On the Fringe, Hilarity and High Points

Though the Palmes are the big news, Cannes is the occasion for a great number of diverse awards. The Ecumenical Jury gives a prize for films with the right kind of values, while the French porno industry uses the festival time slot to distribute its annual Hot d’Ors: The local press reported that this year a special one was voted to Pamela Anderson. This was also the fourth year for the Grand Rail d’Or (The Big Golden Train Track), given by a group of railway workers who for unspecified reasons attend all the screenings of the Critics’ Week sidebar event and vote on what they like.

Sometimes the most enjoyable films in Cannes aren’t even eligible for prizes. That was the case with “Waking Ned,” a first feature by British commercial director Kirk Jones acquired by Fox Searchlight after an uproarious market screening. This deft story of how eccentric Irish villagers scheme to cash a winning lottery held by a dead neighbor was the funniest film in all Cannes, a riotous, cheerful throwback to the classic British comedies of the 1950s and ‘60s. The sight of its two stars, veteran actors Ian Bannen and David Kelly, wandering genially around Cannes together was enough to make even the gloomiest critic smile.

More than anything, Cannes remained the place where people fight to see an unimaginably wide variety of films. Attracting fierce wall-to-wall crowds were both “In the Presence of a Clown,” a typically somber Ingmar Bergman video effort, and the Spanish comedy, “Torrente, the Dumb Arm of the Law,” reportedly advertised in its own country with the line “Just When You Thought Spanish Cinema Was Getting Better.”

Because Cannes draws so many film people, all kinds of entities find it worth their while to advertise here. On any given day, brochures were available for the city of West Hollywood, a French auto stunt company claiming “25 years of experience and exploits,” plus a full-color plea to “Make Movies in Bulgaria.” “If you come to shoot in Bulgaria,” it is promised, “you will come back.” So there.

Yet despite all its focus on the new, probably the most indelible film experience in Cannes was a onetime screening of a newly restored 1928 silent film. “The Man Who Laughs,” taken from a Victor Hugo novel and directed by Paul Leni, stars Conrad Veidt as a man whose face has been disfigured into a chilling, frozen smile. Helped by a newly written score performed live by a nine-piece ensemble, “The Man Who Laughs” strikes the kind of excessive and overwhelming emotional chords impossible to even imagine today. As an extended and ecstatic standing ovation testified, this was a moment of pure cinema that nothing else in Cannes 1998 could come close to rivaling.

CANNES

* Reports From the Festival