CANNES, FRANCE?The movie mood at Cannes this year was bleak, mirroring concerns sweeping the world.
Of the 22 films competing for Cannes? precious Palme d?Or to be awarded on Sunday, only six stuck strictly outside the boundaries of the socially relevant to focus on the strictly personal.
Poverty, rape, organized crime, political corruption, police bungling, and how history deals with such issues?all came under the cinematic spotlight during the 12-day orgy of film from May 14 to 25.
Setting the tone for the 2008 reality bites, the world?s largest cinema showcase offered the red-carpet opening to a film highlighting a near-apocalypse and a government?s inability to deal with a disaster??Blindness? by Fernando Meirelles.
?It?s as if civilization was built on a thin layer of ice that could crack at any moment,? Meirelles said as images of Asia?s devastating disasters traveled the world. ?It?s a metaphor on all the ills of the 20th century.?
As the following films rolled out one-by-one with a hard-hitting dark look at life, rain-clouds hovered, business was slow for the 10,000 industry types in town, and drug- and assault-tainted celebs grabbed the headlines.
Relentlessly grim
The films were ?pretty relentlessly grim,? said Kirk Honeycutt, chief critic at Hollywood Reporter. ?For a lot of us critics, it?s been a tough way to go.?
The struggle of a single mother battling to recover a snatched child was dramatized in Clint Eastwood?s hotly awaited thriller ?The Exchange,? as well as in a gripping Argentine tale set in a women?s prison, ?Lion?s Den? by Pablo Trapero.
A graphic rape scene of a girl by her mother?s lover featured in Hungary?s ?Delta,? while ?Serbis? from the Philippines played out the sleazy goings-on at a gay porn movie theater in poverty-struck Manila.
Significantly, a hot ticket for the top prize came in documentary format, an animated antiwar Israeli movie, ?Waltz With Bashir,? in which the director seeks out the truth about Beirut?s 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacres, with a little help from Sigmund Freud.
In fact, nonfiction seemed all the rage at Cannes 2008?either as authentic documentary, or make-believe fictionalized documentary.
One of the most-awaited movies, ?Che? by ?Ocean?s? director Steven Soderbergh, was a case in point.
Casting Oscar-winner Benicio Del Toro as the revolutionary hero, backed by an all-star Latin American cast, Soderbergh dished up a marathon clocking up four hours plus that was meticulously researched over nine years and shot and edited to hit the screen as a documentary look-alike.
France?s most warmly received entry ?The Class? used a real teacher and young nonprofessional actors in a film on life in a Paris schoolroom.
Like Soderbergh, Italy?s two acclaimed entries on the mafia and political corruption (?Gomorrah? and ?Il Divo?) were fiction films made over as fact-finders.
In ?24 City,? a well-received documentary on China?s fast pace of change seen through 50 years in the life of an aeronautics company, director Zia Zhangke took another option?throwing in a few actors to pepper up his interviews with real-life workers.
Documentaries on VIPs
High on the must-see list of films featured at Cannes this year too were documentaries on the rise and fall of sporting icons Diego Maradona and Mike Tyson, as well as filmmaker Roman Polanski?VIPs associated with drugs, assault and illicit sex.
And taking time for a spot of navel-gazing reassessment of its own, the festival chose to close the event on Sunday with a satire about the film industry by Barry Levinson that includes a hilarious send-up of the Cannes film fest.
