CANNES REPORT : British Movie Makers Show Their Determination

Just because the two most talked about films of the opening days of the Cannes Film Festival happened to be British, don’t expect any brave talk from the filmmakers about the sun stubbornly refusing to set on their plucky film industry. Quite the opposite.

“Even if one of us wins a prize,” says Mike Leigh, whose lacerating, power-house “Naked” emerged as an early favorite, “I would be very cautious about celebrating that all is well with the British film industry.”

And Stephen Frears, whose thoroughly delightful “The Snapper” opened the Directors’ Fortnight, was even more forthright. Asked at a press conference whether he was joking when he said British cinema was dead, he snapped back, “It’s not a joke. What is there to joke about? The fact that a few corpses have risen from the grave doesn’t change that. Some people--Ken Loach, Mike Leigh, myself--make films in the cracks, you steal money or something. It doesn’t deny the central fact that the industry is gone.”

Still, even though it seems that the only films that manage to get made in Britain are the extraordinary ones, Cannes has a remarkable confluence of them this year. Included are not only the ones by Frears and Leigh but also “Raining Stones,” the latest effort by Loach (who Leigh calls “the big daddy of contemporary British film directors”), which plays near the festival’s end.

And there is more in common here than nationality and even friendship. For when funding dried up for British theatrical features in the early 1970s, all three worked extensively making films for the BBC, causing Leigh to crack, “I’ve said many times British cinema was alive and well and hiding in television.”

And Frears, who followed “Dangerous Liaisons” and “The Grifters” with the big deal Hollywood production “Hero,” has returned to the BBC to make “The Snapper,” a small-scale, low-budget family comedy shot in working-class Dublin.

Though the director, perhaps smarting from the adverse press “Hero” received, has refused interviews with American reporters, he did say at his press conference that “The Snapper” was a return to his roots “not in a symbolic sense, but to be near my family, not to have to travel half-way across the world to see them.” Then he added, with perhaps a nod to Alan Parker’s “The Commitments,” “for English directors, Ireland is like Lourdes. You go there and are refreshed. You get up and walk.”

Certainly “The Snapper” has been a tonic for Frears. Written by the same writer (Roddy Doyle) about the same family that was featured in the Parker film, and even starring the same actor (Colm Meaney) as the father, “The Snapper” is an alive and playful film. Dealing with what happens when the eldest daughter announces she is pregnant but refuses to name the father, this is a film both ruefully comic and wise, awash in good talk as well as rambunctious vitality.

Many of the same adjectives could be used to describe Leigh’s “Naked,” but no two films could be more disparate. Quite different in tone from “High Hopes” and “Life Is Sweet,” his last two films, “Naked” is another of Leigh’s astonishing character studies, an attempt to stretch the emotional boundaries of truth on film as far as they will go.

The difference this time is that Johnny (David Thewlis), a sullen drifter we follow through a hellish night in as bleak a London as Dickens ever described, is very hard to accept as protagonist. Angry, sarcastic, violently misogynistic, he takes an awful delight in brutalizing almost everyone he meets, so much so that Leigh himself describes “Naked” as being “as ambivalent as any film I’ve made.” Yet with its insight and even moments of humor, “Naked” shows Johnny to us with a degree of complexity and compassion that cuts as close to life as anything on the screen.

This verisimilitude is a quality that Leigh, a soft-spoken, dartingly amusing man of 50 with the deeply thoughtful look of a Talmudic sage, has been interested in since childhood. “I was an avid movie-goer as a kid; the vast majority of what I saw came of Hollywood,” he remembers. “And I used to sit there thinking, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if you had a film where the people really are like real people?’ For me, in a way, that’s the essence, that’s the job.”

Capturing that essence, according to Leigh, “demands that you don’t waste screen time on tautological journeys or pyrotechnics like blowing people up.” It has also led Leigh to gradually develop a filmmaking method that is completely his own.

After selecting his actors, Leigh gathers with them--and the nub of an idea--and out of what can be months of discussions, a script slowly forms. “We create a world of characters, relationships and tensions,” he explains. “That’s something I control and stimulate, or, in horticultural terms, something I husband, but it is also a journey of discovery with an outcome that can’t be predicted. You don’t know what you’re going to get.” More than that, even when you get it, it can be indescribable in conventional terms: The man who was hired to write a synopsis of “Naked,” for instance, “couldn’t do it. He gave up, cashed in his chips.”

What all this means is that, even though his agent has had a few tentative nibbles, there is zero chance of Leigh making the trek Frears did to Hollywood. “How would I pitch ‘Naked?’ ” he asks in mock exasperation. “I wouldn’t have a clue. And if I could describe my films before they were made and went with that to anyone with money, including my backers, I couldn’t get a cent.”

With his films mostly financed by Britain’s Channel Four, which plays them after their theatrical release, Leigh, though he would like bigger budgets, is more than happy where he is but almost perplexed by having gotten there. “Being in Cannes is something else again. I always swore I’d never come unless I had a film in competition and I’m amazed that one of my films got in. Why did it? I don’t know. You tell me.”