Cannes Festival: The 13 Days That Shook Off the World

During the two weeks of the Cannes Film Festival, which had its closing ceremonies Monday night, trumpeter Chet Baker, subject of a documentary in the festival, died, and legendary “Children of Paradise” star Arletty celebrated her 90th birthday. We heard about those events here, but hard news about the rest of the world virtually evaporated.

It’s almost impossible to convey the intensity of the isolation that permeates this privileged parcel of real estate during these 13 days. If something isn’t in the movies or of the movies, it simply doesn’t exist. It is a bizarre immersion.

As it turned out, this was not a year in which there was one real buzz film--a “Stranger Than Paradise,” a “Paris, Texas,” a “Mona Lisa.” Instead, you picked and chose from among a cross section of countries, from India (Mira Nair’s “Salaam, Bombay!”), Great Britain (Terence Davies’ “Distant Voices, Still Lives,” Mike Newell’s “Soursweet”) and China (Zhang Yimou’s “Red Sorghum,” already the best picture winner this year at Berlin).

It might be said, however, that there was a buzz country--China--and that among its young directors, two in particular who were here, Zhang and Chen Kaige (“Yellow Earth,” “The Big Parade” and “King of the Children”), have emerged as the festival’s real discoveries.

Whatever the training is at the Beijing Film Academy, it carries a breadth of experience we are unaccustomed to in the West. Zhang Yimou, for example, not only directed “Red Sorghum,” an offbeat love story whose time frame includes the harrowing days of the Japanese occupation of China, but he was the (superb) cinematographer on Chen’s “Yellow Earth” and the central actor of “The Old Well.”

If there was a consistent cross-cultural theme this year, it was the endangered family unit. From the Danish grand prize winner, “Pelle the Conqueror,” to the South African setting of “A World Apart,” or the fantasy world of “The Raggedy Rawney” (Bob Hoskins’ directing debut), no fewer than a dozen films played out their variations of family or of poignant yearning for one.

It’s hardly surprising that in America, among nesting baby boomers, domestic tranquillity has replaced passionate political upheaval on our movie screens. What’s interesting is to see how pervasive a theme that seems to be, occupying film makers from Germany, England, China, India, Italy, New Zealand, Spain and Africa, to name only a few. The only drawback seems to be that films of that stripe have also tended to be staid, stodgy and uncontroversial--the classically “well-made” movie.

Only a few directors have used that comfortable cocoon in an arresting manner, notably Great Britain’s Terence Davies, whose “Distant Voices, Still Lives” is a daring experiment using the British fondness for sing-along as counterpoint to a tale of madness within a conventional family.

Cannes today is the best and the worst faces of cinema colliding 22 hours a day. (You have to sleep sometime.) And there are no easy conclusions to be drawn here.

Looking at the extra-cautious selections of the major competition, you might find the films comfortable, even banal. You’d be right in 90% of the list, but wrong in the case of “A Short Film About Killing,” the great, astringent Polish film of Krzysztof Kieslowski that forces its audience to face every contradictory element about capital punishment.

If you decide that you can judge the Marche, the public marketplace of films, by some of its rowdier titles like “Space Sluts in the Slammer,” then you might miss “Little Dorrit,” one of the most enthralling experiences here, which was also lurking in the Marche. Made by British screenwriter-director Christine Edzard, this adaptation of one of Dickens’ less-well-known novels is an engulfing two-part, six-hour triumph of drama and psychological observation, with Alec Guinness, Derek Jacoby, Joan Greenwood and Roshan Seth, among its multitudes.

You judge a Cannes festival differently, I suspect, depending on the number of previous Cannes festivals you’ve had under your belt. It’s a shock to the system, no matter how many you’ve survived, but the first is something of a baptism of film-fire.

After a steady rate of five or six films a day, the movies seem to echo each other. I wondered why I was flinching at scenes from a documentary in which Amazonian natives deftly lifted the bark from a tree intact, giving them a long, ready-made canoe with 6-inch-thick walls. Then I realized it was only too close to the scene in “Red Sorghum” in which the invading Japanese order a man to be flayed alive.

But in any context, some parts of the festival, like opening night, seem incongruous, or at the least dreamlike. After trumpets and red carpets, lovingly calibrated couture and the whole grand parade, one enters the Palais des Festivals to come face to face with what appears to be the most imposing 70-millimeter screen in life. And the first bit of film on that screen was . . . “Lucky Ducky,” a 1948 Tex Avery cartoon, screened with no explanation or further comment.

Is it ritual? A passion of the French? Perhaps the first short shown when it and the festival were young? We were never to be told. It became the first of the Great French Mysteries, part of the weird collected history of 1988 Cannes.