Script Doctor

THE CANNES FILM Festival's blue-chip Official Selection was even more sclerotic than usual. Packed with old masters past their prime and a couple of proven favorites, the competition tried to prove its pluck by including a few renegade choices: one documentarian (America's own Michael Moore), one Palestinian (Elia Suleiman), and, just to be fair, one Israeli (the perennial Amos Gitai).

While I gave up the usual gig of tracking every damn competition title in favor of trolling the more interesting alternative sections, I caught a few competition screenings anyway, such as Moore's Bowling for Columbine, a riveting antigun and anti-gun nut screed that's quite strong even if it plays way too conveniently to European expectations of American brute stupidity. My heart really sank, though, with Roman Polanski's The Pianist, a mediocre riff on the unfortunate Holocaust genre that nonetheless went on (surprise!) to win the Palme d'Or. It seems Polanski and jury president David Lynch share a producer, a fact that didn't go unnoticed on the croisette.

The true discovery of the competition was Suleiman's Divine Intervention. His second feature, it's a deadpan comedy about life in the Israeli-Palestinian war zones. Suleiman himself plays a charmed everyman who navigates a nonsensical and violent world with a sophisticated physical humor that brings to mind both Tati and Keaton. As his character courts a beautiful Palestinian woman, she is transformed by the combined powers of love and cinema into a warrior magician, half ninja and half Xena. In one fantastical scene she fights Israeli soldiers in a choreographed ballet that invokes Beau travail as well as The East Is Red.

The alternative festival sections – both Un Certain Regard, which is under the umbrella of the main festival, and the Directors' Fortnight, a section founded by May '68 rebels – offered the most excitement this year. Belgian director Bénedicte Liénard's A Piece of the Sky is an old-fashioned feminist story modernized by sublime stylistic flourishes. It juxtaposes life in a women's prison to women's lives on the assembly line of a croissant factory. Premiering with it in Un Certain Regard was an upstart U.S. film, Peter Sollett's Long Way Home, which explores young love in an entirely fresh fashion thanks to a cast of nonprofessional Dominican adolescents and a tender story of first love, first sex, and the gravitational pull of the post-nuclear family.

Meanwhile, Directors' Fortnight, where former San Francisco International Film Festival programmer Marie-Pierre Macia calls the shots, opened with a bang: prolific French bad girl Catherine Breillat's latest movie, Sex Is Comedy. Hundreds of interviews later, Breillat has apparently decided to tell the world just what might transpire behind the camera when she's shooting her scandalous sex scenes. The film is a Breillat primer, crammed full of classic observations delivered by actor Anne Parillaud in the role of the director and recognizable scenes from Romance and Fat Girl.

The heat didn't let up. Lynne Ramsay proved she was no one-film wonder, following up her Ratcatcher success with the brilliant Morvern Callar, starring the outrageously intense Samantha Morton in a hilarious meander of a caper movie that forsakes action for mood, complete with a road trip to nowhere. It was quite fun even though a plot summary (boy commits suicide, girl steals book) might suggest otherwise. Finally, the extraordinary new Mexican film Japón, by first-time feature director Carlos Reygadas, proved how totally cinema can be reinvented in the right hands. In this case, an existential city dweller on the verge of suicide rediscovers the meaning of life through his relationship with a village, an old woman, and the spirituality of the Mexican landscape.

I had foolishly expected the French political mood to infiltrate the Cannes bubble, given the festival's slot midway between French presidential and legislative elections, but politics showed up instead in an Italian documentary, Bella ciao, covering the momentous events in Genoa last summer when police attacked the unarmed protesters of the G-8 Summit, killing Carlo Giuliani. Shunning narration in favor of music, it tips into music-video vernacular but is chilling anyway.