The festival has famously neglected the talents of female directors, but this year four are vying for the top prize, including Lynne Ramsay, whose dazzling interpretation of Lionel Shriver's novel We Need to Talk About Kevin is tipped for glory
Oone of the 15 golden rules of Cannes president Gilles Jacob, as set out in his new memoir Citizen Cannes, is: Never forget that a beautiful woman's face is the reason cinema exists.
A reflection of cinema itself, the festival has always been in the thrall of beautiful women: Faye Dunaway adorns this year's striking festival poster, slinked as she is in a mid-length black dress around the digits 64, while Marilyn Monroe in a sparkly playsuit is poster girl for the Un Certain Regard sidebar.
However adoring of on-screen beauty, Cannes has notoriously neglected female talent behind the camera, the Australian Jane Campion being the only Palme d'Or winner, for The Piano, and even then she had to share the 1993 prize with Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine. But this year, the 20-strong competition features four female directors, three of whose films ? We Need To Talk About Kevin by Lynne Ramsay, Sleeping Beauty by Australia's Julia Leigh and Poliss by French actress Ma�wenn ? played out in quick succession over the early days of the festival, which runs for another week, like some sort of "ladies first" politesse.
It allowed Ramsay to stake an early claim as a Palme d'Or frontrunner, her superb adaptation of Lionel Shriver's million-selling novel confirming her near-mythic status as one of British cinema's most aesthetically assured talents. How we've missed her since her debut Ratcatcher (1999) and Morvern Callar (2002), which both premiered in Cannes sidebars.
Tilda Swinton, surely a favourite for best actress, stars as Eva Katchadourian, famed budget travel author and notorious guilty mother, who sifts the pieces of her ruined life as she tries desperately and painfully to divine what went wrong with her son, Kevin (Ezra Miller), whom she now visits in a juvenile detention centre after he committed a high school atrocity.
Ramsay's film works through shards of colour, sound and symbol: the director's visual translation of the novel's epistolary structure. It opens with a wonderful scene shot at the Spanish tomato festival of La Tomatina in Bunol, showing Swinton's Eva revelling in the hedonism of red-spattered bodies and setting up the film's predominant colour symbol, later picked up in everything from Kevin's T-shirts to the paint which vandals daub on Eva's house. Can bloodshed be foretold?
It's the question that haunts Eva. What could she, should she, have done as Kevin's mother to deflect him from a destiny that seems as ineluctable in the film as in a Greek tragedy? Bitter memories waft over her in a beautifully calibrated flashback structure which, in Ramsay's hands, never feels contrived or obtrusive, and the film is particularly honest on the gruelling trials of bringing up baby.
Swinton is terrific at this, holding us and the infant at arm's length, her face in a rictus grin that hides the deadening secret of her depression, failure and sense of imprisonment.
Are the sins of the mothers visited on the children? Why did Eva have to read him the stories of Robin Hood, an outlaw Kevin seemed to love? And did she really mean to hurt him that day, leaving a scar on her son for life?
All of this unfolds in an atmosphere that manages to be gripping, dazzling and dread all at once. Seamus McGarvey's camerawork is scintillating and Ramsay's music choices, including Lonnie Donegan and Buddy Holly all linked by another impressive score by Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood, are impeccable.
If the film has a minor flaw it is that it has something frozen about it, like Eva herself. Wrapped in a carapace of its own artistry even as the unspeakable event itself approaches full revelation, you stop feeling, although you never cease admiring.
The Australian Sleeping Beauty also deals with the freezing of time as pretty, sexually curious student Lucy (Emily Browning) joins a secret dining society where the silver service waitresses wear bondage-style lingerie. Lucy graduates from waitress to sex toy, travelling to a country house run by stern Madame Clara (Rachel Blake), who gives her a tea that renders her unconscious while wrinkly, wealthy old men act out non-penetrative fantasies on her lifeless, beautiful body.
Debut director Julia Leigh is here adapting her own novel, and the film is billed as "Jane Campion presents". Leigh's camera has a pitiless stare and yet her style, intentionally or not, has echoes of Catherine Breillat, Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut and the sniggery soft erotica of something like The Story of O. It's an unsettling film, certainly, containing haunting images that clearly confront the male gaze of art history with Browning's often-naked Lucy as inscrutable as the Mona Lisa or Manet's Olympia. That said, I didn't like it much, although I wouldn't fully dismiss it as boring or annoying, if only for fear of sounding like David Cameron saying "Calm down, dear!"
The female touch of Ma�wenn's sprawling reality-style cop drama Poliss is evident in its deft mix of sentimentality, soap and heartbreaking sympathy. Ma�wenn herself plays an attractive photographer assigned to document the daily grind of the cops in Paris's Brigade des Mineurs (Child Protection Unit) and she observes a mixed bunch as they argue, bond, deal with turbulent personal lives and confront horrific child abuse. In one storyline Louis-Do de Lencquesaing plays a wealthy father accused of abusing his daughter ? a flipside of his performance in Cannes two years ago in Mia Hansen-L�ve's Father of My Children, while his daughter in that film (and in real life), Alice, plays the young victim of a rape who has to deliver her stillborn baby.
Although Poliss has the feel of a TV series pilot, it's certainly one I would watch. Ma�wenn's script skilfully examines how state institutions impact on family life, religion, privacy and love. It doesn't have quite the probing intelligence of, say, Laurent Cantet's Cannes-winning schoolroom drama, The Class, and there are some jarringly melodramatic moments, but it has a fine cast giving it their naturalistic best (Karin Viard, Nicolas Duvauchelle, rapper Joeystarr) as well as passion and tenderness in buckets.
One of Cannes's many favourite auteurs is Gus van Sant (French director Pascal Thomas once scathingly described the festival as "an old ladies' tea party, the same old faces talking about the same old thing" ? admittedly, his films never got selected). He returns just as his 2003 Palme d'Or winner Elephant, about a school massacre, is being mirrored by Ramsay's Kevin, but competition regular Gus now finds himself "demoted" to the Un Certain Regard section with Restless, another of his studies of youth and death.
Henry Hopper (son of Dennis) stars with the winsome Mia Wasikowska as a couple of teen loners who meet crashing funeral wakes and memorial services. Out of this quirky premise comes an irritatingly fey romance: he's got an imaginary ghost friend called Hiroshi, she likes drawing tweety birds and owns an Annie Hall-ish array of hats, and also suffers from terminal cancer. The lo-fi indie soundtrack plinks and plonks, the script drifts like a feather in the breeze and only Harris Savides's dreamy cinematography keeps you from turning, well, a bit Elephant on these characters.
Another Cannes hero, Woody Allen, opened this year's festival with Midnight in Paris. One of cinema's inveterate women-worshippers, he is this time more concerned with a male protagonist Gil Pender (Owen Wilson, doing a very decent turn as the "Woody substitute"). Wilson plays a Hollywood script hack with a penchant for golden age nostalgia while on a trip to Paris with his pretty but neurotic wife (Rachel McAdams). Each night, at the stroke of midnight, Gil is magically picked up by a 1920s Peugeot limo and whisked off through time to parties where Hemingway and the Fitzgeralds drink and dance the charleston with Picasso, Dali and Bu�uel.
Allen doesn't bother with portals or talismanic devices. His current style is still to keep things simple, almost unpolished, like a play reading. But set to Sidney Bechet's period-appropriate jazz, the film is always pretty (shot by Darius Khondji, it begins with a touristy colour montage of Paris that invites comparison to Gordon Willis's monochrome work on the opening of Manhattan), playful and, hurrah, funnier than Allen has been for some time while still making neat points about nostalgia and creative and emotional inertia.
It was a light and fruity aperitif ? a white wine for the lady? ? kicking off what looks like being a sparkling and refreshingly forward-looking festival.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/may/15/cannes-festival-roundup-jason-solomons
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