A Surprise Ending to Savor

Like the Little Engine That Could, “Rosetta,” a low-budget, 90-minute Belgian film that its co-directors literally drove to the festival just in time for a nonprestigious daytime screening slot, won the super-prestigious Palme d’Or on Sunday night at the 52nd International Festival du Film.

“Rosetta” was directed by Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, brothers who were last in Cannes three years ago for the Directors Fortnight debut of their “La Promesse,” a superb effort that went on to win the best foreign film award from both the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn. and the National Society of Film Critics. The new work, which also gained a share of the best actress award for star Emilie Dequenne (an 18-year-old who was chosen from 3,000 who auditioned for the title role), is every bit a worthy successor.

The Dardennes’ passionate empathy for the underclass and their interest in social and moral issues is very much in evidence in this contemporary drama about a young woman (Dequenne) on the fringes of society who lives in terror of falling into complete oblivion like her immoral, alcoholic mother.

Rosetta brings all her considerable determination and ice-cold fury into a wrenching struggle to simply get a job, to just take her place as an ordinary working person. Heartbreaking and uplifting, yet told without a trace of sentimentality, this is a killer of a film (Barry Diller’s U.S.A. Films, the emerging combination of Gramercy and October, will release it here).

But if “Rosetta” is a triumph of humanistic cinema, the David Cronenberg-led Cannes jury (which included actors Jeff Goldblum and Holly Hunter) revealed serious signs of schizophrenia by giving three awards to a French film that was in many ways its antithesis. Bruno Dumont’s “L’Humanite” took the prize for best actor (Emmanuel Schotte), shared the one for best actress (Severine Caneele, like Schott a nonprofessional) and walked off with the Grand Prix du Jury, the festival’s runner-up prize.

A completely insane film that was booed at its screening and had most viewers tearing at their hair, “L’Humanite” has taken to excess the traits of Dumont’s fine first film, “La Vie de Jesus.” The story of a village idiot policeman who feels the world’s pain in the most tedious ways (don’t ask about the frequent neck-sniffing scenes), this unavoidably pretentious, completely self-indulgent film has to be considered personal cinema reduced to the level of absurdity.

Equally tedious was Aleksandr Sokurov’s “Moloch” which won the prize for best screenplay. A murky, mind-numbing film that explores the relationship between Eva Braun and Adolf Hitler in soporific detail, “Moloch” was a major disappointment even to devotees of Sokurov’s last film, the slow but sure “Mother and Son.”

Almost lost in what festival veterans have called the strangest Cannes awards in memory, Spain’s Pedro Almodovar won the best director prize for his hugely popular “Todo Sobre Mi Madre” (“All About My Mother”), a decision that was greeted by enormous applause.

“Pardon me if I don’t cry,” Almodovar said in puckish reference to the teary acceptors who preceded him, and then dedicated his victory to “democracy in Spain and the Spanish audience.”

A jury prize was also given to ninetysomething Portuguese director Manoel de Olivera who has been bringing films to Cannes since 1981. Just a few moments before, Michele Piccoli, the French actor who was presenting the Camera d’Or for best first film, had convulsed the audience with a deadpan pretense that the award was going to the veteran De Olivera (it actually went to India’s Murali Nair for his “Marana Simhasanam”). The evening’s other award, the Grand Technical Prize, went to “The Emperor and the Assassin,” Chen Kaige’s visually impressive epic to be distributed, like the Almodovar film, by Sony Pictures Classics.

None of the festival’s seven English-language entries (including efforts by American directors Tim Robbins, John Sayles, David Lynch and Jim Jarmusch, and Cronenberg’s fellow Canadian Atom Egoyan) won anything. The other prominent American films, Spike Lee’s “Summer of Sam” and Kevin Smith’s “Dogma,” were, for different reasons, ineligible for award consideration.

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It’s not only the competition jury that gives awards at Cannes; various other entities also get into the act. A group of French railway workers/film buffs, for instance, annually gives something called the Rail d’Or to the best film in the Critics’ Week section. This year the nod went to the quirky Australian “Siam Sunset,” about a man trying to pull his life together after his wife is crushed by a refrigerator that falls out of an airplane cargo door. Yes, it’s a comedy.

Perhaps the oddest looking trophy is the metal baseball cap pierced by iron rods handed out for the Prix de la Jeunesse, or Youth Prize, decided by a panel of European film fans between the ages of 18 and 25. This year the bizarre trophy and the prize went to an American film, “The Blair Witch Project,” which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year and will hit U.S. screens on July 16.

The best noncompetition film to not win anything might have been “Ratcatcher,” an exquisite first feature by highly regarded Scottish short-film director Lynne Ramsay. Sadly unlikely to get American distribution because of its impenetrable Glasgow accents and tough subject matter, “Ratcatcher” tells a familiar story--the harsh effects of poverty and neglect on a 14-year-old boy--but does so in such a compelling and poetic way that we feel we’ve never seen it before. A truly magical debut.

Given the festival’s general level of pretension, seeing “With Fire & Sword,” Jerzy Hoffman’s three-hour-and-three-minute Polish epic showing in the film market was a welcome relief. Taken from the novel by Nobel Prize winner Henryk Sienkiewicz and with 6 million admissions a monster hit in its own country, this Polish “Gone With the Wind” is narrative-driven and old-fashioned with a vengeance.

Detailing a celebrated 1647 conflict between Poles, Cossacks and Tartars, “With Fire & Sword” comes complete with a handsome hero, a deranged villain and a beautiful princess (former “Goldeneye” ingenue Izabella Scorupco) with blond braids that reach almost to the floor. Other diversions include frequent male choral singing, bare-chested Cossacks pounding enormous drums and a sidekick with the strength of 10 who has taken a vow of chastity until he cuts off three heads with a single blow. “I’ve gotten two many times,” he says mournfully, “but never three.”

No, it’s not high art. But after two weeks in Cannes, more high art is the last thing anyone needs.