Controversy at Cannes: The Headless Woman

Purportedly scripted but giving off the impression of old home videos exhumed from an attic grave, Now Showing offered an extreme example of what could be considered Cannes 2008’s defining trend: an aggressive blurring of whatever boundaries remain, in the YouTube/MySpace/Blair Witch era, between documentary and fiction. In the festival’s Official Selection, Israeli director Ari Folman revisited his country’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon in Waltz with Bashir, a fully animated “documentary” that combines Waking Life-style interview segments with dynamic, mangalike re-enactments of wartime chaos. Meanwhile, in 24 City, Chinese director Jia Zhangke’s latest bottled message from the front lines of a rapidly modernizing China, actresses Joan Chen and Zhao Tao intermingle liberally (and rather seamlessly) with actual workers from a military-equipment factory about to be razed to make room for a luxury apartment complex. And back in the Fortnight, there was Claire Simon’s superb God’s Offices (Les Bureaux de Dieu), in which the veteran documentary filmmaker (here directing her third narrative feature) dramatizes the goings-on at a Paris family planning clinic, with movie stars (Nathalie Baye, Nicole Garcia, Beatrice Dalle) playing the advisers, nonprofessionals playing the patients, and dialogues adapted from actual counseling sessions Simon observed during her research for the project.

Curiously, a nearly identical docudrama approach was in effect in director Laurent Cantet’s The Class (Entre les Murs), which became the first French film in more than 20 years — since Maurice Pialat’s Under Satan’s Sun in 1987 — to win the festival’s coveted Palme d’Or. When Pialat accepted the Palme for his controversial adaptation of George Bernanos’ novel, it was amidst a chorus of catcalls and hisses — to which Pialat memorably responded by giving the audience an irreverent hand gesture. With Cantet, it was all smiles and good cheer as the director bounded to the stage with nearly his entire cast, a gaggle of ethnically diverse middle-school nonactors who developed The Class in concert with their director and a ridiculously charismatic schoolteacher/author/ex-punk-band-frontman named François Begaudeau. Begaudeau, whose 2006 memoir inspired the film, makes his acting debut, as a version of himself, in the leading role.

Courtesy Cannes Film Festival

Mind games: Lucrecia Martel's Headless Woman

Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York

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An inspirational schoolteacher movie stripped of spoon-fed inspiration, The Class begins on the first day of school and ends on the last, in between which it is so uncommonly sharp about the perils and pitfalls of public education that you wince when Cantet’s beautifully sustained verisimilitude buckles a bit under the weight of a third-act dramatic conflict. Still, there is much to be impressed by, including Cantet and veteran screenplay collaborator Robin Campillo’s keen observations of class, race, the politics of language, the asserting of adolescent identity and the classroom as simulacrum of the outside world (which, in keeping with the film’s French title, Between the Walls, we never see after the opening scene). As the son of a public-school educator with some 40 years under her belt, I was moved.

During an amusing closing-night awards ceremony at which Competition jury president Sean Penn more than once seemed to be channeling Jeff Spicoli, the Grand Jury Prize (traditionally seen as Cannes’ “runner-up” award) was bestowed upon Italian director Matteo Garrone’s sprawling modern-day Mafia thriller Gomorra, while the third-place Jury Prize went to another Italian film, Il Divo, for its satirical portrait of 89-year-old Senator, former Prime Minister and supposed Mafia emissary Giulio Andreotti. Brazil’s Sandra Corveloni took home the Best Actress award for her affecting performance as an impoverished mother of four in Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas’ otherwise trite Linha de Passe. In one of only two announced unanimous decisions by Penn’s reportedly fractious jury — the other being the Palme d’Or to The Class — Benicio Del Toro was named Best Actor for Che. (Whether that is enough to boost distributor interest in the film, or ease pressures on Soderbergh to prepare an alternate cut, remains to be seen.) Rounding the evening out, three Cannes regulars, Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan and the Belgian brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, respectively won the Director and Screenplay awards — Ceylan for his somber morality play Three Monkeys and the Dardennes for Lorna’s Silence, a powerful tale of an Albanian woman working as a pawn in an illegal immigration scheme. Some members of the international press corps groused that neither film was a masterpiece from filmmakers who have led us to expect masterpieces — and besides, didn’t the Dardennes (who won the Palme d’Or in 1999 and 2005 for Rosetta and The Child, respectively) already have enough Cannes prizes? This may seem like sound reasoning, until you consider that, while we critics come to Cannes every year, the jury — which tends to be composed of those people whose job it is to make movies, not to watch them — is forever changing. Had Sean Penn or Natalie Portman ever seen a Dardenne brothers movie before? Discuss among yourselves.