The Cannes Film Festival saw its 62nd addition bow this year in the grips of a worldwide recession that is seeing fewer films made and thus released and the promise of a sea-change in the way audiences will see films in the future with the next iteration of delivery systems assuring us of high quality distribution directly to the living room. And yet, people are still visiting multiplexes – in droves.


The glamorous Cannes Film Festival, a mainstay of the international film festival scene that takes place every May in an overbuilt southern French harbor town has always been a cultural and artistic reflection of the year that has passed as well as a precursor to what lies down the road. This year has been no different. The streets enveloping the festival, in particular the Croisette, the festival’s main drag, were noticeably less crowded as were many of the press screenings. And while there has been and will continue to be talk of new platforms of distribution, Video on Demand and Pay Per View the two most talked about, this festival continues to be a place where for twelve days, audiences share the cinematic experience in mostly crowded theaters, where they argue the merits of art, entertainment and exploitation and return home satiated by the exhaustive experience.

Perhaps as antidote to the general sense of seriousness that abounds as well as its own selection of hard nosed artistic films, the Cannes Film Festival chose as its opening night presentation Pixar’s latest animated masterpiece. A lively, colorful adventure story directed by Pete Docter (MONSTERS, INC), UP tells the tale of an old man and young boy who travel to South America in a house lifted by balloons. The film is funny and moving and contains perhaps the most brilliant opening ten minutes ever created depicting in full range of detail the beginning, middle and end of a lifelong romance and marriage. Pixar films get at the heart of what audiences want to see and this artful, endearing film set a marvelous tone for the opening of the festival.

Equally colorful was Pedro Almodovar’s latest melodramatic mise-enscene about the love affair between a director and his actress and the inevitable tragedy that encircles them. Starring a resplendent Penelope Cruz who here plays the roles of blonde bombshell, mousy secretary and passionate mistress and lover, Cruz emboldens this love letter to cinema and homage to many of the best moments in Almodovar’s own films. Sprinkled with comedic references to WOMEN ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN, shots and colors reminding us of HIGH HEELS, ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER and TALK TO HER, BROKEN EMBRACES is among Almodovar’s most complex and complete works. While the press may have been tepid in their reaction to this picture and Almodovar was summarily shut out of the awards this year, BROKEN EMBRACES will find an audience in North America and live a long life as a cinematic bell weather.

Like UP and BROKEN EMBRACES, Quentin Tarantino’s INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS is bathed in color. Tarantino’s language is here magnified by its purveyors, a Jew hunting Nazi who speaks several languages, French, German and English among them, played by a magnificent Christophe Waltz who won the jury’s award for Best Actor and is sure to be a front runner for the end of year awards in the U.S., a Nazi hunting American soldier from the South played by a ham fisted but effective Brad Pitt and the owner of a French movie theater played by the wonderful Melanie Laurent. Tarantino’s film, a fantasy look at a group of American Nazi hunters during World War II, pops with energy and stands on its own in this or any moment.

The winners of festival’s two most important prizes were both well deserving of their prizes. Michael Haneke’s follow-up to his haunting and successful CACHE, THE WHITE RIBBON won this year’s Palme d’Or. THE WHITE RIBBON is a staggeringly photographed black and white masterpiece depicting life in a small German “village of the damned” in the year before the start of World War I. Jacques Audiard’s A PROPHET, winner of the Grand Prix, is a mesmerizing look inside a French prison as a young Arab man grows from a timid illiterate outsider to consummate seasoned insider. Both films should play successfully on the art house circuit when they are released in the U.S. later this year.

One of the things that makes Cannes so special is that programmed among the accessible audience-friendly films are pictures that stir immediate debate, or in Cannes, what is referred to as a “scandal”. They are films like Vincent Gallo’s BROWN BUNNY and Johnny Depp’s THE BRAVE, pictures that are either reviled for their lack of artistic merit or hissed off the screen for their obvious crassness. The scandal picture of 2009 is ANTICHRIST, Danish director Lars von Trier’s voyage into domestic hell. ANTICHRIST tells the story of a couple, Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg (who won the jury’s award for Best Actress) descending further and further into a literal Hades after the death of their child. Holed up in a cabin the woods, the film becomes darker, bloodier and more surreal as it goes on, complete with talking animals, constant shrieking and dismemberment.

Andrea Arnold, who impressed us with her debut feature RED ROAD after winning the Academy Award for her short film WASP, was in competition with her second film FISHTANK, a coming of age tale of a fifteen year old girl played by the discovery Katie Jarvis. Despite its setting amidst the cinderblock parameters of a British housing project and its milieu of British miserabilism FISHTANK is actually a film to be admired for the richness of its characters and the ultimate buoyancy of its spirit. FISHTANK tied with Park Chan Wook’s (OLDBOY) vampire tale THIRST for the Jury Prize.

The festival also saw the return of two regulars, Jane Campion (THE PIANO) with her beautiful but removed BRIGHT STAR about the young love affair between poet John Keats and Fanny Brawne and Ken Loach (THE WIND THAT SHAKES THE BARLEY) with his LOOKING FOR ERIC, a feel good romp seeing French soccer legend Eric Cantona playing an imaginary personal life therapist to a Manchester father who needs to take control of his life.

Lou Ye’s (SUZOU RIVER) SPRING FEVER received the Best Screenplay prize from the jury for its writer Feng Mei and Brillante Mendoza’s mostly dismissed KINATAY found itself winner for Best Director, frankly an insult to misters Almodovar, Tarantino, et al.

Among the discoveries this year was Belgian stop-motion feature, A TOWN CALLED PANIC, an almost Dadaist story of a cowboy, an Indian and a horse and their nonsensical adventures. And while a veteran of the festival, his HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR played Cannes fifty years ago, Alain Resnais returned to the festival with WILD GRASS, a lively, colorful and energetic film, for which he was awarded with a Special Prize for Lifetime Achievement by the jury. The jury this year was headed by famed French actress Isabelle Huppert who mostly did a good job with her selections of the winners.

The 62nd edition of the Cannes Film Festival will be remembered as a year of transition. Transition both as filmmakers found their voices in a sea of political, cultural and social change, with the dimension of fiscal change and challenge. Additionally, filmmakers, the industry and audiences are finding themselves taking stock of their places in the worldwide landscape of communicating ideas. Each year the festival becomes more innovative – this year interacting more than ever before with both the industry and the audience online with its catalogue of offerings and information about the market. As the world itself morphs in new and different directions, the Cannes Film Festival will in many ways continue to serve as a guide to those of us that are watching.