A dish best served boiling hot

I'm on the balcony of a small, shabby apartment in Cannes, the day after the 62nd edition of its famous film festival. I'm looking out to a grey-blue Mediterranean sea. Beyond the palm trees in the foreground, their fronds motionless in the twilight air, there's a watercolour corniche and the promise of something other than film. I can smell garlic and, I think, anchovies. I reek of aftersun and my eyes have never been more tired. I've been here for a fortnight, during which time I chatted with Martin Scorsese about a new foundation I am setting up with Tilda Swinton. On a yacht in the Mediterranean I told Willem Dafoe that I loved Lars von Trier's new film, Antichrist, in which he stars. And I met Quentin Tarantino, who called me a "cinetiser." As far as I can tell, he's the first person ever to use the word.

It's my tuxedo self that does such stuff. The real me sleeps on a fold-out bed in a living room, hires a bike and eats cheese baguettes to save money. But most of all, he watches films. Forty films. Too much looking, perhaps. Now that the festival is over, I want to turn that looking into thinking.

The biggest thought that enters my weary brain as I sit here and the air cools is that the Cannes films were full of vengeance. Given that one of the headline movies of the festival was Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds (note the anglophile u as well as the unexpected e), which is "kosher porn" about American Jews killing Nazis, it was no surprise that revenge would have one major outing. But it was ubiquitous. Jump from Inglourious Basterds's retaliation as fantasy to Andrea Arnold's crisp and jewel-like new British film, Fish Tank, and you'll find a more social species of reprisal—vengeance as a response to being hemmed in. The story is set in an English housing estate. Mia, the chippy 15-year-old at its centre, pays back the man who seduced her and then lied to her by pissing on his carpet and stealing his kid. He counters in a far more male way, with a punch in her face.



Theft and urination seem a reasonably measured response compared to the deeds of the unnamed woman at the centre of Danish provocateur Lars von Trier's new film, Antichrist. Her child dies in a fall from a high window as she and her husband are having sex. Her grief reaction is extreme, as are the film's images: Trier's recent depression has scared up some disturbing unconscious material. The fact that the mother (played by Charlotte Gainsbourg) cuts off her own clitoris has led to charges of misogyny or absurdity. My view is that when there has been so much media coverage of Ayaan Hirsi Ali's campaign against female genital mutilation, especially in Trier's native Denmark, and given the fact that women self-harm through cutting far more than men, the idea of clitorectomy is not only in the air, as it were, but its depiction is justified if a filmmaker is hurling out nightmare images in a very uncensored way. It's like Luis Buñuel filming an eyeball being slit open in Un Chien Andalou. Von Trier's woman does the deed, then turns her rage onto her husband, a therapist who has clearly been an inattentive father and who only seems interested in her because of the gothic nature of her mourning. And so she tortures him, grotesquely.

Meanwhile, in a rancorous and beautiful new film from Hong Kong director Johnnie To, Johnny Hallyday avenges his daughter's murder by triads in a manner that's worthy of Sergio Leone or Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry. In case we missed the import of his Old Testament fury, the film is simply entitled Vengeance. And in Alejandro Amenábar's Agora, an epic set in Roman Egypt, the retribution enacted by Christians on Jews takes place in scenes visually reminiscent of the Treblinka death camp. The filmmaker is using vengeance to join historical dots.

In 17 years in Cannes, I've never before seen so many filmmakers suggest that the road to appeasement runs through the valley of the furies. Why now? A partial answer is the convergence of the western and eastern film industries. For decades Cannes has felt like an annual showdown between Asian and Euro-American cinema over which is more artistically vital. Most years, I've reported in Prospect that Asia is in the lead. Now, though, Asian and western locations and storytelling techniques are sharing the screen like never before. This is hardly surprising, given that co-financing between the continents is increasingly frequent, international production treaties are being signed, talent is more mobile than ever, and marketing is more global. Nevertheless, the results were especially spectacular this year.

Gaspar Noé's Enter The Void, Isabel Coixet's Map of the Sounds of Tokyo, Bahman Ghobadi's Nobody Knows about the Persian Cats (Iran), Ang Lee's Taking Woodstock (a Confucian take on the iconic American music festival), To's Vengeance and Tsai Ming Liang's Visage (also released as Face) all freely mix east and west. And since Asian commercial cinema has played the vengeance card more than most—the biggest Indian film ever is the requital epic Sholay; Hong Kong action cinema often spells V for vendetta—perhaps the fire in the blood has spread.

Surely, too, geopolitics has played a part. If, as a result of 9/11 or war in Iraq or Israel-Palestine, one of the questions of our time is how a nation or a person or tribe that has been harmed finds peace, maybe the first answer that comes to the minds of filmmakers is to return harm to those who harmed. If so, I'm disappointed. Vengeance is both ancient and stupid. Why are the world's great filmmakers reaching for it so readily?

The answer may be that to depict vengeance is to do something rather more complex than I suggest. Consider the fact that, in traditional societies, revenge is often enacted by a proxy (or hero) in order to regulate the spiritual order or to restore its equilibrium. Movies are proxies of sorts. They offer comfort, as ancient Greek drama did, by ventilating an audience's feelings of impotence. In those dramas, inscrutable gods would mete out justice or crush mere mortals on a whim. Either way, the arbitrary cruelties of the world (and its inhabitants) would be brought under some kind of artistic control. Today, we still cannot get our hands on—or even identify—many of the world's evil doers. Hence scalped Nazis, bloodied Christians in ancient Rome and the slaughter of triad gangs. We long, it seems, to be avenged both on history and our own the times.

On the fifth day of Cannes, my eyes burning, I was pondering this when I saw Ken Loach's Looking for Eric. It's about an ordinary man, Little Eric, who's divorced from his wife and whose stepson is being forced to hide a gun by a local gangster. At one point, Paul Laverty's screenplay has Eric Cantona, embodying the man's conscience and confidence, tell him that "the noblest vengeance is to forgive." It's a gnomic phrase, suggesting that the decision to refuse vengeance can itself become a form of revenge. It suggests a triumph of mind over rage that brings into play both sides of Cantona's public persona: the cerebral, elegant athlete prepared to aim a kick at the heads of those who abused him. Where Loach's film really gets ahead of the game, however, is in the way that Little Eric deals with the gangster who's terrifying his stepson. For Little Eric and his mates parody vengeance. They perform something that is both genuinely retributive and that wears a comic mask, humiliating the gangster by—among other things—posting pictures of him on YouTube in some distinctly unmanly situations. On day five of Cannes, modern vengeance shifted into something more imaginative, more hopeful.

Fish Tank is just as good as Looking for Eric, and there were even better films at the festival. But it was Loach's belief in the settlement that comes with friendship (which perhaps goes hand in hand with his Marxism) that felt most welcome amid the carnage. His characters, unlike so many others, aren't hemmed in. I found myself, in the blinding sunshine, crying behind my sunglasses after Looking for Eric. It was the best guide to life in the festival thus far.