It’s where cinema is a matter of life

The patron saint of film criticism, Andre Bazin, once compared film festivals to religious revivals -- tent meetings where the faithful come to affirm their belief in cinema. That was the 1950s; this is now. These days, those who converge at the Festival de Cannes seldom exhibit the passion or the faith that made the golden age of art cinema such a heady time: They’re agnostics rather than true believers.

At this year’s Cannes, though, movie love flickered somewhat more brightly, more intensely than it has in recent memory. The selection may not have inspired the faithful to collectively prostrate themselves on the altar of cinema, but it did furnish reason for them to periodically jump to their feet and shout hallelujah. Generally regarded as a return to quality form after last year’s competition -- exemplified by Vincent Gallo’s widely ridiculed “The Brown Bunny” -- this year rehabilitated the festival’s tarnished reputation and served as a forceful reminder that good movies don’t always stand outside the larger culture but can be neck deep in it.

That engagement with the world is what makes Cannes exhilarating. The red carpet and its swanning stars give the festival glamour, but what gives it vigor, critical relevancy and an ever-present shiver of expectancy is its expansive sense of cinema as more than just a commodity or an evening’s entertainment.

This is a festival that embraces film as an art and connects moviegoers with a medium that isn’t in retreat from reality, as is too often the case with contemporary American movies, but passionately engaged with it. Here, you see films attuned to the rhythms of life (not just death), watch tenderly flawed people make love without a hint of plastic enhancement and worry about the same kinds of things the rest of us worry about -- where to live, how to live, why to live.

Hype, but something else

Nothing made the case for an urgently engaged cinema better than Michael Moore’s Palme d’Or winner, “Fahrenheit 9/11,” which arrived at the festival amid a storm of brilliantly orchestrated hype. The day before Cannes opened, Wall Street Journal columnist Alan Murray -- who apparently has learned nothing from Mel Gibson’s canny manipulation of the media -- railed against Moore’s film sight unseen. Miramax’s Harvey Weinstein, who as of my deadline was still shopping for a distributor, couldn’t have hoped for better launch or a more expert partner in publicity. By the time “Fahrenheit 9/11” screened at the festival’s midpoint, Moore had Cannes securely in pocket, having worked the American right, the French left (on the Croisette striking workers cheered him like a rock star) and an international media eager to embrace his patented anti-establishment shtick.

Certainly, there can be more to Moore than just shtick; for the first time since “Roger & Me,” however, there is also more to one of his movies than noise and self-promotion. A biting and, at least on the basis of a single viewing, factually sound critique of George W. Bush’s presidency in the wake of 9/11, the documentary offers little that’s new by way of information; its triumph, rather, is that of synthesis and of storytelling. It’s by no means a great film, but it’s nonetheless important. Less because of what it says specifically about the past few years -- Jon Stewart, among others, beats the same partisan drum almost every evening -- but because it affirms the power of film to spur a larger, noncinematic dialogue. It affirms that movies make meaning beyond their grosses.

Some of the French media greeted the film’s win of the highest prize at Cannes as a victory for anti-Bush sentiment, an attitude that, it’s worth pointing out, rarely registers as anti-Americanism. Indeed, it’s arguable that the reason Moore has won so many hearts and minds in France (“I love Michael Moore!” a Frenchman exclaimed to me unsolicited) is that he’s the kind of American who allows the French to simultaneously indulge in their love and hate of the U.S. That love-hate dynamic -- as well as this country’s overwhelming influence on the rest of the world -- is one of the great, unarticulated themes of international festivals. In film after film, country after country, America’s influence dictates the clothes movie characters wear, the music they listen to, the movie posters they hang on their walls.

A convergence of chatter

One of the great pleasures of film festivals is that they place individual movies into a dialogue. “Fahrenheit 9/11” and Wong Kar-wai’s hotly anticipated romance “2046” have little to say to each other, but one of the most beneficial ways to approach a festival like Cannes is as a series of interrelated discussions -- a convergence of cinematic chatter. To judge by this year’s roundup one of the most pressing concerns, especially in non-Western countries, is the new global economy and its discontents. Perhaps because artists tend to be liberal or on the Left, the films that broach globalization never register as anti-modern (or anti-Western) in the manner of radical Islamists. Instead, films such as the Cannes entry “Passages” -- a Chinese feature about high school students desperately seeking a bright future -- manage to be both modern in their emphasis on the individual and skeptical about a modernism dictated solely by money.

On another continent, the 81-year-old Senegalese director Ousmane Sembene -- whose classic titles include “Black Girl” -- offered an even sharper political critique with “Moolaade,” a stirring story of resistance. Although the plot hinges on the horrors of female genital mutilation, both for the girls subjected to the procedure and the women lucky enough to survive it, at its root Sembene’s film is about the challenges of post-colonialism. In a tiny village, a woman who refused to have her daughter mutilated (or “cut”) takes four girls under her protection, incurring the wrath of the men, who in the name of Islam use the ritual as a means of oppression. A model of political cinema, “Moolaade” ends with the image of a mosque swallowed by thick apocalyptic smoke -- a bracing image from the director, a longtime Marxist.

Sembene, resplendent in traditional white robes and holding an elegant pipe in his mouth, received a standing ovation at his first public screening at Cannes. The warm reception coupled with that of the press underscore the view by many critics that artistic director Thierry Fremaux blundered by not including “Moolaade” in competition. Although Fremaux appeared a model of calm and gave Sembene a gracious welcome, he had his feet to the fire throughout the festival. Last year he came under attack for what many considered one of the poorest festivals in years. Given that festivals are generally only as good as the available movies and that even the most prestigious festival in the world cannot improve the state of the art, many of the criticisms often came across as at best naive, at worst politically motivated.

That said, Fremaux did himself no favors this year with his decision to program two of the festival’s best films -- the Sembene and Jean-Luc Godard’s “Notre Musique” (“Our Music”) -- out of competition. Like the Sembene, Godard’s surprisingly mellow consideration of our violent age is nothing if not timely. In one of the film’s most provocative scenes, a beautiful Israeli woman -- who’s committed suicide in the name of peace -- gains entry into a stretch of paradise heavily guarded by American Marines. The idea that the American military stands between a peace-seeking Israeli and heaven on Earth found a touching if somewhat startling echo in a strong documentary by Arab-Jewish filmmaker Simone Bitton called “Wall,” about the “separation” wall under construction in Israel that will divide the country from its Palestinian neighbors.

Godard, who granted interviews to only three journalists at Cannes, declined to answer even the most seemingly nonconfrontational questions relating to Israel. When asked if he had named one of his main characters -- yet another Israeli woman -- after the biblical Judith, who beheads Holofernes and delivers the Jews, he unconvincingly answered that the name held no meaning. Despite this, the most overtly political, famously contentious veteran of the French New Wave came across as surprisingly friendly (he smiles, he laughs!), often speaking in English except when embarking on the same anti-American harangue he trotted out in his last feature, “In Praise of Love.” (Why, he wondered, do Americans call themselves Americans when our neighbors call themselves Ecuadoreans, Mexicans and the like.)

As ever, Godard continues to draw lines between past and future, on the political front and in terms of film aesthetics, but these days his work tends to stir little interest beyond the usual cinephile suspects. Like many filmmakers, he dabbles in digital video; unlike most, he doesn’t use it as an inexpensive substitute for celluloid but as one color in his creative palette. In conversation, Godard had plenty to say about digital video (all negative), but his most trenchant comment comes in “Notre Musique” when a woman asks if he believes that “little digital cameras” will save cinema. By way of an answer, Godard just cuts to his unsmiling face obscured by shadow. If he’d shot it in digital video you wouldn’t be able to see the shot, much less his contempt.

In the past decade, the number of films shot on digital video and screening at festivals has greatly increased. Third World directors, in particular, often work in digital video for the same reason American directors looking to catch a break at Sundance do -- it’s cheaper. Aesthetics rarely seem to play a significant part in the decision to shoot in video, though one of the medium’s most ardent champions is Abbas Kiarostami. Considered one of world’s leading auteurs, the Iranian director had two video-films at Cannes, “10 on Ten” and “Five.” The first distills Kiarostami’s reductive ideas about digital video (he deems it more truthful than film); the second is a lazy stab at the sort of avant-garde experimentation (non-narrative, fixed camera, long takes) that’s been old hat since Andy Warhol ran the Factory.

The inclusion of these projects into the official Cannes selection may have thrilled Kiarostami completists, but it didn’t put the festival in the most favorable light. One frequent criticism of Cannes several years ago is that it had become overly loyal to favorite auteurs, leading to the automatic inclusion of even mediocre work. Fremaux isn’t immune to auteurs (as the two Kiarostami projects proved), but he’s also moved on from some established, less overtly “sexy” art-cinema names (the new Mike Leigh film was rumored to have been turned down) while holding fast to art-cinema icons such as Wong Kar-wai and Spain’s Pedro Almodovar, whose work looks as good between the pages of French Vogue as it does in the Cannes catalog. Fremaux also appeared to be chasing other, more interesting agendas.

Asia welcomed

As the festival wore on it became increasingly clear that Fremaux was pushing Cannes out of its familiar Eurocentric classicism. He was redrawing the world-cinema map to include more Asian titles, many of which were also genre films -- Zhang Yimou’s “House of Flying Daggers” (a swordsman epic from China), Johnnie To’s “Breaking News” (a Hong Kong policier) and Park Chan-wook’s “Old Boy” (a South Korean revenge flick).

To judge by the noisy walkouts during its press premiere, Park’s flashy “Old Boy” was one of the less-loved competition entries. For better or worse, the film marked the arrival of “extreme Asian cinema” -- loosely speaking, the tag refers to violent genre movies -- in the most hallowed of art-cinema temples. The film has its merits, but the idea that a mature work like Sembene’s “Moolaade” had been kept out of competition to make room for Park’s giddily brutal production gave more than one critic pause. It also led some to speculate that the film was only in competition as a sop to jury president and extreme Asian cinema fan Quentin Tarantino. By the time “Bad Boy” won the Grand Prix, the second-highest award given at Cannes, those suspicions had ossified into received wisdom.

For those who prefer their aesthetic revelations delivered with more feeling and less carnage the Wong was a relief. As much a showman as Moore, Wong arrived late at Cannes; more important, so did his film. Some (mainly French) cynics speculated that the Hong Kong director intentionally missed his first press screening to prevent potentially negative word-of-mouth from leaking to buyers. At both his crowded press conference and a press luncheon Wong politely but firmly denied the charge. He was less forthcoming on the question of whether “2046” was actually finished. His eyes obscured by his trademark sunglasses, Wong indicated that shooting had finally come to an end after four on-and-off-again years. His star Tony Leung Chiu-wai looked visibly relieved. And was the editing done? “This,” Wong said, a smile tugging at his mouth, “is the final edit in May.”

This coy cat-and-mouse likely only stoked the cynical view that Wong engineered his Cannes arrival for maximum publicity. Maybe he had; he wouldn’t be the first or the last filmmaker to exploit the festival. Even so, considering that Wong ranks among the world’s most important film visionaries -- his impact on the medium outstrips that of Almodovar and may prove more lasting than that of Kiarostami -- the complaint seems irrelevant, trivial. “2046” may indeed be unfinished, but this sumptuous, gauzy story about a man stuck in a past of his own foolish design, emerged as a highlight of the festival. Like the other Asian filmmakers, Wong traveled a long way to get Cannes. If he took his time getting there perhaps it was because he knew the festival needed him. It would wait -- and it did.

Manohla Dargis is a Times film critic. E-mail her at calendar.letters@latimes.com.