“Life is short, Cannes is long,” quipped an exhausted American critic friend in the midst of the 59th Cannes Film Festival. What bedazzles and seems so glamorous on TV — the azure French Riviera, the red carpet at the Palais, toothsome international movie stars — makes for the most sleep-deprived, workaholic 12 days of the year for the 4000 journalists in attendance. They scramble from screening to cellphone to interview to press conference to computer to e-mail from 8:30 a.m. to deep into the night. Yes, there are lush parties down by the sea each après-midi and evening, but these are mostly gulp-a-wine and gobble-an-hors-d’œuvre teases for on-the-job reporters, who must rush away in the middle to make their deadlines.

Enough! I left Cannes this year after seven grueling days, sleeping on the plane and only minimally sorry to be leaving before the end. I wouldn’t catch the David Lynch press conference, in which he might shed some light on his cryptic Mulholland Drive, which I’d just seen. I’d miss the works of some interesting Russian, Japanese, and Taiwanese cinéastes. Although 13 pictures had screened in competition, I had no clue which one the Liv Ullmann–led jury (which included Edward Yang and Terry Gilliam) would honor with the prestigious Palme d’Or. The winner turned out to be a film that hadn’t screened yet, Nanni Moretti’s The Son’s Room, about a psychiatrist whose son goes scuba-diving and never returns.

The only masterpiece at Cannes? The out-of-competition Apocalypse Now Redux, cleaned up and re-edited a bit (by genius Walter Murch) and with 53 never-before-watched minutes added, including another Brando scene (he reads aloud from Time’s right-wing cheerleading) and a half-hour episode in which Willard (Martin Sheen) and his small company stop along the river for a long dinner with a family of still-zealous French colonialists who preach that “you Americans can win the war.”

How relevant is Apocalypse Now 22 years later? It’s uncanny how much Willard — who’s endlessly morose and alienated from American policy yet nevertheless carries out all orders to kill, including gunning down an innocent peasant woman — seems like a ghostwalking Bob Kerrey.

Francis Ford Coppola strolled about Cannes deliriously happy. I didn’t hear a negative word about the new version, not even from those nay-sayers who found the 1979 release politically incoherent and formally self-indulgent. I’m with them: the new Apocalypse Now, which opens here in August, is a great film of powerful ambition and intellect, wonderful from beginning to end.

But I saw no masterpieces in competition. Joel Coen’s The Man Who Wasn’t There was uncomfortably, fatally flawed; so was Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, and the huge-budget festival opener, Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge. Several films I liked were dismissed by critics for being amoral and too violent (Cedric Kahn’s based-on-life bandit saga, Roberto Succo) or sexually disturbing and too kinky (Michael Haneke’s La pianiste). Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s Safar e gandehar was regarded as too small-scale and documentary-like to warrant a major prize, Jean-Luc Godard’s Elegy of Love too avant-garde and obscure. The only competition film that practically everyone warmed up to was a tiny chamber drama by Portugal’s Manoel De Oliveira called I’m Going Home (Vou para casa), which dramatizes the life of an aging, well-established stage actor (Michel Piccoli) in the aftermath of an off-screen car accident that has killed his wife, daughter, and son-in-law. Where should he find solace? In a new love? In doing TV? One day he is offered a bizarre acting opportunity: the role of Buck Mulligan in a movie version of Joyce’s Ulysses that’s directed by an American (John Malkovich).

“I was fortunate to have two great actors,” De Oliveira said at the press conference. “Malkovich belongs to the world of pragamatism, Piccoli to the Mediterranean side of civilization.” Bald, spry, and at 92 miraculously unwrinkled, De Oliveira himself is one of the world’s wonders: he directs a feature a year as he sails through his 90s, and these (The Letter last year) are improvements on the ones he made in his 80s. When a journalist asked him the secret of his youth, he answered, “You must ask the Lord in Heaven.”

Piccoli, an icon of French film since the early 1960s (memorably in Godard’s Contempt), was seen as the likely Best Actor for his performance in I’m Going Home. De Oliveira explained, “I chose Piccoli because he’s an actor with a long life of experience behind him, but he’s a youngster next to me. Piccoli (who’s over 70?) laughed, “I didn’t do the arithmetic but I could perhaps be Mr. De Oliveira’s son!”

In the end, Best Actor went to Benoît Magimel for his role as a young pianist in La pianiste, and Best Actress to Isabelle Huppert for her transgressive turn in the same film as a thwarted, late-30ish classical-music teacher under the thumb of an abusive mother. She fights for her sexual identity by becoming pornography-obsessed and mutilating her genitalia and (an unconscious parody of The Rules?) formalizing on paper the regulations she insists be adhered to in her sexual relationship with Magimel. This last is a roundelay of extreme masochism, with her as the stepped-on, beat-upon slave.

At the press conference, puritan journalists praised Huppert’s thespian bravery while condemning her character as sick and revolting and deserving of being institutionalized. Neither Huppert or Haneke accepted the backhanded compliment. “When I read the script, a brush was a brush, a spade was a spade. I knew where I was going,” said Huppert. Her character, she pointed out, tries to overturn the male-dominant rules for defining a sexual tryst, and she appropriates male voyeurism, creating the Female Gaze.

“She’s neurotic but I don’t think she’s ill,” Austrian director Haneke lectured a blue-nosed journalist. “A sick woman? That’s your interpretation.”

La pianiste may have been too dark to win the Palme d’Or, but it clearly impressed the jury, taking the Grand Jury Prize as well as Best Actor and Actress.

AS THE STORY GOES, David Lynch was approached by ABC to develop an adventurous TV series à la Twin Peaks. But when he presented the two-and-one-half-hour pilot for Mulholland Drive (the title refers to a fancy LA address), ABC executives were appalled. What was this crazy nightmare stuff? Compromises failed and the series was dropped; Lynch reclaimed the footage, added some non-prime-time material (several hot-and-panting lesbian scenes), mixed it all his way, and carried it to Cannes. It’s the tale of nice girl Betty (Naomi Watts), who arrives in LA from rural Canada to become an actress. At her boarding house she runs into a dark-haired woman (Laura Elena Harring) who has total amnesia. As Betty seeks Hollywood fame and fortune, she helps Rita (as she calls herself) search for her lost identity; along the way, they fall in love. Other characters include a movie director losing wife and job (Adam Kesher), a heavily made-up landlady (former MGM music star Ann Miller), and a Chandleresque detective (Robert Forster). So far, despite some enigmatic scenes, Mulholland Drive can be followed even by Who Wants To Be a Millionaire fans. Then Lynch takes a mighty plunge into dream terror, Jungian otherworlds, shifting identities. Nobody is who she or he seems. Everyone is somebody else, or maybe several somebody elses.

The interchange of identities in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona seems the starting point for this high-dive plunge into non-linearity. A night at a incantatory magic show, perhaps inspired by Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf, also takes Lynch’s movie into the rabbit hole. Mulholland Drive will live forever on DVD, where slackers and stoners can struggle with it for eternity. But its box-office prospects are suspect: two and a half hours of surrealism is a stretch for people who just want an old-fashioned, well-plotted story.

Nonetheless, Lynch shared Best Director with Joel Coen, whose The Man Who Wasn’t There (Ethan Coen is co-writer and producer) is also a California nightmare noir. Shot in luxuriant black-and-white by Coens regular Roger Deakins, this lavishly expensive period film is situated in vaguely early-’50s Santa Rosa, where Alfred Hitchcock set Shadow of a Doubt, and the stark lighting recalls several 1940s Alan Ladd thrillers. What’s more, the story of how a good barber (Billy Bob Thornton) gone greedy and murderous gets caught in a chain of duplicity and blackmail pays homage to hardboiled James M. Cain novels like The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity. Ethan Coen explained that “Cain’s stories always had as their heroes shlubs — losers, guys who were involved in dreary and banal existences — as their protagonist.” Old Ed is dimly aware that his wife, Doris (Frances McDormand), is cheating on him, and that the years are passing by without love or money. One day, a Man with a Scheme invites him to invest in the wonderful world of dry cleaning.

Most who saw The Man Who Wasn’t There admired the Coens’ effort more than they liked the movie, which is slow-moving and claustrophobic and occasionally lugubrious and has a frustratingly passive protagonist. Ed, do something! Weighed down by Fate, the last 20 minutes are especially cumbersome. And there’s a badly miscalculated anachronism at one key moment: a sweet young girl suddenly attempts an unsolicited blow job. Sorry bro’s, not in 1952!

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.std.com.

Issue Date: May 24-31, 2001