Another one in the Cannes

CANNES — Was it because of the film’s signature image of a decapitated bird skewered on a pair of scissors? Or was it for the haunting sound of a boy wailing as his father, the local pastor, whips him for his latest transgression? Or could it have been for the unremittingly bleak, unrelentingly stern Teutonic-ness of it all?

Only a jury member could tell you, and Asia Argento has unfortunately been blocking our calls. In any case, the highest honour at this year’s Cannes film festival went to The White Ribbon (****), Michael Haneke’s latest study in human cruelty and societal collapse.

An ensemble black-and-white drama set in a Teutonic town on the eve of WWI, it was an interesting choice of Palme d’Or for a variety of reasons. As with Martin Scorsese’s Oscar triumph for The Departed, this may have been deemed the most convenient time to hand out the big prize to a filmmaker who had been unfairly edged out for superior works (in Haneke’s case, the description applies to Caché and The Piano Teacher, both of which earned lesser prizes at Cannes festivals past).

Moreover, its selection points to the highly divisive nature of the films in competition this year. What with nearly everything being admired and loathed in roughly equal measure, it was hard to determine what would get into the winners’ circle. Besides The White Ribbon, the only other consensus favourite was A Prophet (***), a compelling if conventional prison drama by Jacques Audiard, a French director who, like Haneke, has been in better form in the past. It won the second-place Grand Prix.

Bright Star (****), Jane Campion’s exquisitely rendered film about the last years of John Keats, and Vincere (****), Marco Bellocchio’s bold and blustery telling of the story of Mussolini’s secret wife and son, went unrecognized in favour of a few of the more contentious entries, including the fest’s two most talked-about movies.

Intermittently brilliant but overlong and overindulgent, Inglourious Basterds (***) is a good distance away from the masterpiece that Quentin Tarantino’s loyalists (and Tarantino himself) may have hoped for. But his WWII-actioner-cum-Jewish-revenge-fantasy is invigorated by a stunning performance by Christoph Waltz as a ruthless Nazi officer who speaks all of the film’s many languages with equal aplomb. The previously little-known Austrian thespian was a great choice for Best Actor.

Best Actress winner Charlotte Gainsbourg was just as deserving for her all-out performance in Antichrist (***), and here’s hoping the win will inspire viewers to take a more generous view than many critics here did of Lars von Trier’s audacious mash-up of Tarkovsky and torture porn.

Third-place nods went to Fish Tank (***), Andrea Arnold’s lively movie about a stroppy council-estate teen, and Thirst (***), Park Chan-Wook’s sometimes-inspired but overblown vampire saga. More mysterious were the directing and screenwriting prizes for Brillante Mendoza’s grisly Kinatay (**) and Lou Ye’s muddled Spring Fever (**).

I was happier to see Canada get some love when a Canuck contribution to the Directors’ Fortnight section earned several prizes. Starring, written and directed by a 20-year-old Montrealer named Xavier Dolan, I Killed My Mother (****) is the semi-autobiographical tale of a gay teen’s highly tumultuous relationship with his mother. Raucous and energetic, it will cause a stir when it begins to circulate at home, too. The same goes for Carcasses (****), the fourth feature by Montreal critic-turned-auteur Denis Côté. The sort-of-documentary portrait of a junk collector who lives on an unbelievably cluttered property near Saint Amable, Quebec, it is the most unpredictable and original film this nation has spawned in years.

Carcasses was also one of the few films debuting in the festival’s waning days to really startle. Two others that had been much anticipated by freaks and fanboys failed to satisfy despite having moments that were extraordinary by anyone’s measure. Gaspar Noé’s third feature after the pugnacious I Stand Alone and the indefensible Irreversible, Enter the Void (**) rigorously replicates the perspective of a young drug dealer in Tokyo who strives to protect his stripper sister even after his demise. It’s a cunning piece of work, especially in the extraordinary early stretch that depicts our protagonist’s DMT trip with some of the most imaginative CGI ever presented on screen. There are more wonders to come, along with much more squalour and raunch (another first: a sex scene presented from the vantage point of a woman’s cervix). So it’s unfortunate that this version — reportedly a rough cut — is also maddeningly turgid and repetitive.

Debuting out of competition on Friday, Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (***) is also hard to love despite a similar degree of visual novelty. A sort of Gilliam greatest-hits comp that filches ideas and images from stops throughout the director’s career, this romp bears the most resemblance to The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Chances are it would’ve been plenty chaotic even if star Heath Ledger hadn’t died mid-production. He plays Tony, a con man who comes to play a part in an age-old battle between a God-like magician (Christopher Plummer) and the Devil (Tom Waits with pencil-thin moustache). The fluid transitions between Ledger and the three replacement actors in the same role (Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell) are actually one of the most successful elements of the film, which has boundless energy yet rarely engages as much as it ought to due to its muddled storyline.

And when it comes to strange sights, tranny bobbies can’t compare with seeing a smile on the face of Europe’s most misanthropic auteur. Yet maybe it took a man of Michael Haneke’s mettle to weather such a strange and stormy festival.

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Jason Anderson’s Cannes Top 10