Heading back to L.A., I bumped into Leung at the Nice airport, where he sat in a zippered tennis sweater, so completely unobtrusive that one barely noticed he was there. But once we began talking, he turned on his effortless charisma, flashing that sweet smile, fixing me with a gaze that made me feel I was the only person in the waiting room and, like Bill Clinton, repeatedly touching my arm to give our connection human intimacy. No wonder he’s been involved with Hong Kong’s most beautiful actresses. Leung may be the most watchable movie star in the world today, and when I asked why he still hadn’t made any movies in the U.S., he smiled and said he hadn’t found anything he really wanted to do. You could tell he felt that he didn’t need it.
Each year before the awards ceremony, the media subject the jury to the kind of labyrinthine speculations one associates with scholars of the Illuminati. One hears rumors of conspiracies, death-dance bickering, decades-old scores finally being settled by a quietly malicious backroom vote. Would Tarantino really push through a Palme for Old Boy, which resembled a Tarantino movie but wasn’t nearly as good? (“That,” one producer grumbled, “would be a catastrophe for international cinema.”) Did he have it in him to honor Agnes Jaoui’s Woody Allen–ish Look at Me, an unrepentantly bourgeois comedy that was the competition’s most universally liked film (except by the repentant bourgeoisie)?
When the decisions were finally announced, such questions felt silly. For all his many gifts — I’ve celebrated them in these pages — Tarantino has wretched taste, and his jury’s selections proved a fatuous mishmash. It gave Special Jury Prizes to Irma P. Hall in The Ladykillers (remember her moaning about her piles?) and the Thai film Tropical Malady, a daily double that trivialized both winners by making the awards seem preposterously arbitrary. It gave the Best Director prize to quasi-talented Tony Gatlif for Exiles, a film even his handful of admirers didn’t like. It named Maggie Cheung Best Actress for Clean, though she wasn’t nearly as good as Zhang Ziyi, and gave Best Actor to Yuuya Yagira, a 14-year-old, anime-faced Japanese kid. Tarantino announced each of these choices with the braying cockiness that Europeans love in their American primitives.
Several days earlier, born contrarian Godard had remarked that Fahrenheit 9/11 could actually help Bush get re-elected. Watching the awards ceremony turn into an orgy of political self-congratulation, you got his point. The runner-up for Best Short Film, a faux-naive Belgian pipsqueak, cunningly upstaged the gracious Romanian winner, Catalin Mitulescu, by announcing that people should oppose Bush. Tim “Prada” Roth then came out and praised the Belgian for his “bravery” in making such a statement, although attacking Bush in Cannes was about as brave as booing Shaq in Minneapolis. If I were Karl Rove, I might consider running a campaign ad showing European show-biz types showing their smug disdain for the president.
Once Moore himself finally claimed the stage, the night had come to resemble some inside-out version of a Henry James novel, filled with wide-eyed Europeans and cynical Yanks. Although nearly the entire U.S. film press opposes Bush, you could feel its collective flesh crawl when Tarantino announced Fahrenheit 9/11’s victory and Moore began hugging Harvey Weinstein, boss of the company known as “The House That Quentin Built.” The unseemly conflict of interest in all this apparently eluded the European audience (and media), which cheered Moore wildly when he told them that Cannes’ decision “will ensure that the American people see the movie,” perpetuating the big lie that they otherwise might not. Seeing smart Europeans be so embarrassingly gullible — here was a moment of corruption being treated as the triumph of high principle — I suddenly felt as jaded as one of the Borgias.
