Day: May 22, 2010

Manohla Dargis‘s 5.20 N.Y. Times piece (“World Events Rumble at Cannes”) reminded me of a statement made by Certified Copy director Abbas Kiarostami during a press conference for his film, in which he commented about imprisoned Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi.

Kiarostami said that explanations were

necessary if the Iranian government continued to imprison Panahi “because he did not understand how a film could be considered a crime.”

Such sentiments always seem strained and almost theatrical to me. Kiarostami surely knows that with a repressive and belligerent government like Iran’s, all notions of what is criminal or legal are entirely subjective and outside the bounds of written law. On top of which all powerful, persuasive art is usually subversive in one way or another, and tends to breed skepticism, and is therefore anti-authoritarian. Which is something that every ugly-thug regime has always understood.

So why ask a rational question about the actions or motives of I’m-a-dinner-jacket and the clerical Al Capones running the show in Tehran?

The Cannes Film Festival’s 2010 awards ceremony happens tomorrow tonight, so I suppose I’m obliged to speculate about the winners. What I’d like to do, for the first time in several months, is take a day off and just ride my rented scooter around town and pretty much blank out and eat gelato. But as long as I’ve begun this…

I’m half-foreseeing and am therefore predicting a Palme d’Or win for Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu‘s Biutiful. If this happens all of the nip-nippers who launched a hate campaign against this film will be obliged to once again consider a familiar equation, which is that one way or another brilliant dweebs will always find some way of taking down any film that traffics in strong emotion, as Biutiful clearly does, because dweebs aren’t as comfortable with this as they could be. This has been observed time and again so let’s not have a big hoo-hah about it.

I suspect that Fair Game, for all its expertness in so many departments, will lose out to Biutiful because the Inarritu is more pained and impassioned and daring.

If Mike Leigh‘s Another Year wins the Palme d’Or, it’ll be considered a so-whatter. Leigh is a master filmmaker who knows exactly how to finesse his own realm, and he will always be respected and feted for being, among other things, a major Cannes brand.

The dweebs loved Abbas Kiarostami‘s Certified Copy — a very elegant film about almost nothing — but there will be much international forehead-slapping if it wins the Palme d’Or.

Copy costar Juliette Binoche, however, may win the Best Actress prize. I don’t know to what extent fate is behind the prospect of Yun Jung-hee‘s performance in Lee Chang-dong‘s Poetry taking this award, or if Lesley Manville has any shot at winning for her performance in Another Year.

Bertrand Tavernier‘s The Princess of Montpensier was pretty much dead among the press in the wake of its a.m. press screening a few days ago, and I can’t imagine the Tim Burton-led Cannes jury selecting it for anything.

I was saying right away that Biutiful‘s Javier Bardem looks like a strong contender for Best Actor; Sean Penn‘s Fair Game performance as Joe Wilson is a strong competitor, of course, but Barden’s turn is more anguished and operatic.