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  1. Culture
25 May 2010updated 14 Sep 2021 4:01pm

Gilbey on Film: No Cannes do

Don’t pay too much attention to the pictures that wow the festival crowds; we may only recognise a c

By Ryan Gilbey

So, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives won the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. But how much do you really care about Cannes?

I’ve only attended the festival once. That was 1999. A good year, I reckon: the Dardenne brothers’ Rosetta and Bruno Dumont’s L’humanité scooped the big prizes from David Cronenberg’s jury, while All About My Mother, Kadosh, The Straight Story, Pola X and Wonderland were memorable competitors.

I also spotted Jeff Goldblum rolling his eyes as we both left the cinema after Peter Greenaway’s 8½ Women, wearing an expression that would now be described as: “WTF?”

While I harbour no burning desire to return to Cannes, it became a habit to peruse the festival despatches by other journalists and critics. This year, I broke that habit. It was all down to the sense of overkill after 2009’s festival; by the time films such as The White Ribbon, A Prophet, Fish Tank and Antichrist landed a release here, I felt strongly that I had already watched them several times over. I didn’t want that to happen again with this year’s selection, so I adopted a policy of No Cannes Do.

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Seeing a film fresh, with no prior knowledge of its flaws, virtues and twists as perceived by other eyes, is one of the rarest pleasures in cinemagoing. (I get quite unreasonably annoyed just thinking about the critics who revealed the identity of the casting surprise in Zombieland.) Add to that the unavoidable hothouse hysteria of many of those reviews filed straight from the steps of the Grand Palais, and you’ve got a recipe for some seriously warped judgements.

There are times when it can seem the festival isn’t about the films at all, but rather the reaction to them. That is why the miserable ritual of booing has such a hallowed place at Cannes.

The most notorious example remains Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’avventura, which is now regarded as a masterpiece, but was greeted with a chorus of catcalls on the Croisette in 1960.

Antonioni reportedly believed his career was over, until a band of critics and film-makers, including Roberto Rossellini, released a statement unequivocally supporting the film. It went on to win the jury prize. Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette and Vincent Gallo’s unfairly maligned The Brown Bunny, along with the aforementioned Dumont film, are among recent competition entries that were subjected to a severe Cannes-ing.

Who knows how many of today’s judgements will stand? As Steven Soderbergh said in 2007: “Twenty years from now we’ll figure out which ones are great and which ones aren’t.” I was reminded of this comment, and of the unfairness of what is politely called “the common consensus”, by the news that Ang Lee’s Ride With the Devil has just been released on Region 1 DVD in a director’s cut, with 13 minutes of missing footage restored.

In his look back at this masterful 1999 film, set during the US civil war, Graham Fuller of Sight and Sound strikes some familiar, plangent notes, reminding us that the picture was “poorly distributed and publicised on release . . . sank without trace . . . [was] not an easy sell . . .” And ain’t that always the way?

Fuller rightly argues for the picture’s unorthodox brilliance, calling it “the most mature film made about the effect the war had on shaping American society”. Bravo. You can read a report here on a recent Q&A with James Schamus, the picture’s articulate writer/producer (and regular Ang Lee collaborator), in which he reveals that his screenwriting dictum is not “Write what you know” so much as “Write anything but what you know”.

Also heartening is news of another restoration. The new version of Fritz Lang’s 1927 Metropolis is a case not of a disparaged or overlooked film being rehabilitated, like Ride With the Devil, but of a confirmed classic being shown at last in its correct form.

Chris Fujiwara writes: “For years now the false Metropolis has been running amok, courting charges of proto-Nazism, furnishing video backdrops for nightclubs, and fuelling predictable academic studies . . . The Lang film had been mutilated in so many ways that its creator insisted that it had ceased to exist.” Metropolis will be released in the UK on 10 September.

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