Cannes ‘08: Pete Hammond’s Notes on a Season: Oscar and the French connection

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It was a warm reception at the Palais on Friday night for the first of three official French competition entries, veteran director Arnaud Desplechin’s stylish and engaging ‘Un Conte de Noel’ (A Christmas Tale), starring Mathieu Almaric and Catherine Deneuve, among many others.

(See Kenneth Turan’s Cannes review here.)

The film has already been picked up for U.S. release by IFC films and opens in France about as far from Christmas as you can get, on May 23.

Two other homegrown films are yet to unspool: Phillippe Garrel’s ‘La Frontiere de L’Aube’ and Laurent Cantet’s ‘Entre les Murs.’

Speculation is already growing about which film France will select to rep the country in the 2008 best foreign film Oscar race. Among those who have sat on the committee that decides these things is Cannes Film Festival honcho Thierry Fremaux.

Coincidence or not, last year France went with animated Cannes discovery ‘Persepolis’ over the more popular and well known ‘La Vie en Rose’ (not at Cannes), which many think would have been a cinch to take home a nomination and probably the foreign film Oscar itself.

It wound up winning two anyway -- for Marion Cotillard as best actress and for best makeup. ‘Persepolis’ was nominated for best animated feature but was left off even the short list of nine foreign-language finalists.

This year presents a particularly intriguing situation.

The committee will have the artier French films or those from big-name directors, such as some presented during Cannes.

More improbably is the biggest hit in the history of French cinema, ‘Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis’ (Welcome to the Sticks), a crowd-pleasing comedy from comedian Dany Boon at which many critics thumbed their noses.

Nevertheless, it has been compared with ‘Titanic’ in terms of its unprecedented seismic box-office returns. Perhaps if one of the French entries can pull off the Palme d’Or, it will make the decision easier for the jury.

We’ll see soon. Still, it’s hard to argue with the kind of incredible box-office story ‘Ch’tis’ has had when you are trying to impress what Mel Brooks once called ‘the Academy of Motion Picture Arts, Sciences and Money.’

-- Pete Hammond