‘Dark’ Drama Shines Brightest

“Dancer in the Dark,” a film whose back story was at least as interesting as what appeared on screen, was the predictable winner of the Palme d’Or at the 53rd Festival International du Film awards program Sunday night.

As Danish director Lars von Trier, who won the Grand Jury Prize here for “Breaking the Waves” in 1997, noted in his thank-you speech, this festival has always been good to him, inviting six of his films to participate. “I don’t know if Gilles Jacob knows much about film,” he said, jokingly referring to the festival’s top gun, “but he’s a very nice man.”

Though “Dancer’s” glum recitation, complete with morose musical interludes, of the endless tragedies that befall a nearly blind factory worker in rural America, had as many disgusted detractors as passionate partisans, everyone was riveted by the continuing soap opera dynamics between Von Trier and his star, the Icelandic singer Bjork, who was a popular choice as the winner of the festival’s best actress award.

Eye-catching to be sure in a dress of pink and black zigzag stripes set off by green plastic flowers around her neck and a golden bird on a chain for a purse, Bjork made no reference to the controversy in her acceptance speech, only repeating, “I’m very grateful, thank you very much” into each of two microphones before exiting to great applause.

The European press, however, had made much of the ruckus between star and director that took place during the filming, as Bjork, who refused to do interviews at the festival, reportedly walked off the set during filming and returned days later with a team of lawyers eager to help her get out of her contract.

Von Trier, known to be a demanding director, was asked about the contretemps earlier in the week. “Bjork was not acting anything, she was feeling everything, and that made it extremely hard on herself and everyone else,” he said. “It was like being with a dying person all the time, and I worked like a hangman, dragging her there. The work was extremely rewarding but extremely painful. As I see it now, it was the only way it could be done.”

Still eager to make amends, the director singled Bjork out in his acceptance speech. “I know she doesn’t believe it,” he told the Palais du Festival crowd, “so if you see her, tell her I love her very much.” The film will be distributed domestically by Fine Line.

The only other film to win two awards was Wong Kar-Wai’s swooningly cinematic “In the Mood for Love,” which took the best actor award for star Tony Leung and the Grand Prix du Technique for its visual look. Expecting better, both the director and the producer reportedly boycotted the ceremony, and it’s easy to see why they were upset.

The most visually ravishing work in the competition, characterized by the extraordinary use (by Wong’s regular cinematographer Christopher Doyle and Mark Li Ping Bing) of muted yet vivid colors, “Love” (to be distributed by USA Films) is the director’s most accessible film in a career that has included such festival favorites as “Happy Together” and “Chungking Express.”

Set in Hong Kong in 1962 and so chaste it could have been filmed at the time, “Love” illuminates the yearning and regret that characterize the relationship of a man and a woman (Leung and Maggie Cheung) who slowly fall in love after learning that their spouses are having an affair.

Americans’ Role Limited

The best any American film did in the awards contest was the prize for screenplay, which went to John C. Richards and James Flamberg for “Nurse Betty,” directed by Neil LaBute. Americans did, however, show up well in their roles as presenters. Director John Waters fondly noted that “it’s been a long road from ‘Mondo Trasho’ and the streets of Baltimore.” And James Caan, in remarks he said he’d been eager to make for years, gave his “deepest and most sincerest thanks to whoever named the most famous film gathering in the world after me.”

The festival’s runner-up award, the Grand Prix, went to one of its many Asian films, Jiang Wen’s “Devils on the Doorstep,” a two-hour, 44-minute life-and-death comedy about the Japanese occupation of China during the last days of World War II. Another long Chinese film, the two-hour, 53-minute “‘Yi Yi,” won the directing award for Taiwan’s Edward Yang.

Unhurried but sharply observed, “Yi Yi” (“A One and a Two” in English) is a sensitive and empathetic comedy of manners set in contemporary Taipei, a series of grace notes that follow the members of one Taipei family through crises both personal and professional.

Showing in the noncompetitive Un Certain Regard section was another shimmering Asian film, “A la Verticale de l’Ete,” directed by Tran Anh Hung, whose “The Scent of Green Papaya,” also set in Vietnam, won the Camera d’Or here in 1993. Gentle, languorous and sensual, it follows the romantic dreams, secrets and conflicts of three sisters while quietly celebrating things like the colors of walls and the textures of food.

It was also a strong year for Iran’s critically popular brand of neo-realism. Two Iranian films, Hassan Yektapanah’s “Djomeh” and Bahman Ghobadi’s “A Time for Drunken Horses,” split the Camera d’Or for best first film. And 20-year-old Samira Makhmalbaf not only was a co-winner of the Jury Prize for her “The Blackboards,” she gave the most moving speech of the night when she said through tears that she accepted “on behalf of the new young generation of hope in my homeland, to honor the heroic efforts of this young generation who struggle for democracy.”

The other half of the Jury Prize went to “Songs From the Second Floor,” the first feature in 25 years from Swedish director Roy Andersson, who in the interim has become one of Europe’s top commercial directors. Employing an exactly calibrated, exquisitely deadpan sense of humor, Andersson and his fixed camera record a series of melancholy yet somehow funny tableaux that deal with the approaching end of the world and the theme that “it’s not easy being human.”

Getting a Special Mention award from the jury for its ensemble performances was Pavel Lougine’s “The Wedding,” a rowdy, raucous and very Russian comedy about an all-night wedding celebration that gets a whole town talking. And the International Critics Award went to the longest work in competition, Aoyama Shinji’s “Eureka” from Japan. Shot in sepia-toned black and white and Cinemascope and clocking in at three hours, 37 minutes, this deliberate and unhurried film ever so gradually tells the story of the three people left standing after a fatal bus hijacking and how they deal with survivor guilt over a number of years.

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Cannes is known for its multiplicity of honors: there’s even something called Grand Rail d’Or (the Large Golden Rail), for the best film in the Critics Week section as selected by a group of 100 railway workers/cinema enthusiasts who’ve been coming here for more than five years. This year it was won by the Mexican film “Amores Perros,” directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu.

Americans taking prizes somewhere in Cannes include two Sundance winners. Karyn Kusama’s “Girlfight” took the non-French half of the Prix de la Jeunesse, given by a jury of 18- to 20-year-olds and previously won by “The Blair Witch Project.” And the Cinefondation short film award went to “Five Feet High and Rising,” directed by Peter Sollett.

One of the perennial pleasures of Cannes is the chance to stumble upon smaller films that might never make it over the Atlantic. Showing once only during the Directors’ Fortnight was a remarkable 52-minute TV interview called “Malou Meets Ingmar Bergman and Erland Josephson,” in which Malou von Silvers, the Barbara Walters of Sweden, talks to the reclusive director and celebrated actor. Exceptionally intimate and personal, the interview offers the almost unheard-of chance to glimpse Bergman talking about his temper, the children he neglected, the selfishness of the artist and the difference between guilt and a guilty conscience.

Much lighter in spirit was a droll and pointed Croatian comedy called “Marshal Tito’s Spirit.” Directed by Vinko Bresnan, it details how the sighting of the ghost of the former Yugoslavian leader turns a sleepy island into a kind of Titoland, where free-spending old partisans arrive by the boatload and are serenaded by anthems to the Marshal performed to a reggae beat. The film’s genial presence is a hopeful sign from a once-troubled republic, and hope can be one of the things Cannes is about.