But no matter what they think about the dark and chaotic sides of the Cannes experience, even the unlikeliest filmmakers in the end are almost compelled to attend because it is so big, because so much worldwide publicity can be generated from here.
John Sayles and his producing partner Maggie Rienzi, called in one profile people who “will never be mistaken for the sort of couple who attract the paparazzi in Cannes,” show up and, yes, attract photographers. “Being here is a job,” explained Todd Solondz, who arrived with his genially twisted Happiness. “The picture doesn't sell itself, I have to sell it, especially since I don't exactly have a ‘big opening weekend' kind of cast.” Even Ken Loach, the dean of socially conscious British filmmakers, dons formal wear for the red-carpet premiers of his films. “There are bigger things to be rebellious about,” Loach reminded me, “than black tie.” “O”
So it turns out, as with any big, glamorous party, that the people who are most upset about Cannes are those who can't get in. In recent years that has meant filmmakers from both Germany and Italy, two major film-producing nations that have had enormous trouble getting their pictures accepted into the official competition, the most prestigious part of Cannes.
The 2000 festival was the seventh year in a row that German filmmakers were shut out of the competition, and they were not happy about it. “We suffer when this happens,” one German director told the Hollywood Reporter, which detailed that “since 1994, both Taiwan and China/Hong Kong have had four films each in competition; Denmark has had three; Iran, Greece and Japan have each had two; and Mexico, Belgium and Mali have each had one. During that time, Germany, which has the world's second-largest media industry and which has a newly booming feature film sector, has had none.” The reason for the snub, another director theorized, was the French belief that “France invented culture, and the Germans can't possibly participate.”
Even more unhappy, and not at all unwilling to talk about it, were the Italians when they, too, were shut out of Cannes 2000. Veteran producer Dino DeLaurentiis was quoted as saying “These snotty Frenchmen make me laugh. In an international festival, it's ridiculous to exclude our cinema.” Film director Ricky Tognazzi, retribution on his mind, said “For a year I will avoid eating French goat cheese.” Christian De Sica, son of the great director Vittorio De Sica, added the coup de grace: “As if the French didn't also make a lot of stupid movies.”
If there is one thing that is generally agreed about the official competition, it's that the selection process is baffling at best. Every Cannes veteran has his or her list of ridiculous films that were somehow let in, from the dim British comedy Splitting Heirs to the literally unreleasable Johnny Depp-directed The Brave to the even worse Steven Soderbergh Schizopolis (shown as an out-of-competition special event).
Even worse, if films with any kind of crowd-pleasing potential do get into the festival, they are often relegated to meaningless out-of-competition slots. Such was the fate of deservedly popular works like Strictly Ballroom, Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Trainspotting, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. This trend is so well known that comedy writer-director Francis Veber, the most widely popular French filmmaker of his generation (The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe, La Chèvre, Les Compères) genially told me that when he received a phone call from the festival announcing an official tribute to him in 1999, “I was so surprised I fell on my ass. Why the tribute now? Maybe they've seen my tests for cholesterol and sugar, and they think I will die soon.”
The uncomfortable truth is that for a film festival that is the cynosure of all eyes, Cannes's taste, at least as far as the competition goes, is surprisingly narrow. France is the home of the auteur theory, which deifies directors at the expense of other creative parties, and Cannes overwhelmingly favors films by critically respectable auteurs who've been there before, a usual-suspects group of largely noncommercial film-makers Variety categorizes as “heavyweight helmers.” It's proved to be an increasingly unpopular philosophy.
“High Art pays low dividends at Cannes fest” was the headline on a much-talked-about 1999 piece by chief Variety film critic Todd McCarthy that placed the auteur theory in “an advanced state of decrepitude” and lamented that “the gulf between the sort of High Art films that many serious directors want to make (and that is generally sought by fests) and pictures that will hold some sort of interest for audiences is bigger than ever.”
In the same vein, Maurice Huleu of Nice-Matin wondered if “this outpouring of work, of talent and creativity is predestined to satisfy only a few initiates.” Talking of the 1997 decision, which split the Palme d'Or between rarefied films by Iran's Abbas Kiarostami and Japan's Shohei Immamura, Huleu emphasized that the jury “may have sacrificed other considerations in the name of art, but they also did a disservice to the Cannes Festival and to cinema.”
Which brings us, inevitably, to Hollywood, that other center of the movie universe. It's the place that makes the movies the world hungers for, and though Cannes well knows the value of glamour and glitz, the festival in recent years has had great difficulty attracting top-drawer items from the bowels of the studio system. So Cannes 2000, for instance, settled for Brian De Palma's frigid Mission to Mars while even the most aesthetically rigorous French journalists and critics were wondering why Gladiator wasn't there in its stead.
There are reasons for this absence. Cannes, unlike Toronto, comes in the spring, the wrong time of year for the “quality” films studios would prefer to send to festivals. Cannes, as noted, can kill your picture, something studios don't want to risk with prospective blockbusters costing tens of millions of dollars. Cannes is expensive, especially when you factor in flying stars over in private jets. And, especially in recent years, the festival hierarchy has been unwilling to play the Hollywood game, to take trips to Los Angeles and do the kind of schmoozing and flattering of the powers that be that's necessary to overturn more rational considerations.
Also a factor is that the jury awards at Cannes can be so arbitrary and contrived, so governed by whim and geared toward advancing political and cultural agendas, that studio pictures rarely get what Hollywood considers a fair shake. For every year like 1993, when the Palme d'Or was wisely split between The Piano and Farewell My Concubine, there is a 1999, when the David Cronenberg-led jury horrified everyone except themselves by giving three major awards to the unwatchable L'Humanité. “David Cronenberg's decisions,” one festival veteran said, “are scarier than his films.” In 1992, the brilliant French-Canadian Leolo was shut out at least in part because its director, Jean-Claude Lauzon, made a provocative sexual remark to an American actress who was on the jury. “When I said it,” the director recalled, “my producer was next to me and he turned gray.” In an atmosphere like this, it's no wonder one of the best Hollywood films of the past decade, L.A. Confidential, made it into the competition and came home with nothing. Not exactly the kind of encouragment the studios are looking for.
Yet when a film hits here, when it wins a major award and touches a nerve in the audience, it really hits. Quentin Tarantino was genuinely shocked when his Pulp Fiction took the Palme in 1994 (“I don't make the kinds of movies that bring people together, I make the kinds of movies that split people apart”), but that moment was the engine of the film's enormous worldwide success. Steven Soderbergh had already won a prize at Sundance, but when he became the youngest person to win a Palme for sex, lies and videotape, he said the experience was “like being a Beatle for a week. It was so unexpected, like someone saying ‘You've just won $10 million' and sticking a microphone in your face. I didn't know how to react, I don't know what I said.” And then there was Roberto Benigni.
Benigni's Life Is Beautiful didn't win the Palme in 1998 (that went to Theo Angelopoulos's understandably forgotten Eternity and a Day); it took the runner-up Grand Prize, but it mattered not. A direct line could probably be traced from Benigni's effusive behavior that night, running on stage and passionately kissing jury president Martin Scorcese's feet, to its eventual status as a triple Oscar winner and the then highest-grossing foreign-language film in U.S. history. That indelible image of Benigni in ecstasy will likely do as much for the status and mythology of Cannes as the earlier