This year was my 16th Cannes film festival and the seventh selflessly reporting on it for Prospect. Once again it was good for the mind—I saw great films—but bad for the body: I came back sun-roasted, alcohol-pickled and two kilos heavier. If you've ever considered going to Cannes, do so only if your mind matters more to you than your body.
Since 2002, the festival's two big themes have been American violence and the beauty of Asian cinema. This year the American films were again mostly violent and the Asian movies mostly beautiful. However, for the first time I can remember, the best films were all about human goodness. The Palme d'Or went to Cristian Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, which everybody seemed to think was brilliant but bleak. It is indeed brilliant—but not, I'd argue, that bleak. Set in the grim half-light of Romanian communism, the film's defining moment comes when a young woman agrees to a sleazy abortionist's demand for sex in exchange for terminating the pregnancy of her friend. Her act is complex, generous and ennobling; it gives the film its originality and hope.
Two such ennobling acts are at the heart of The Edge of Heaven, by the German-Turkish director Fatih Akin. In it, a Turkish professor at Hamburg University (and how often do we see a Turk play a professor of anything in a film?) returns to Turkey in order to find a young Kurdish woman whose mother, his father's lover, has died. As the intricate plot unfolds and doubles back on itself, we learn that the Kurdish woman had a German girlfriend who has been accidentally killed, leading the girlfriend's mother to travel from Germany to Turkey, where the shooting took place. Independently, the professor and the mother both decide to help this young Kurdish woman, to whom they are only tangentially linked. Eventually, professor and mother meet. Neither knows that their separate quests are so intimately connected. Their scenes together—two decent, cautious people, a Turk and a German, taking risks for the sake of someone neither of them knows—are some of the best I have ever seen in a movie about the relationship between two countries.
As Alexandra potters, she experiences sensory overload—the smell of the young men and the steel and iron of their weapons and tanks. In the hands of Sokurov, who is a master at depicting rumination, these sense perceptions become a Joycean odyssey. Alexandra is a curmudgeon, but she emerges as one of the most distinctive characters I've ever seen in a war movie. The idea behind the film is simple—a granny wanders around an army camp. Yet because of the performance of the legendary 80-year-old opera singer Galina Vishnevskaya (a soloist at the Bolshoi before she was stripped of her Soviet citizenship in 1978), and because, unfashionably, Sokurov is a director who strives not for depictions of character or psychology but metaphysics, Alexandra is deeply original and uplifting—among the greatest works of art, in fact, that cinema has produced. I was disappointed that the festival's jury didn't give it a prize.
Critics (anglophone ones at least) were in agreement that Christophe Honoré's musical Les Chansons d'amour was a turkey. But it wasn't. The best film musicals marry gritty truth with rococo fun. Jacques Demy's Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, for example, takes place in a pink and lime universe, yet refers to the Algerian war, and is about the painful dissipation of love. Cabaret is lacerated by scenes of Nazism. Most modes of cinema—realism, comedy, adventure, melodrama—are aesthetically too narrow to capture the absurd, giddy amplitude of experience.
For me, Les Chansons d'amour did so triumphantly. A girl dies, her lover most of the movie grieving. The setting is
a microcosm—Paris's undistinguished tenth arrondisement. Yet, like a puppeteer who understands the tragedy of the situation (the film is based on the director's own experiences of bereavement, Honoré insists on lifting his grieving marionettes up into moments of happiness. Whereas in the Mungiu, Akin and Sokurov films, the generosity occurs on screen, in the film's story, in Honoré's it is in the form of the film, in the idea that the musical genre is a prism that can refract sadness and despair into the colours of the rainbow. Don't believe the Anglo scribes: Les Chansons d'amour is a joy.
Many of the best films shown at Cannes often don't get a release in Britain, but London distributor Artificial Eye has bought all of the above movies—which is very good news indeed.
