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Quote of the Day
"The only thing that Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Millennium Mambo has in common with his last film, Flowers Of Shanghai, is that the characters again spend much of their time stoned out of their skulls. - Tony Rayns, Moving Pictures International

Synopsis Du Jour
The Crossing (Documentary) "By the time Stephane was born, his father had already left for the USA. His mother never told him she was pregnant. Stephane only knows his father's name, date of birth, height and profession: U.S. soldier." Well, he'll never be able to find him with such sketchy information.

Previous Reports
Don't miss John Harkness' other reports from the festival. Jump down to the list.

report date: May 17, 2001

By JOHN HARKNESS

CANNES - Ermanno Olmi's epic, The Profession Of Arms, is set in 1526 and documents the invasion of Northern Italy (remembering that Italy as a political entity did not exist at this point) by German mercenaries apparently in the pay of Spain and against the Pope.

Opposing them are armies led by a young captain of the Medici family. Every time we change scenes, we get titles on the screen with the name of the character as well as the time and place, and I'm thinking, "Is this going to be on the final?"

Wish that I'd seen it with NOW's art maven, Deirdre Hanna, who could have helped identify the dozens of cinequecento Italian paintings that Olmi uses as visual models.

In Manoel de Oliveira's I'm Going Home, the great French actor Michel Piccoli plays a stage actor who is engaged to star in a theatrical production of James Joyce's Ulysses. The question is, On what planet? OK, director D'Oliveira is 93, and to him Piccoli probably seems a vigorous young man, but he's 75 years old, which is about 30 years past playing any of the major characters in Ulysses. Then we hear his Irish accent, which kind of sounds like what John Malkovich would sound like drunk and playing a Croatian.

Why have the Festival programmers back-loaded the competition schedule with Asian pictures? Tsai Ming-Liang's What Time Is It There, Shinji Aoyama's Desert Moon, Shohei Imamura's Warm Water Under A Red Bridge, Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Millennium Mambo are all playing in the last four days. Does fest director Gilles Jacob want an Asian Palme d'Or this year?

I SAY IT'S SPINACH - There are two schools of thought on Tsai Ming-Liang's Competition snoozer, What Time Is It There? The first says that the film's themes come together beautifully in the last 45 minutes of the putative comedy. The second says, well, sure, but you have to sit through the first 75 minutes to get to there.

THINGS I LEARNED AT THE MOVIES TODAY - Taipei is seven hours ahead of Paris. There's an underground rock scene in Beijing. And they have Wendy's in Tokyo.

OOPS - In the regular NOW magazine piece on Cannes. I noted that five of the last seven Best Foreign Language Film Oscar winners had come from the Cannes Film Festival. Turns out I was wrong - Karakter, the Dutch winner from a couple of years ago, actually had its first non-Dutch screenings at Cannes in the Critics' Week. So, actually, six of the last seven Foreign Film Oscar winners came from Cannes.

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