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The sensible question is why anyone would venture to the sunny Riviera in so lovely a month as May to sit in the dark, hour after hour, day after day, days on end. And all of that sitting in the darkness was to find some kind of light, or at least glimmers thereof. Oddly, though, it worked, and then some, though in a very unexpected way. The 2008 Cannes Film Festival lacked any film that flared incandescently in the usual firmament of many really fine films. Instead, the big surprise was the cumulative efflorescence of the whole lot—not only as cinematic dazzle, of which there was plenty, but as a resounding chorus of wonder and praise for one of the more mystifying portions of the human riddle.
Understand, first, that the entries at Cannes came from all over and went everywhere. A young filmmaker from Kazakh-stan, Sergey Dvortsevoy, brought Tulpan, the plainly told story of a young ex-sailor who wants to herd sheep on the barren steppes. From the Philippines came Serbis, a seamy tale of a dilapidated family-run porn house (still sporting, with ham-fisted irony, the huge marquee from its prosperous days, F-A-M-I-L-Y). From Italy came striking crime stories about guns, the mob, and teenage boys (Gomorrah) and guns, the mob, and aging politicians (El Divo). Brazil and Argentina delivered splendid films about hard lives in hard places. The list goes on, more than one can absorb in the ten days, film after film of fresh story and cinematic elegance. There were bad movies too, very bad, ones to walk out on (once), but, ah, the wonder is that so much was so very good—and that so very many, for all their unsortable profusion, went after the same daunting subject matter. There was with startling regularity a resolute, wondrous sort of meditation on the marvel of being human as soul-in-the-flesh—how much we all are somehow, in an ever-strange brew, consciousness and spirit but also fundamentally of and in flesh. Clearly, that is something we've always known, at least in our heads, but we forget easily, or even deny it.
These films grab us by the collar and compel our attention by means of images, or sequences of images, usually wordless. The great Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein thought that with the embrace of sound and dialogue, the medium soon came to neglect the power of the visual image. On the evidence at Cannes, he was unduly pessimistic. The festival was a feast of telling, memorable images, the sort one could hang on the wall as icons of the glory (and bane) of what people are.
A very pregnant woman, nude, showering, the camera in close, dwelling on her distended abdomen, nothing at all soft-focus gauzy about it. For one, she's an inmate, and two, an inmate in the mother's wing of a ramshackle Argentine prison, and there she will birth her child and rear him till age four.
In 1928 Los Angeles, the look on the face of another young mother, strained and uncomprehending, when police present to her a boy who is not her abducted son. They brook no dissent. Unbelievably, it's all true, as in actual history.
In a starkly urban Anywhere, a driver at a traffic signal instantly goes sightless, the viewer seeing the sudden white nothing that he sees. And then everyone goes blind, one by one, stone-white blind.
In San Paulo, a jobless, middle-aged, single mother of four, all by different fathers, with still another on the way, mutters sweet love to her sleeping youngest. When he's awake, she only rails at his very existence.
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