Sundance to Sarajevo. Kenneth Turan
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walking out and seeing this poster of a woman with large breasts holding a machine gun. The film wasn't made yet, but they already had a title and an ad concept.”
This ability to somehow combine the yin and yang of the film business, to link at the same site the rarefied elite of the world's movie artists and a brazen international marketplace where money is the only language spoken and sex and violence the most convertible currencies, is the logic-defying triumph of Cannes.
This is a festival where popcorn movies like the Sharon Stone starring Quick and the Dead and Torrente, the Dumb Arm of the Law (advertised in its country of origin with the line “Just When You Thought Spanish Cinema Was Getting Better”) share space with the work of demanding directors like Theo Angelopolous, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, and Abbas Kiarostami. Where festival head Jacob speaks with pride of attracting Madonna as well as cult director Manoel de Oliveira. Where within twenty-four hours in i997 you could have a serious talk about the situation in Sarajevo with “Welcome to Sarajevo” director Michael Winterbottom and share a press lunch with Sylvester Stallone, who displayed an easy manner and surprising charm as he mordantly dissected past fiascoes like Stop or My Mother Will Shoot: “If it was a question of having my spleen removed with a tractor or watching it again, I'd say, ‘Start up the engine.'”
Stallone also ridiculed the current crop of action films (“If you took the explosions out, 90 percent of them would not have endings; if someone stole the gasoline truck, it would be like an e.e. cummings poem at the end”) and talked of looking forward to the gathering of all the previous Palme d'Or winners that was scheduled for later that week. “I'm gonna meet those people who won't work with me,” he said, amused. “All in one room.”
This uneasy but animated coexistence between the commercial and the artistic sometimes gets highlighted in a way no screenwriter could have concocted. Opening night of the 2000 festival, for instance, started with a casual screening of Ken Loach's Bread and Roses, an earnest film dealing with the urgent problems of labor organizers attempting to unionize impoverished, often illegal workers who make marginal livings cleaning the office towers of Los Angeles.
When that socially conscious picture was over, I hurried back to my room in the aptly named Hotel Splendid and changed from a T-shirt to a tuxedo to attend the official opening night party for Vatel, a big-budget French film set amid the “it's good to be the king” splendor of the profligate seventeenth-century court of the Roi du Soleil himself, Louis XIV.
Once Vatel's story of a celebrated chef and master of revels, played by Gérard Depardieu, had ended, the audience walked out the door of the Lumière theater and directly into the most elaborate, extravagant, and undoubtedly expensive re-creation of the film's world. The entire entrance hall of the Palais had been changed, via billowing red curtains, huge paintings, multiple candles, and artfully faked stone walls, into a vintage French chateau. And that was just the setting.
I joined the disbelieving guests in evening clothes and walked slowly down corridors that had become the physical duplicates of what had just been seen on screen. Actors dressed in period costumes brought Vatel's kitchens to life: bread was kneaded, fruit was dipped in glazes, ice was sculpted, salamis and cheeses and an enormous fresh fish were displayed, and, adding just the right touch, a man rushed through the crowd clutching a goose.
At the dinner itself, white-coated waiters poured champagne from a stream of magnums as actors playing the king and his intimates ate on a stage. By the time tabletop fireworks ended the evening, the janitors of Los Angeles seemed to belong to another universe.
The key element ensuring that the bracing presence of the commercial remains integral to Cannes is the market, officially known as MIF, Marché International du Film. It started in 1959, apparently with one flimsy twenty-seat room jerry-built onto the roof of the old Palais. Now, with its own brand-new building, the 70,000-square-foot Espace Riviera, it attracts approximately 6,000 participants representing some 1,500 companies from more than seventy countries. Many Cannes regulars agree with Ethan Coen, the writer-producer half of the Coen brothers team, that without the market Cannes would be “a little too snooty.”
Every year, festival regulars keep a watch for market films with titles that go beyond the preposterous. Standouts include Biker Mice from Mars, Teenage Bonnie and Klepto Clyde (“Desperate Kids, Bonded by Passion and Crime”), Headless Body in Topless Bar, Kraa! The Sea Monster (touted as the successor to Zarkorr! The Invader), and the always popular Attack of the Giant Moussaka. One year saw a wave of kickboxing films from Korea with titles like Year of the King Boxer and Kickboxer from Hell while comedies about sumo wrestlers never seem to go out of style: Sumo Do, Sumo Don't was offered in 1992, and in the year 2000 Secret Society showcased the story of an overweight housewife somehow becoming a sumo standout.
Having these films not only for sale but also available for viewing can be a refreshing change of pace, like a dish of palate-cleansing sorbet after a constant diet of heavier, more ponderous fare. I felt nothing but elation after experiencing Jerzy Hoffman's three-hour-and-three-minute With Fire and Sword, a Polish Gone with the Wind that came complete with a handsome hero, a deranged villain, and a beautiful princess with gold braids that reached almost to the ground. Other diversions included frequent male choral singing, bare-chested Cossacks pounding enormous drums, and a sidekick with the strength of ten who has taken a vow of chastity until he cuts off three heads with a single sword stroke. “I've gotten two many times,” he says mournfully, “but never three.” Only in the market.
The market is also the place where films that are little more than a concept and a title make themselves known in the hopes of raising enough money (via preselling foreign distribution rights) to actually shoot the film. In 1976, I was part of a contingent of revelers that was ferried out to a large cruise ship, where energetic waiters encouraged everyone to take part in the Greek party tradition of breaking plates. Hundreds of pieces of crockery dutifully made the ultimate sacrifice to help create interest in what turned out to be The Greek Tycoon.
Even as the market has grown more sophisticated, that kind of bombastic showmanship has not gone away. At the 2000 festival, the talk centered on a new film from resurgent mogul Menahem Golan (“the producer and director of Delta Force, $100 million in world box office”), who flooded the city with posters, flyers, and much-sought-after T-shirts for Elian, the Gonzales-boy Story, a.k.a. “the explosive, dramatic and human story that captured the world.” Illustrated with an obviously faked photo re-creation of Elian's celebrated rescue at gunpoint, the film swore that it was “shooting now in a secret location.” Everyone considered themselves warned.
This shameless carnival atmosphere is not for everyone, and it can be especially tiring for stars and directors who are dragooned into promoting new films. Frenetically shuttled from one-on-ones with key journalists to group situations to TV setups to still photo opportunities, prime interview targets can feel like valuable private railway cars being switched from track to track as they meet literally hundreds of media representatives. It's no wonder that by the time Chinese star Gong Li got to a group press lunch in 1993 to promote Farewell My Concubine, she was so hungry she ate all the rolls off the table and asked her interpreter if she could have some of her lunch as well.
Filmmakers also don't necessarily enjoy Cannes, because, unlike famously supportive festivals like Toronto and Telluride, it can be an unforgiving, high-risk, hostile place. Boos not infrequently clash with cheers after competition screenings, so much so that even as much of a Cannes partisan as head man Gilles Jacob has admitted “the commentators are merciless. There are festivals where you can send a film thinking that if it doesn't go down well, it may do OK in the long run. That's not possible at Cannes. Cannes is very violently for or against.”
One form of dismay that is unique to Cannes is an activity I've come to call “thumping.” The seats in the Palais snap back with a resounding sound when their occupants get up to leave, so when disgruntled viewers exit a screening before a film is finished, everyone knows about it. “There is something terrifying in the new Palais,” is how a publicist quoted in their book described one unfortunate screening to authors Beauchamp and Behar. “People were so bored they started leaving after an hour in droves. In