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CANNES DAY 12
Sunday, May 25
HEY, WHERE'D EVERYBODY GO?
CANNES, France – Aside from the absence of long weekend holiday resort crowds, people have been making sudden departures because Air France is doing a one day strike today, and the Air Traffic controllers are going out on Tuesday — and, since I'm on Lufthansa, and I'm flying Monday, I should be okay, touch wood. That or I'm spending a couple of days in Frankfurt airport.
CONTEXT IS EVERYTHING — The late Jay Scott once said that he never trusted any of his responses to films at Cannes, and it's easy to see why. I still can't decide if the handful of good films I've seen are as good as I thought they are while watching them, or if they simply look good because they're surrounded by a number of really bad movies.
MY IRANIAN PROBLEM — Jafah Panahi's not exactly a slouch on the Festival Circuit . The Circle won the Golden Lion and the FIPRESCI Prize at Venice in 2000, The White Balloon picked up the Camera d.or for Best First Feature at Cannes in 95. His new film, Crimson Gold, picked up the Jury Prize (third) from the Un Certain Regard jury here this year, which was announced at the screening yesterday.
All well and good, but I can't be the only one who's beginning to suspect that Iranian directors have an unfortunate habit of padding their films out to feature length when their stories aren't. It's that travel habit.
Hitchcock once said that if you show someone arriving in a place, the audience will assume that they got there. You don't need to show the whole journey. Panahi was an assistant to Abbas Kiarostami (Taste Of Cherry), king of the Iranian road movie, and there is often, as in Panahi's White Balloon, the sense that the journey is the point — it's a way to move the character through different elements of society.
That's not really the case in Crimson Gold, which begins at the end, with a botched robbery and shows us how the characters got there, which kind of takes the edge off the old narrative. The two protagonists, Hussein and Ali are working class guys. Hussein is a pizza deliveryman engaged to Ali's sister and apparently a damaged veteran of the Iran-Iraq war. He's also not terribly bright, definitely George to Ali's Lenny.
But we do spend an awful lot of time following him on his motorcycle. He's not interacting with characters he meets, because he doesn't meet any while he's moving, and much of it takes place at night, so there's no scenic interest in the journey. We're just following him on the motorcycle until he gets to the next place. And if we cut the extraneous motorcycle footage out of the movie, it's about 65 minutes long. Panahi's not
the only one to do this, of course . both Makhmalbaf's are great walkers. And while Crimson Gold is a not bad Festival film, I really wishe he.d spend a little more time developing the story. Of course, maybe Iranian audiences think of travel sequences the way North American audiences think of explosions.
CANNES PRIZES — The main competition prizes will be up at this site at around 2:pm, Eastern time.
This should be interesting. According to Screen International Critic Allan Hunter, "The competition choices were considered the worst in living memory - and some of those memories stretch back almost 40 years."
My memories only stretch back 17 years, and I certainly won't argue with that assessment. Just guessing, but I'll predict Dogville for the Palme, Les Invasions Barbare for Grand Prix du Jury, The Tulse Looper Suitcases for Jury Prize, Sean Penn for actor, Samira Makhmalbaf as director, and Charlotte Rampling for actress. I offer these only so you can laugh at me once the actual winners are posted, and should not be used for wagering purposes.
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