It's true what Todd McCarthy says in his Variety report on the Cannes awards: that the Romanian film 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days led the critics' polls throughout the fest. And he is also right when he implies that as such, it was kind of a surprise (I wrote to a colleague that I was stunned) to see it take the Palme d'Or at the festival. Trying to predict or second-guess a Cannes jury is one of the most fruitless tasks on the face of the planet. One need only go back to last year, when Almodovar's masterful Volver was the critical favorite and Ken Loach's much-less-rapturously received The Wind That Shakes The Barley took the top prize, to see this axiom demonstrated.
I think that 4 Months, a drama directed by Cristian Mungiu about a woman seeking an abortion in Romania during the twilight of its Ceausescu's rule, benefited from the tailwind of The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, the Romanian film that made a big splash at Cannes two years ago. Mungiu's film (which, by the way, was almost universally referred to by the critics at the fest as "the Romanian abortion movie") confirmed an idea of a new wave of Romanian cinema (although many are ignorant that there was ever even an old wave of such), the seed of which was planted by Lazarescu.
Still, not a lot of people thought 4 Months, which screened early in the fest, would take the Palme. The consensus was that it was worthy, but that it might be overtaken by the Coen Brothers' No Country for Old Men or Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, or even Lee Chang-Dong's Secret Sunshine. But the Stephen Frears-led jury went with 4 Months, and although I'd like to blame Bush, I can't. This prize represents an agreement with critical consensus in more than just the particular choice of film. If my colleagues have found a theme at Cannes, it is that, despite some of the less-than-sanguine perspectives on film and its future offered by the Chacun son Cinema shorts commissioned for the 60th anniversary of the fest, both world cinema and the festival showed a new strength and diversity this year. That if the artistic film is the patient and Cannes is the hospital, the patient is showing new signs of life and the hospital is providing first-rate care.
Personally, I was glad to see Schnabel get the director's prize for Diving Bell, and also happy to see the jury give a special prize to Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park. Jeon Do-yeon fully deserved the actress' prize for her astonishing work in Secret Sunshine. Anton Corbijn deserved a little better than a special mention for his Control.
Not to sound like an American cry-baby, I would've thought the Cannes jury would've responded better to the "arty" Hollywood thriller, Zodiac. Its meditation on identity, obsession, and willingness to not answer questions would seem more at home in France. I wonder how they would've responded to 300.
Posted by: Aaron Aradillas | May 28, 2007 at 05:06 PM