The big story in world cinema is that Asia is on a roll. Last year, for the first time ever, a Chinese film, Hero, went to number one at the US box office. Now there's hardly an action movie made that doesn't nick the balletic "wire-fu" combat techniques which originated in Hong Kong. In the horror genre, Hollywood can put up its hands to eastern filmmakers and say, "You won."
Asia is winning because it has found a balance between cinematic action and repose. Its movies can be as kinetic and violent as Hollywood's, but Buddhist and Taoist notions of equilibrium in the best films keep the violence in check. The story of Asian sure-footedness continued in Cannes this year. The best film was the Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien's masterly Three Stories, in which the same couple is seen to meet, flirt and communicate by letters and then texts in the 1960s, 1911, and the present day. In a real coup de cinéma, Hou presents the 1911 section as a silent movie, complete with inter-titles. Hou's film is breathtaking in its beauty and not at all violent. But Cannes this year was not dominated by such beauty. The festival's annual snapshot of world cinema told a new tale. Western filmmakers were back on form. Canada's David Cronenberg, Austria's Michael Haneke, Belgium's Dardenne brothers, America's Jim Jarmusch and Gus van Sant and Denmark's Lars von Trier all presented work of the highest standard. One of these, Jim Jarmusch, openly acknowledged the Asian influence. Accepting the grand prix for his film Broken Flowers, Jarmusch announced: "Hou Hsiao-hsien, I am your student."
But the real issue in Cannes this year was how western directors are accepting that they, too, must think more deeply about the violent instincts in humans. Take Cronenberg's thriller A History of Violence, in which Viggo Mortensen plays Tom Stall, a placid small-towner who shoots two thieves when they try to rob his diner. He is acclaimed as an American hero, a defender of private property, but the brutality of the shooting disquiets his family. Stall is not what he seems. His wife comes to realise that she is living with a killer. Hollywood westerns are full of men who have apparently laid their violent pasts to rest. Cronenberg's film shares with them an Old Testament belief that it is not possible to do so, and that savagery lies below the surface of liberal assumptions about human decency and reform. And if a Canadian auteur is selling the very un-Canadian idea of innate fury, Lars von Trier's new movie, Manderlay, is even more dismissive of Scandinavian humanism. Provocation being von Trier's mode, he chooses a 1930s slave plantation in America as the setting for his story. Most filmmakers see slavery in morally clear-cut terms, yet von Trier has his liberated African-Americans volunteer for captivity again, even suggesting that they themselves wrote the rulebook which governs their servitude.
Cronenberg and von Trier's shared view is of human nature as a geology in which the top layer of civility covers deeper, volcanic instincts. Each of their films is a story of erosion, a wearing away of the top layer of life. Like much of western drama they start with worlds that we initially take to be true but discover that the real stuff was underneath. They are suspenseful. We are waiting for the explosion.
Which was certainly the case with Caché. No film in Cannes this year got people talking more than Michael Haneke's latest. It begins with Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche discovering video footage of themselves and, in their terror, attempting to discover who has filmed it. The footage leads Auteuil to Majid, an Algerian man whose parents were Auteuil's family servants, then to Majid's son, in the wake of Majid's suicide. But the maker of the videos remains elusive. Auteuil, it becomes apparent, represents France's misdeeds in north Africa.
Caché was by some way the best of the European and Anglo-Saxon films dealing with violence this year, and it establishes Haneke as the best European filmmaker of his generation. The final significance of his film is that imagery itself is the cause of its terror. Haneke is being even more introspective than von Trier and Cronenberg, pointing the finger not only at his own society, but his own medium. More than any film I have seen, Caché catches the icy inhumanity of moving imagery. The video footage that causes Auteuil and Binoche such distress carries no pounding music and indulges in none of the clichés of the horror genre, yet they are frozen by it.
Taken together, the films by Cronenberg, von Trier and Haneke seem to be part of what I could call the Kill Bill effect. Just as Natural Born Killers shocked the film world in 1994, waking it up to the medium's effortless facility with amoral violence, so I think the Kill Bill films have done the same more recently. I have heard many in the film industry express something like revulsion at their lack of consciousness. The Kill Bill circus makes movies look formally omnipotent but cluelessly amoral, dangerously close to the problems in society.
Cannes 2005 showed serious filmmakers in the west reacting against such formalism. They have done so in a way that is very much their own, very unlike how Hou would. Yet the last irony is that the Kill Bill films were inspired by Asian cinema in the first place.
