Under the Skin

DELIRIUM SET IN SOMETIME MIDFESTIVAL. THE crowds had become a roiling, nearly impenetrable swirl into which attendees at the 52nd Festival de Cannes would fling themselves like salmon, seemingly driven by instinct and little else in an attempt to reach their collective goal, the Palais. Outside the enormous concrete mass that is the cold heart of the Cannes film festival, passersby gaped in place and thugs in soiled sneakers roamed the streets, grabbing at women, purses and even the sack of a street accordionist. There is a degree of madness in seeing something like 40 films in 10 days, but 40 films is only a drop in the proverbial munificence. The festival presents 76 films in its four most distinguished programs, those in Competition, those out, those in the noncompetitive category, Un Certain Regard, and those in the Directors' Fortnight (Quinzaine des Réalisateurs), a platform for new directors from around the world.

That Cannes is a shared madness is reassuring only in part. During the course of the festival there are countless dramas and intrigues, most of them well-projected in theaters, with ample seating and good raking. After a while, though, after the 30th or 35th film, the dramas unfolding among the expatriate community of critics, journalists and everyone else from the world of cinema can become indistinguishable from those unfolding onscreen. Was that a fight with a friend, or was that a remembered moment from Raoul Ruiz's film about Proust, Le Temps Retrouvé? Was that a flirtation, or a scene from Manoel de Oliveira's eccentric A Carta? I am turned on by the sex in one film (Leos Carax's Pola X) and turned off, I worry perhaps forever, by the rutting in another (Bruno Dumont's L'Humanité). Everyone drinks too much, but not as much as the sodden lost souls in cinematographer Christopher Doyle's very terrible Away With Words.

The films keep coming. Trends are latched on to, invented, an admittedly reductive exercise that nonetheless helps to put order to the millions of feet of unfurling celluloid. There are what I quickly come to think of as the We Are the World movies: Two British films, Michael Winterbottom's Wonderland and Jasmin Dizdar's Beautiful People, the French Nos Vies Heureusesby Jacques Maillot, and a Canadian feature, The Five Senses, by Jeremy Podeswa, adapt the quasi-Altmanesque strategy of knitting together various lives in order to score larger points about the whole of humanity. Although Podeswa's is the most formally exacting, it shares with the others the sort of gooey humanism that, while anathema to Altman, characterizes Hollywood apologies such as Grand Canyon, films that invariably extol solipsism over anything resembling politics or faith.

At the other end of the spectrum there are the inevitable essays in miserablism (festivals are always full of these), including Lynne Ramsay's beautifully composed, narratively impoverished Ratcatcher, Arturo Ripstein's logy El Coronel No Tiene Quien le Escriba, and incontrovertibly the most disputed selection in competition, Dumont's demented L'Humanité. Dumont, whose first feature was the highly regarded La Vie de Jesus, which last year opened at the Nuart to about $5 in business, is, as they say, a filmmaker of ideas. This is sometimes a very good thing, as with Jesus, a discourse on the lives of disaffected provincial youth.

L'Humanité opens with a visual quotation from Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest, only to rapidly up the anxiety of influence with a re-creation of Marcel Duchamp's inscrutable masterpiece Étant Donnés, a tableau that features the waxy body of a naked woman, her vulva shaved and a lantern clutched in one hand. The female pelvis in the Dumont film is arranged similarly to that in the Duchamp, and similarly exposed, but is horribly bloodied because it belongs to an 11-year-old girl who has been raped and left dead in a country field. This vision, like nearly every shot in the film, made for one of the most powerful in this year's festival, and one of the most unforgettable. If only the film as a whole didn't collapse in on itself, and quickly become a near parody of artistic reach.

Nominally the story of a police investigation, the film is more accurately an exploration of art and truth, grace and evil, flesh and consciousness. Or to cite Dumont himself, "L'Humanité is a tragedy because it contains the painful emergence, slow, brown and carnal, of a dazzled and mystical consciousness." Given the director's stubborn aesthetic and his almost poignant inability to locate and sustain the right tone for such a weighty project, it was no great surprise that during the film's premiere press screening, prestigiously scheduled midweek in the festival's biggest theater, the audience soon divided between those who could barely suppress their laughter -- including numerous American and British critics, whose giggling swept the theater like a virus and sounded a likely death knell for a release in either of their countries -- and the rest of the international press, who periodically yelled "Silence!"with futile, mounting outrage.

THE FILM THAT DUMONT HAD SO BOLDLY ATTEMPTED was realized in the festival's genuine triumph, Rosetta. Written and directed by Belgian filmmakers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, whose first feature was La Promesse, this meticulously detailed, wrenching story of an impoverished teenage girl struggling to find a job, as well as a small measure of happiness, was the unexpected, greatly deserved winner of the festival's top honor, the Palme d'Or. (The only other sane choice would have been Pedro Almodóvar's Todo Sobre Mi Madre, a vibrant, hugely pleasurable rethinking of classic melodrama.) An acquaintance called Rosettathe meta-movie of the festival, a story of interminable struggle and hard-won faith. The film, surprisingly and happily, was bought by the new company USA Films, the Barry Diller venture that now encompasses October Films and Gramercy Pictures.