Cannes plays safe

With the Cannes Film Festival over for another year and the prizes handed
out, the conservatism of the jury's decisions was striking, in what was a
variable year in the south of France, writes Michael Dwyer

A jury presided over by Hollywood maverick David Lynch - and including actor-producers Sharon Stone and Michelle Yeoh and directors Raoul Ruiz and Walter Salles - might reasonably have been expected to have produced a bold statement or two and a few potentially controversial decisions in their deliberations on the 22 films in competition at the 55th Cannes Film Festival, which closed on Sunday night. However, what proved most surprising about their verdicts was the sheer conservatism they exhibited, both in terms of what they included and excluded from the prizes.

This was exemplified in their decision to give the festival's major award, the Palme d'Or, to one of the most conventional films in competition, Roman Polanski's The Pianist, in what might kindly be viewed as a life achievement award for an often personally troubled director of considerable accomplishment, even though he is very far from the peak of his form with this plodding and turgid new film.

It is based on the experiences of the Polish pianist Wladyslaw Spilman, who survived in the Warsaw ghetto during the second World War and died two years ago aged 88. And the jury was clearly influenced by the fact that the film represents such a personal project for Polanski, who was born in France to Jewish parents but later returned to Poland, where his mother died in a concentration camp.

The first half of the film firmly confronts the systematic degradation of the Jews by the Nazis, while the second half concentrates on Spilman's desperate individual quest for survival against all the odds. While unquestionably sincere and worthy, the film is convoluted and pedestrian, and with many of the worst excesses of what we have come to know as Euro-puddings. Performed in English, it is woodenly acted by an international cast led by the mannered US actor Adrien Brody in the role of Spilman. Most of the Poles speak with RADA-trained accents, the dialogue sounds forced and obvious in Ronald Harwood's screenplay adapted from Spilman's memoirs, and crucially, there is never any compelling sense of danger about the second half - the Nazi who finally finds Spilman is not only decent but cultured, and even asks him to play the piano for him - and we are left merely watching Brody's beard grow.

Like Polanski, the gifted Armenian, Toronto-based writer-director, Atom Egoyan, makes many missteps in confronting personal historical material in Ararat, which was shown out of competition at Cannes. In tackling the claims that the Turks carried out a campaign of genocide in Armenia in 1915, Egoyan uses the awkward and ultimately unsatisfactory device of observing a Toronto film crew making a melodramatic movie on the subject. While as visually stylish as we have come to expect from Egoyan, and marked by his characteristic directorial flourishes, this unusually disappointing film from him is hampered bya serious structural problem from which it cannot escape.

The Cannes runner-up prize, Le Grand Prix du Jury, went to the festival's critical favourite, the Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki's melancholy, witty and supremely stylish The Man Without a Past, which also received the best actress award for Kati Outinen as a Salvation Army officer who falls in love with a man (Markku Peltola) who is mugged on arrival in Helsinki and loses his memory. Gorgeously lit in radiant Technicolor compositions by his regular cinematographer, Timo Salminen, this quirky and touching serious comedy is Kaurismaki's best work to date and it engagingly develops its hopeful story of love and community, somehow transcending the daily dilemmas of the socially marginalised in contemporary society.

THE journey to finding a form of hope and redemption is even more difficult in Le Fils (The Son), which took the best actor award at Cannes for its dour but committed performance from the Belgian actor, Olivier Gourmet, as a carpenter forced into an exceptionally difficult relationship with his new young apprentice, who happens to be the boy who murdered his son. Another precisely delineated and socially concerned drama - set in the working-class milieu of their native Liege by directors Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne - Le Fils is even more austere and demanding than their previous film, the Palme d'Or-winning Rosetta.

The best director award was shared by American Paul Thomas Anderson, for the offbeat romantic comedy, Punch-Drunk Love, and the South Korean film-maker, Im Kwon-Taek, for Chihwaseon, inspired by the life of a 19th century painter.

As a sop to Michael Moore's rapturously received documentary, Bowling For Columbine, which abrasively tackled the lax gun laws in the US, it received an invented award, the "special prize of the 55th Cannes Film Festival".

Much interest centred on the competition entries from Israel and Palestine, but the Israeli entry, Amos Gitai's Kedma, went unrewarded at Cannes while Elia Suleiman's caustic Palestinian film, Divine Intervention, received the minor prize, Le Prix du Jury. Set in present-day Nazareth, near the security checkpoint operated by Israeli soldiers depicted as bullies and boors, Suleiman's episodically structured film is steeped in edgy, surreal humour, as when a solider orders a Palestinian prisoner to give directions to a tourist, even though the prisoner is blindfolded, and when a red helium balloon carrying a caricature of Yasser Arafat floats over the checkpoint.

Quite unfairly, there were no prizes at Cannes for David Cronenberg's chilling, complex and fascinating new film, Spider, which proves as warped as its opening titles. Adapted by Patrick McGrath from his own novel, it stars Ralph Fiennes in an intense, almost wordless portrayal of a traumatised man struggling to cope with the outside world after years of confinement in a mental institution - and still haunted by horrific events from his childhood when he suspected his father (Gabriel Byrne in an intriguingly ambiguous performance) of being unfaithful to his wife (Miranda Richardson) and murdering her. The three actors are on remarkable form in this deliberately paced and uncompromising film that rewards the viewer's patience with a stylised, hypnotic and unsettling psychodrama.

The ridiculously over-ripe acting of the cast consistently undermines Russian Ark, the patience-stretching and mostly irritating new film from Alexander Sokurov, which follows a contemporary film-maker's journey through time and history, within the grand Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. Sokurov must have found the gratingly theatrical performances acceptable because he was so deeply preoccupied with the film's formal experimentation: admirably eschewing editing employs a single, extended 90-minute shot for the duration of the film - a virtuoso achievement by director of photography and steadicam operator Tilman Buttner, who first showed his terrific flair on Run Lola Run.

There were no awards for the new films from former Palme d'Or winners Mike Leigh and Abbas Kiatostami, nor for any of the four French entries, which included the festival's most controversial film, Gaspar Noe's provocative Irreversible, which graphically - and joltingly - depicts rape and murder, and was received with stunned silence followed by resounding boos at its press preview in Cannes. Like the recent US thriller Memento, Irreversible is told backwards, in that its 12 complete scenes are shown in reverse order. At its centre is a shockingly brutal rape sequence in which the victim is a middle-class young woman, attacked and sodomised in a Paris underground passage by night.

The consequences are even more violent, when her lover and her former partner track down the rapist in a gay sex club and bludgeons him to death with a fire extinguisher. The horrific nature of both scenes is heightened by the use of exaggerated sound effects. The victim is played by Monica Bellucci, and her lover by her off-screen partner,Vincent Cassell. The brutality of the rape sequence is effectively contrasted with an earlier sequence of their tender love-making, to illustrate how intimate and loving sex can be compared with the violation of the sexual act in rape. Noe's powerful but numbing film goes to extremes where jury president, David Lynch, did not even dare to go in Blue Velvet.

The film most undeservedly snubbed by the Cannes jury on Sunday night, About Schmidt, takes a loosely similar route to Lynch's The Straight Story as it follows a lonely, ageing man on a journey of self-discovery. Adapted from and expanding upon the novel of the same title by Louis Begley, and made with wit, compassion and elegance by Alexander Payne, the bright young director of Election, the new film features Jack Nicholson in a towering performance of honesty and tenderness. He plays Warren Schmidt, a recently retired and widowed man who begins to re-evaluate everything about his life as he travels in his winnebago from Omaha to Denver for the wedding of his self-absorbed daughter (Hope Davis) to a dim-witted waterbed salesman (Dermot Mulroney). Nicholson ought to receive his fourth Oscar next spring for this gentle, unsentimental and very funny film, which was my favourite from everything on show in a distinctly variable but generally satisfying programme of new international cinema at this year's Cannes.