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 packs. It went clack clackclackclack clackclack clack. You felt repeatedly stabbed in the back. Each clack was terrifying. And it's still terrifying. Those clacks remain engraved.”
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
