Films intent on provocation

Like many of the movies at Cannes this year, the winner of the Palme D'Or, 'The White Ribbon', encourages audiences to draw their own conclusions, writes MICHAEL DWYER, Film Correspondent

CHAIRING THE Cannes jury this year presented Isabelle Huppert with a dilemma faced by Sean Penn as jury president last year. Among the films for consideration by Penn's jury was Changeling, directed by Clint Eastwood whose Mystic Riverfeatured Penn's first Oscar-winning performance. Expectations that Penn might show favouritism proved unfounded when the Cannes awards were announced and there was nothing for Eastwood beyond an invented honorary prize.

Critical consensus was in short supply at Cannes this year, but it was widely agreed that the two front-runners for the Palme d'Or were Jacques Audiard's A Prophetand Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon. Jury president Huppert featured in two of Haneke's films over the past eight years and was voted best actress at Cannes for one of them, The Piano Teacher, in 2001.

The fearlessness of her intense performance in that film was recalled on Sunday night when she proudly declared that her jury was giving the Palme d'Or to Haneke. While Audiard's gritty, stylish French prison drama would have been at least as deserving of the top prize – it took the runner-up award, the Grand Prix du Jury – there can be no suggestion of bias in the Palme d'Or going to Haneke, who had been the favourite to win it in 2005 when his enthralling Caché (Hidden)brought him the award for best director.

As was the case with Caché, The White Ribbonraises more questions than it answers, but that's how Haneke prefers it, to engage the audience to the point where we can draw our own conclusions based on the information he chooses to impart. The film is set among a small Protestant community in northern Germany in the 12 months leading up to the first World War.

In the first of several incidents that puzzle the population, the local doctor is seriously injured in what appears to be a riding accident until it transpires that his horse was felled by a trip wire. There are further “strange events”, as the narrator describes them, including the death of a woman in a sawmill accident, a vicious attack on the son of a baron, and the disappearance of the doctor’s four-year-old son.

Haneke is less interested in identifying the culprits than in addressing and exploring the repression, malice and moral hypocrisy that pervades the village. The film takes its title from the white ribbons the pastor orders his children to wear as symbols and reminders of purity and innocence; when he discovers his son has been masturbating, the pastor ties the boy’s hands to the bed by night.

The doctor is another of the area’s supposed paragons of virtue, but he is cruelly dismissive when he rejects the housekeeper with whom he has been having a secret affair, and in one of the film’s creepiest scenes, he is interrupted when, it is suggested, he is molesting his own daughter.

The narrator is the amiable young schoolteacher who avidly woos a shy nanny, but as he recalls the events of that era, his voice on the soundtrack is evidently that of a much older man reflecting on those events from the distance of decades later, presumably after Germany has been through two world wars. In that context, the national psyche is acutely probed through the microcosm of village life and as the adults sow the seeds of intolerance and malice in their children, who will be in their 30s during the rise of Hitler. Haneke resists using music in his austere, thoughtful drama, which is in black-and-white and compelling throughout its two-and-half-hour duration.

THAT WAS CLOSE to the average length of the movies screening in competition at Cannes this year, although few justified it and audiences were subjected to copious taxing longueurs. Clocking in at two hours and 43 minutes, Enter the Voidwas the longest movie on show, and given the tiresomely repetitive nature of its structure, it ought to be much shorter by the time director Gaspar Noé eventually finishes it.

Noé's first film since he shocked Cannes audiences with the sexual and physical violence of Irréversiblein 2002, the rambling Enter the Voidfeatures Nathaniel Brown and Paz de la Huerta as Oscar and Linda, American siblings in present-day Tokyo where he deals drugs for a living and she works as a lap dancer. Flashbacks illustrate their childhood memories of the horrific accident that killed their parents.

Oscar then promised Linda he would never abandon her, and he doesn’t, not even when, early in the film, he is shot dead during a police raid on the Void nightclub. Noé makes extensive use of dizzying overhead camerawork to observe the world as if Oscar were looking down upon it. This rambling movie takes its own sweet time in conjuring up hallucinatory drug-taking imagery before it enters the final hour and Noé gets down to graphically depicting sex and an abortion.

Enter the Voidwas one of many Cannes entries this year that were intent on provocation and with an agenda that seemed rooted in sensationalism. "Some of them were very, very weird indeed," remarked one jury member, novelist and screenwriter Hanif Kureishi. "I saw things I've never seen in my life before in these films." He certainly was not alone in making that observation.

There were no prizes for Noé on Sunday night, but what was most surprising about the awards was how gullibly the jury accepted so many attempts to startle and disturb viewers. For the first time in Cannes history, this year's jury had a majority of women, five out of nine members, and in an astonishing decision, they gave the best director award to Filipino filmmaker Brilliante Mendoza for Kinatay (Slaughter).It features an extended, repellent sequence in which a Manila prostitute is abducted, beaten, raped, murdered and dismembered.

The jury honoured the festival's other most provocative entry, Lars von Trier's risibly pretentious Antichrist, by giving the best actress award to Charlotte Gainsbourg. In the most unsettling of several scenes that resort to shock tactics, she engages in genital mutilation with the aid of gruesome special effects.

Several groups other than the festival jury present awards at Cannes, and this year’s ecumenical jury took the unprecedented decision to give an “anti-award” to von Trier’s film, describing it as “the most misogynist movie from the self-proclaimed biggest director in the world”. Cannes festival director Thierry Frémaux responded that this was a “ridiculous decision that borders on a call for censorship” and that it was “scandalous coming from an ‘ecumenical’ jury”.

The official award of the ecumenical jury went to Ken Loach's Looking for Eric, which was cited for its "grand artistic quality and its humouristic, optimistic and human approach to a contemporary society in the midst of crisis". Loach's engaging serious comedy was one of many Cannes contenders passed over by the main festival jury.

Others included Jane Campion's overrated Bright Star, set over the last three years in the life of poet John Keats; Pedro Almodóvar's middle-range modern film noir, Broken Embraces, starring Penélope Cruz; and Ang Lee's appealing evocation of the landmark 1969 rock festival in Taking Woodstock.

Nor were there any awards for some films shown over the closing days of the festival. It was quite understandable given that they included Catalan director Isabel Coixet's Map of the Sounds of Tokyo,a ponderous tall tale featuring Sergi López as a Spaniard running a wine shop in the city. He becomes a target of a professional assassin (Rinko Kicuchi) who, although well paid for her assignments, inexplicably continues to toil on the night shift at a fish market.

Seasoned moviegoers will not be at all surprised when she falls for her proposed victim, and they are drawn closer by – possibly a screen first – what could be described as straphanger sex in a hotel room themed after a subway car. A movie that is peculiar but never in any interesting way, it opens on a sequence of Japanese businessmen consuming a buffet served on the naked bodies of women prostrate across restaurant tables. It later features López performing a karaoke version of Depeche Mode's Enjoy the Silence.

A MORE DESERVING contender for an award would have been The Time That Remains, which concludes Palestinian director Elia Suleiman's trilogy which began with Chronicle of a Disappearance(1996) and continued with Divine Intervention(2002). Subtitled Chronicle of a Present Absentee, Suleiman's semi-autobiographical new film bemusedly observes himself and his family over five chapters from 1948 to the present as it portrays their lives and their place as so-called Israeli-Arabs in Nazareth. The treatment is often surprisingly light given the subject matter, and peppered with quirky humour and surreal imagery.

One always expects to find those qualities in the movies of Terry Gilliam, and they are abundant in his latest, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, which had its world premiere at Cannes over the weekend.

Played by Christopher Plummer, Parnassus is over 1,000 years old, having made an immortality pact with the devil, Mr Nick (Tom Waits), and he runs a travelling theatre show.

Blending animation familiar from Gilliam’s Monty Python period with mystifying mumbo-jumbo and delirious fantasy, this wildly uneven movie is a curiosity most notable for the final film appearance of Heath Ledger, who died while it was in production early last year.

Gilliam ingeniously draws on the parallel worlds afforded by the theatre show to have versions of Ledger’s character played by three other actors – Johnny Depp, Jude Law and most effectively, Colin Farrell. The movie includes a poignant sequence featuring floating tributes to Rudolph Valentino, James Dean and Princess Diana, all of whom, like Ledger, died young. Gilliam implicitly signals that Ledger has joined them on the river of immortality.