By the time you read this the Cannes Film Festival will be finished, with only one or two minor administrative discrepancies left to be sorted out - for instance, who won. We find all that out tonight. At the time of writing there are still a couple of competition films to be unveiled, notably Exodus, Nikita Mahalkov's sequel to his feted Stalin-era drama Burnt by the Sun. But in the main competition, the field has changed since midweek. Another few Palme d'Or contenders have emerged, notably an opposing, or perhaps complementary, pair of Franco-Algerian themed films.
Xavier Beauvois's Des Hommes et des Dieux tells the story of a group of Cistercian monks who in 1996 refused to leave Algeria amid reports of growing violence. They were kidnapped and murdered, but not, on the evidence of this historical hagiography, before making some brave speeches. A solid and serious bit of filmmaking by most accounts, though not a greatly inventive one. Alternatively, there's the more daring option of Rachid Bouchareb's Hors la Loi, which has already caused controversy on France's touchy right wing for tackling the subject of the Algerian resistance movement during the 1950s. Indeed, the Palais des Festivals has had a special security detail in order to head off the possibility of any unpleasantness during its screenings.
That didn't stop the film's star and co-producer Jamel Debbouze joking: "When you see Rachid Bouchareb come along, a lot of people are afraid. They think it might be al Qa'eda." The new film reunites the cast of Bouchareb's previous Cannes hit Indigenes, which was itself an incendiary treatment of France's treatment of its Algerian troops during the post-war Liberation. As Debbouze noted: "It's a new experience every time and we never emerge unscathed from it."
The other outside contender is Gonzalez Innaritu's Biutiful, his first feature since a messy professional break-up with his longtime screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga. It's a new era for the director and thankfully that means a new approach to narrative structure: gone is the fractured chronology and everything-is-connected chin-stroking of his previous films, Babel, Amores Perros and 21 Grams. Instead we get a fairly straightforward story of Javier Bardem as a small-time hood with psychic powers and exceptionally rotten luck. Indeed, there are few contexts outside of Inarritu's reliably dour vision in which prostate cancer could be described as the icing on the cake. In the midst of shakedowns, family betrayals and the persistent buzz-kill of seeing dead people, a terminal diagnosis is almost reassuring - a lighted exit sign at the end of a very dark tunnel. One American reporter told me he'd already been to see the film twice and only feared that the jury might simply find it too depressing for the Palme d'Or. Too depressing for the Palme d'Or, I thought, wonderingly.
The one American effort on the competition slate, Fair Game, an account of the CIA agent Valerie Plame's outing by the US government over the WMD controversy, has met an enthusiastic response that should gratify its backers at Abu Dhabi's Imagenation. The film is a very long shot for the prize because brisk American dramas with good commercial prospects don't tend to win much at Cannes. Still, the role of the unflappable Plame marks a happy departure for Naomi Watts, who admitted: "A lot of the material I've been drawn to in the past has been about women in some kind of psychosis. Ahem, since David Lynch." You can take the girl out of Mullholland Drive ...
Fair Game should also boost the reputation of its director Doug Liman. As one reporter said at the film's press conference: "It seems incongruous that the Jumper guy would make a film of this calibre." Liman, whose credits include Swingers and The Bourne Identity as well as the execrated sci-fi flick mentioned above, took the comment in good part. "This film is a step up for me," he admitted. But he insisted that it was what he had been trying to do all along - "to try to come up with films that are both entertaining and meaningful." The Bourne Identity was supposed to be based on the Iran-Contra affair. "Nobody got it," he said glumly. When he started making the popular TV drama The OC, "I said I'm going to hook a bunch of teens in America and then I'm going to start dealing with serious issues like immigration reform. And Fox said: no you're not." It's enough to make you feel rather sorry for him, if Jumpers isn't too fresh in your memory.
Cannes prizes are tricky to predict at the best of times, and the Un Certain Regard section, to which most of the really peculiar efforts are relegated, can be especially flukey. Still, one film in that part of the slate does look destined for recognition at the Oscars if not here. Derek Cianfrance's extraordinarily raw romantic drama Blue Valentine stars Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams as a young couple getting together and then falling apart, and it should be a shoe-in for a pair of Best Acting nominations.
The director calls it a "duet" between past and present, and that's just what it is: the beginning and end of the marriage are told in alternating segments. Apparently its development had a similarly fraught relationship with time. Cianfrance had been trying to get the thing made for 12 years. Williams and Gosling had been attached for six and three years respectively; the script went through 67 drafts; Cianfrance initially wanted to shoot the two time-frames with an actual seven-year hiatus between them, and given the film's monstrous gestation time, he probably could have done.
"You know, everything Derek does is kind of slow," Gosling told an industry panel at the American Pavilion on Thursday. "He leaves you a message and he sounds like the big guy from Boyz II Men ... He makes a soup that he calls all-day soup." "The longer it cooks, the better it tastes," Cianfrance retorted.
Striking a more serious note were the hardships that the Iranian director Jafar Panahi is facing at the hands of the Iranian government, of course. Panahi was asked to sit on one of the prize juries at the festival but, both then and at the present time of writing, he was in jail for allegedly working on an anti-regime film. Earlier in the week it emerged that he had started a hunger strike. A group of Iranian directors came to Cannes to speak out for the director and the cause of freedom in Iran. I asked Mohsen Makhmalbaf and Bahman Ghobadi, both celebrated independent filmmakers in their own right, to describe the significance of Panahi's career.
"He's one of the important people for the New Wave of Iranian cinema," Makhmalbaf said, "and he's very serious for supporting democracy in Iran. He's not only a filmmaker. He has enough heart to support the society of Iran." He noted out that Panahi's films were themselves powerful political statements. "For example The Circle, that was in Venice, it was talking about the secret life of Iranian people under the pressure of dictatorship, and what is going on in the night, what is going on for the women, how much Iranian people are under the pressure of this situation."
On the other hand, Ghobadi told me, "he has said a lot, but you can't see all the braveness in his films. Jafar was very brave and stood up and talked in public to the government and the media, and as you can see he is still standing up and is not going to take any short-cut." Ghobadi feared that Panahi would see his hunger strike to the bitter end. "If this person dies the regime will be satisfied but we know there is not going to be another Jafar."
"We are planning to ask Iranian people to have a festival of Jafar Panahi in their houses," Makhmalbaf said. "In many Iranian houses you can find a minimum of one of his films." On Friday evening the New York Times reported that Panahi had been granted a bail hearing. If that went ahead, he might have been released just as this paper was going to press.
