Cannes Report - Friday, May 24
BY JOHN HARKNESS
CANNES - Who'd have thought that Roman Polanski would be the guy to stand up for old-fashioned liberal humanist filmmaking? The Pianist, the newest film from the 68-year-old auteur, is based on the autobiography of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a middle-class Polish Jew and highly regarded musician and composer who survived the second world war in the Warsaw ghetto.
This is the first time Polanski has confronted the Holocaust in his films - he himself survived Warsaw and the closing of the Cracow ghetto, and he is at least honourable enough not to do The Pianist as autobiography. That may be because of the long-suggested rumours that Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird was more Polanski's childhood than Kosinski's.
The Pianist was filmed mostly at Babelsburg Studios in Berlin and stars American actor Adrien Brody as Szpilman.Though very well made and painstakingly historical, it's the kind of film that tends to play away from Polanski's great strengths as a director. It lacks the perverse sense of humour and low cunning that made hits of Rosemary's Baby and Chinatown and rendered such under-seen and underrated works as The Ninth Gate and Bitter Moon such electrifyingly odd films. Polanksi even managed to jolt Harrison Ford into something resembling life in the Hitchcockian thriller Frantic.
Of course, low cunning and mordant wit are not the qualities anyone looks for in a Holocaust picture - you look for a film where everything comes in shades of black, grey and brown and the hero looks increasingly haggard as the film progresses. Polanski delivers, even if the film's multinational cast is a bit of a Euro-pudding - everyone speaks English but no two characters have the same accent, including members of the same family.
It's an honourable film, and worth seeing. Brody's work is exceptionally fine, even if he's looking at an uphill struggle in the prizes category against Jack Nicholson in About Schmidt, Ralph Fiennes in Spider and the non-pro Martin Compston in Ken Loach's Sweet Sixteen.
HANDICAPPING THE PALME
Two of the strongest contenders for the Palme d'Or are films I've not seen - the Palestinian Divine Intervention and Aki Kaurismäki's The Man Without A Past, with Michael Moore's Bowling For Columbine looking for a prize and Aleksandr Sokurov's epic one-shot movie Russian Ark a near cinch for the Prix du Technique.
If Spider doesn't take a prize as a film, Miranda Richardson, who plays three roles in the film, has a very good shot at best actress in a year when great female performances are rather thin on the ground. (Her main competition is another English thesp, Lesley Manville in Mike Leigh's All Or Nothing.)
Director could go almost anywhere - Cronenburg, Kaurismaki, perennial also-ran Loach, Elia Soulieman for Divine Intervention. The problem this year is that there are a number of good films, but I've yet to see a great one - certainly nothing that defines the festival.
UNLIKELY TO GET A PRIZE
Gaspar Noé's Irréversible, set up to be the succès de scandale at this year's Cannes Competition, plays like Memento-meets-The Blair Witch Project - it begins with Vincent Cassell's Marcus being dragged out of a gay sex club on a gurney. The camera style could be described as heavily caffeinated, with the camera set on some kind of rig that allows it to move through 360 degrees in three dimensions while on a crane. This tends to relieve director Noé of the responsibility of actually framing or lighting his shots.
The film then moves backwards toward the event that triggered Marcus's vengeful quest - the rape and beating of his girlfriend, played by Monica Bellucci. For this sequence, which takes nine excruciating minutes, Noé manages to find a stable place for the camera so we can see and hear very clearly what's going on.
Noé isn't simply rubbing the audience's face in the horror. I suspect that he's getting off on it - it's a jolly capper to a film that has already featured the beating of a transsexual whore, the racial abuse and macing of a Chinese taxi driver, and the beating of a man's face with a fire extinguisher until he doesn't have a face anymore.
I'm going to be very curious to see the reviews of this one, particularly from the French critics. Noé made a splash a couple of years ago with Seul Contre Tous, a Taxi Driver-like story of a psychotic butcher (literally a butcher, not metaphorically), with his racist interior monologues.
Noé's basically seeing how far he can go with shock tactics, and in the era of Baise-moi (which thanked Noé in the credits), the bourgeois art cinema audience may no longer be as shockable as it once was. Heck, Buñuel used to be able to generate shock simply by throwing mud on Catherine Deneuve.
In a curious act of historical revisionism, the official Cannes Web site describes this as Noe’s second
film after Seul Contre Tous, when it's actually his fourth according to the Internet Movie Database.
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