‘Bird’ Flies Into (Yawn) Cannes : Competition Warms Up--But Not Soon Enough

As it approaches its final days, Cannes has become a sea of movie-lovers who’d give anything for one magnificent film, and a sea of star-hunters who’d give anything for the sight of one rattling big star.

The tantalizing glimpse a week ago of Robert Redford--here for a scant few hours for the screening of his “The Milagro Beanfield War” and for the most ho-hum press conference imaginable--only intensified the public hunger for stars. Robert De Niro. Clint Eastwood. Anyone.

De Niro didn’t materialize. Gerard Depardieu will today--to present the festival’s awards, the Palme d’Or. Eastwood, whose 2-hour, 43 minute “Bird,” a dark-toned music-filled biography of Charlie (Bird) Parker, which had its world premiere Saturday night to a generally enthusiastic audience, has already come and gone.

So the public who crowd the white iron barricades have had to make do with a surprise visit from Patty Hearst Shaw, with Natasha Richardson--whose portrayal of the kidnaped heiress is the one solid virtue of Paul Schrader’s “Patty Hearst.”

The official competition finally began to warm up--and not a moment too soon--with the screening Friday of “A World Apart,” Chris Menges’ devastating and warmly received anti-apartheid film. Torpor was a fallout from most of the entries, which were generally large-scaled, decorous and lifeless. The passion of Menges’ story, whose screenplay was written by Shawn Slovo, the daughter of the martyred central character played by Barbara Hershey, made it an across-the-board favorite with the public and the critics.

Closest to it, at least with the critics, was a superb Bresson-like Polish entry, “A Short Film About Killing” by Krzystof Kieslowski--thought-provoking, tough to endure, impossible to forget.

Entries from several of the better-known directors deal with literary or historical subjects. With “El Dorado,” Carlos Saura tries his hand at the same story that fascinated Werner Herzog: the obsessed Aguirre’s voyage to South America in search of the lost city of gold. However, each time the story approaches a vast peak, Saura seems to flatten it.

Margarethe Von Trotta’s updating of Chekhov’s “Three Sisters,” with the great French favorite Fanny Ardant and Greta Scacchi, was unkindly dubbed by some as “Three Members of a Caring, Supportive Extended Family Have a Very Bad Time of It.” A Japanese retelling of “Wuthering Heights” by Kiju Yoshida is stark and gorgeous, but seems to travel to somewhat less effect over the same isolated mountaintop that Akira Kurosawa pioneered with “Ran.”

The newer directors, here in such refreshing numbers for both the official competition as well as the Director’s Fortnight, haven’t fared much better. Many who had attracted attention with arresting-looking first movies are making second or third films that may look stunning but have a numbing lapse of anything to say.

Luc Besson’s empty opening-night splash, “The Big Blue” is a case in point, coming after “Subway” and “Le Dernier Combat.” Young New Zealand film maker Vincent Ward’s stylish odyssey, “The Navigator” shows that he is a film maker to be watched, but he needs to rein in the ponderous seriousness that still is part of his signature. The Director’s Fortnight farewell screening Thursday night in the Palais Croisette became a rousing evening with the sentimental appearance of more than a dozen of the now-celebrated directors whose first films were unveiled in that auditorium and with the canny choice for the Palais’ closing film, director Mira Nair’s stunning and powerful “Salaam Bombay!”

A portrait of Bombay’s runaway street children, “Salaam Bombay!” may well be called India’s “400 Blows.” Its only close competitors in its category among lesser-known directors are two English entries: “Distant Voices, Still Lives,” an exquisitely stylized memory-piece by Terence Davies, and the wrenching “Soursweet,” a story of young Chinese immigrants in London by Mike Newell (“Dance With a Stranger”). “Salaam Bombay!” looks like Nair’s earlier documentaries, including her Los Angeles Anthropos festival prize-winner, “India Cabaret,” but in reality it’s a brilliantly achieved fiction film with all but four key roles played by actual street children.

Shot in nine weeks, with absolute sureness and fluidity, “Salaam Bombay!’s” combination of compassion and unsentimentality is reflected by the nickname the kids call their soft-spoken director, “Tough Sister.” Still dazed from the film’s reception, when she was taken to the steps of the Palais Croisette to greet a public that wouldn’t stop applauding her, Nair is not unaware of the ironies of the lives of her young cast.

“The India Film Board is having real flower wreaths flown in from Bombay for the film’s party tonight,” she said quietly. “What we suspect is that many of our kids made those wreaths--they do anything to earn a penny.”