoebe Cates, Jennifer Beals, Gwyneth Paltrow) at their sixth anniversary. It's a Dogme-style film (Leigh appeared in Dogme 4, The King Is Alive), observing unity of time and place and shot on hand-held digital video. But it does something very unusual - it looks good. Indeed, it looks as if it was shot by someone who understands light, and it was - the cinematographer was John Bailey, who shot The Big Chill, In The Line Of Fire and As Good As it Gets. Lord knows, no one is more critical of the uses digital video has been put to than I am, but this is a good-looking piece of work that plays to the strengths of the DV image - it's generally better in close-up than in depth and it eats light, so Bailey made sure he had lots of it. The two films to compare and contrast with are so studiously underlit as to devolve into visual mush in the transfer to 35mm film: Wayne Wang's The Center Of The World, which shares space in Un Certain Regard with The Anniversary Party, and Ethan Hawke's Last Word On Paradise, which played earlier this week in the Fortnight. PREVIOUS REPORTS:
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