<p>We continue into the 63rd Cannes Film Festival, and in this second part we will look both forwards and slightly backwards. As the Abu Dhabi Film Festival highlights this year's contenders for the Palme d'Or, it might interest you to discover those films and filmmakers who left their mark during each decade here in Cannes.</p>
<p>Although the Festival was inaugurated in 1939 and stumbled through its initial years, it was not until 1949 and the third official edition that the jury in Cannes unanimously honored only one film. The Grand Prix (then the Festival's highest prize until the creation of the Palme d'Or in 1955) was awarded to The Third Man [click on the bolded titles to view trailers or excerpts]. It was remarkable in that the film was based on Graham Greene's murder mystery, set in contemporary post-war Vienna, directed by an Englishman called Carol Reed, photographed by an Australian named Robert Krasker and produced by a Hungarian known as Alexander Korda, with a pan-European cast including Alida Valli and two very notable Americans of the time, Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten. The international festival was on its way up now, and it embraced a truly international film that was both timely and classic. You now have the names of the important players and the title of the film so all that re
mains is for you to discover a terrific experience called The Third Man.</p>
<p>Now we go forwards and find Alejandro Gonzlez Irritu's Biutiful, which is competing for the Palme d'Or, in all its unflinching power and lyricism. It is the film to most look forward to, and as expected it was given a very warm welcome in Cannes. Irritu and his team have conceived a complex tale of corruption that lays bare our ability to use the disease of hate and the strength with which forgiveness can rescue our wounded soul. Irritu's previous picture Babel (2006) was also a hard-hitting pulse in Cannes with its story spread across several countries, languages and plots, but in Biutiful he and the actor Javier Bardem focus exclusively on one character. Bardem delivers the role of Uxbal, a devoted father and underground businessman, with such quiet perfection that it is absolutely dazzling to behold. He carries the film in each and every scene with immense talent and subtlety. The father-of-two learns he is dying and sets about trying to put everything right in his life
before he passes away. What he does for a living is to hire out illegal immigrants, but unlike the people he deals them over to, Uxbal cares about what becomes of them. In that way he tries to do a group of illegal Chinese workers some good, but instead he ends up with blood on his hands and an extremely guilty conscience. Uxbal can communicate with souls of the recently deceased in a spiritual way, and he is called upon by others to ease the transition of their loved ones to the next life. It is this understanding of death that makes him confront what is happening to his body, while still helping mourners with their own grief. The film creates an unforgettable portrait of a flawed man through incidents and moments that will leave you wanting to revisit the film again and again. It is a whole picture that delves into the human condition fearlessly. The film is a much-needed discovery.</p>
<p>Everyone is looking for a breakthrough film and that is what will make it challenging for the jury this year. Each Competition film so far has its share of admirers and has offered something wonderful for audiences. For example, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun's film A Screaming Man is extraordinary (like his prior theatrical feature, Dry Season [2006]) both in that it comes from Chad and that it is such a modest picture. This drama set in a war-torn society, severely crippled by an oppressive past and violent present, is extremely worthy of an audience anywhere in the world. It complements the theme of fathers struggling with parenthood that at least two other pictures in competition (Biutiful, Chongqing Blues) are dealing with by capturing the inner conflicts of being a father with confronting rather chilling truths. In Chongqing Blues (from Sixth Generation Chinese director Wang Xiaoshuai, internationally most known for Beijing Bicycle [2001]) we find a sea captain who comes back
from a long journey to discover that local police shot dead his 25-year-old son after he had taken hostages in a local mall. His efforts to learn more about the case take him on a journey through and across a distant city that is as unreadable and transformed as his estranged child. Its modernity leaves him alienated, and the focus on dislocation digs deep into a parent's mental and physical condition that is burning slowly on the inside.</p>
<p>British documentary-maker Lucy Walker - whose preceding film Waste Land (2009) is just starting to make the rounds - journeyed to Cannes to present a special screening of her most recent work, Countdown to Zero, which delves into the ubiquity of nuclear weapons and the terrifying amount of unaccounted for weapons-grade material that terrorists would love to get their hands on. The film is successful in reviving the subject matter and takes you completely off guard when it shows you how simple it would be to make a nuclear bomb with the right materials available. It is fascinating in the way that it considers how real a legitimate attack by an accident could be in our present times. It delivers startling facts such as that we came closer to nuclear war in 1995, when the Soviets had gravely mistaken a Norwegian scientific research rocket for a U.S. attack, than we did during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. The Soviet generals marched into President Boris Yeltsin's office with
the strike codes and had Yeltsin followed protocol there would have been an immediate retaliatory attack. Inexplicably, he simply refused to believe the situation and the crisis passed. Walker exposes the way major cities are vulnerable to potential nuclear calamity and argues that to protect ourselves from another atomic devastation we need the world to eliminate all nuclear arsenals.</p>
<p>Among the modern masters of cinema alive and working today is Jean-Luc Godard, who comes to Cannes this year with Film Socialism, allegedly his final film. If you have not heard of Jean-Luc Godard then here is a recap: in the spring of 1959, Claude Chabrol's Le Beau Serge, Franois Truffaut's The 400 Blows and Alain Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour are released and fire the first salvo of the French New Wave cinema. In March 1960, Godard's Breathless is a tremendous sensation. He was probably the first director in the history of cinema to have entirely done away with the plotline and created iconoclastic films from a collage of story, newsreel, reportage, quotations, allusions and direct interviews, all of which concern his characters in contemporary times. Godard is now nearly 80 years of age and still reinventing cinema as only he can. He has been synonymous with cinema for so long that when the film showed in Cannes this week the entire Debussy auditorium was jam-packed. Go
dard's film did not need to find itself an audience because they had already found the picture and were ready for this latest offering to deliver them something radical and new. The film occurs in three various sections that continue his trend of pushing the complex relations between sound and image, and it is a kind of delicious film experience that Godard enjoys partaking in with an audience. There are scenes that take place on a cruise ship juxtaposing gorgeous images of the sea with the banalities of life on the ship. There are other sections that visit places including Egypt, Palestine, Odessa, Greece, Naples and Barcelona. Languages are interspersed with each other; tricks are played with competing soundtracks; clips from classic movies flash by at strange moments to perhaps illustrate a point being made; the off-screen space is used as part of a running commentary - all of these create a patchwork that remains distant throughout the film's running time. Watching it se
nds the mind on an expedition through ancient history, entertainment, industry and ideologies to simply get you re-thinking about everything as a form of exercise. Godard puts forth an array of ideas very creatively through this essay film and invites you along on a voyage through humanity. As if winking at the audience, Film Socialism closes with large block letters: NO COMMENT.
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