..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..R.J. Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

The Cannes-didate

About a month ago I was in Toronto enjoying the city’s sartorial splendor and a sort of family reunion. However, I also found a couple of hours to drop in on an old colleague, veteran entertainment journalist Sid Adilman of the Toronto Star. Eventually, owing to our shared trench experience at Variety, the topic of Cannes arose. Sid, who hasn’t attended in five years (I’ve missed the past two), observed that the coverage of the event in his town had become increasingly sour and wanted to know if the fun had been excised from the festival or was it simply that the reporters were curmudgeons.

I found the query intriguing and told him that I imagined the answer involved a bit of both. With the latest incarnation of the Cote d’azur movie marathon now come and gone, Sid’s observations seem even more acute. Very little appeared to satisfy the chroniclers and critics in 2003. The official selections were largely derided and one - Brown Bunny - was dubbed “the worst competition entry ever.” Well, not being one for absolutes, I wonder whether anyone asserting that claim was around in 1975 for Yuppi Du, written, directed, scored and starring then Italian singing sensation Adriano Celantano.

Bests and rests aside, the thread that seemed to run through this year’s reportage was betrayal. Somehow the tacit contract between the Cannes programmers and the press had been broken and the latter group was intent on blowing the whistle on the deal breaker.

Of course, such a position is irrational. Now, having attended about 20 editions of Cannes, there are a few things I know to be incontrovertibly true about the festival. It is a madhouse and organizers appear to favor chaos throughout because it would be too confusing if some things ran smoothly. There is no central clearing house for screenings, so the schedules appearing in the assorted festival dailies are often contrary or simply incorrect. With that in mind, one should never attempt to play catch up. If a missed screening pops up later in the week and fits your schedule by all means go but under no circumstances should one try to juggle yesterday’s film with today’s agenda. For the uninitiated, there can be 25 to 30 film options available at any time of the day and no more than three of those potential choices are in official festival sections.

Which brings me to the most salient aspect of Cannes: The best, the most memorable, the most enduring movies at the festival are never, never, never to be found in the main competition. From time to time great films are among the 20 to 25 movies competing for the event’s Palme d’or. However, as with everything else, one has to glean through a lot of dross to find the golden kernels. My suspicion is that too much emphasis has been placed on the least interesting and traditionally weakest segment of the festival and, not to place individual blame, many of the chroniclers lack the imagination or adventure to track down the interesting, offbeat and compelling work that is there to be found.

One cherished ritual of my early years at Cannes was coffee on about day three of four at the Blue Bar with the legendary Gene Moskowitz. Mosk unquestionably holds the record for discovering more budding talents on the festival circuit than anyone in history. Our banter was always the same. It began with what each of us had seen, commentary and the word on the street about upcoming screenings. Then, about 20 minutes in, Gene word start to voice a thought and abruptly stop. After a moment of silence, he always said, “this has got to be the worst Cannes ever.” It was ever thus with one exception. In 1978, he indeed invoked his familiar assessment and then paused and added, “no, last year was worse … and it rained every day.”

Looking back, what I remember about 1977 was a frantic screening schedule, lots of reviewing and a day in which an unplanned personal record occurred. About mid-fest, I had a go-go screening day and when I finally got back to my room and started to jot down what I’d seen in my daily diary, realized I’d viewed nine films that day. The diary is long gone but, if memory serves, things got off to an excellent start with The Lacemaker starring Isabelle Huppert, a quick segue to a highly forgettable horror cheapie called The Rats and back to the palais for Marco Ferreri’s Ciao, Mascio, aka Goodbye Monkey with Gerard Depardieu.

The highlight of that 24 hours turned out to be the last film I saw, Sergei Paradjanov’s The Color of Pomegranates. At the time, the film had been banned in the then Soviet Union and its inclusion at Cannes was a total surprise. Actually, it was being screened at the Studio MJC, a youth hostel some miles out of town that showed some of the more interesting films from sidebar events. I’d never been to the MJC because it was a schlep and a cab ride but to see a film by the man who made Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors was worth the extra effort.

As luck would have it, I bumped into Ron Holloway, Variety’s German correspondent, and his wife as they were searching for a taxi to the MJC. En route, he told me the story of how Pomegranates came to Cannes. The film had been selected for a Soviet film week in Beirut and between its shipment and arrival in Lebanon, organizers were told by Sovexport Film that it was banned, could not be screened and to ship it back immediately. Fortunately, the head of the Beirut festival kept his head and shipped the print on to Henri Langlois at the Cinematheque Francais to make a duplicate copy. He requested only that the film be made available as a fundraiser for Lebanese youth organizations. The print screened that evening was likely a dupe of a dupe of a dupe (I’ve subsequently seen pristine prints since the ban was lifted in the 1980s) but the power of the filmmaking was strong enough to overcome the scrappy projection.

Flash forward several years and a chance meeting on opening night with David Overby, an American in Paris who was programming for several festivals including Toronto. Knowing the limitations of official selections, I asked David for pointers on interesting French films playing in the marketplace or Perspective of French Cinema. I believe he came up with five titles but the one I remember best he characterized as “original and energetic.” He did not hype the film or first time filmmaker and made note that the picture had already opened and closed in Paris and was not so much panned as it was ignored.

Several days later, I tracked the movie down in a small screening room in the old Palais. The unheralded effort had drawn seven viewers (including myself), mostly buyers from Asia and Eastern Europe but also Tom Bernard from UA Classics. When the projection was over only three people remained. My memory is that I immediately went to the Variety office and banged out a “money” review that trumpeted the director as a major talent and predicted this local failure would be the most commercial French film of the past decade. The movie was Diva and my blarney proved to be correct.

And one more for good measure circa 1990. That year, my wife decided to come along, catch a few movies and mostly go to galleries in the region. Early on in the festival we ran into David Ansen of Newsweek who was on the programming committee of the New York Film Festival. We asked him if he could recommend any movies and he promptly offered up three. As I recall each of the tipped trio were excellent, particularly Aki Kaurismaki’s The Match Factory Girl. Again, it was a film screened in the market and our friend Paul Bartel came along. Though I’d seen a couple of earlier films by the Finnish director, this one seemed perfectly executed - precisely observed, slyly humorous and innately emotional. It was a wonderful screening because half the audience got it and the rest were lost in translation. When we ran into David near the close of the festival and commended his selections, he responded with a quizzical look and asked to be reminded of his choices. As it turned out, we misunderstood his advice. He hadn’t seen any of the films but subsequently did on our recommendation in yet another Cannes irony.

I think it is true that the thrill of discovery has become more rare in recent time. The frenzy within the acquisition community has risen to a point where the most aggressive buyers will camp out in labs to glimpse a peek at movies with even a faint buzz so it’s virtually impossible to stumble onto a quality film that hasn’t been seen by someone, someplace. Still, there are always a few exceptions and surprises.

There are other things that cause me to wax nostalgic for a moment about Cannes. Lost friends, the energy of non-stop movies and parties and favorite cheap restaurants and hotels that mysteriously disappeared. What’s important to keep in perspective is the tremendous privilege to be able to attend and the opportunity it affords anyone who cares about cinema. It should not be squandered or viewed with derision. It’s exhausting and if you’re not having fun, you’re probably doing something wrong.

 

Kimo Sabe, Toronto!

It’s a bit of a shock to check the calendar and realize that the Toronto Film Festival is a little more than three months hence. Like Cannes, it’s an event laced with frantic energy and an impossible ticket system. However, following several snafus in 2002, organizers have promised to be more attune to press and industry needs.

The wild card this year can be summed up in one acronym: SARS. Toronto has been on and off the World Health Organization’s travel advisory twice and it’s anyone’s guess what its status will be after Labor Day when the festival unspools. The event has experienced more than its fare share of bad timing, most chillingly two years ago when the World Trade Center tragedy occurred at its mid-point and attendees were stranded, unable to get home and in a state of shock that one person described as “watching the air rapidly leaving the balloon.”

Organizers, who have worked mightily to make Toronto the most Hollywood friendly of major festivals, have to be anxious about upcoming Tinsel Town attendance. It’s likely the scare will have dissipated through medical attention prior to September but if matters aren’t resolved quickly, some of the majors could well bow out because the logistics of arranging junkets and talent availability soon hinges on a clean bill of health from the WHO.

- by Leonard Klady