[news, film] Time Magazine: Asian Sweep at Cannes

[AnHai Doan <anhai@cs.washington.edu>]

To you movie fans:

JUNE 2, 1997 VOL.149 NO.22
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

CINEMA

Asian Sweep
Films from Iran and Japan took the big honors at Cannes, but where were
China's top contenders?

BY RICHARD CORLISS/CANNES
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

A Palme d'Or, the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival, is a fine thing to
have. Just ask a man who owns one. Chen Kaige, Chinese director of the 1993
winner Farewell My Concubine, is happy that the study in his Beijing
apartment holds the only Palme d'Or in a country of 1.2 billion people. He
is also pleased to recall the elation he was able to share with a veteran
Chinese filmmaker whom, during the Cultural Revolution, the young Chen had
been forced to denounce publicly: his own father. "After receiving the award
I walked right off the stage and called him," says Chen. "It was late at
night there, but he stayed up to hear the news, good or bad. I didn't even
say hello, I just said, 'I got it.' He went crazy, screaming like a little
boy, my lovely father."

Winning an honor at the world's largest movie bash often turns grown men
into little boys. On last week's closing night of the 50th Cannes Film
Festival, when his name was called as Best Actor for the film She's So
Lovely, Sean Penn raced up to receive the award from French actresses
Emmanuelle Beart and Sandrine Bonnaire. Standing between these two comely
presenters, the famously surly American star wrapped an arm around each
woman's waist and giddily shouted, "I love this country!"

All right, actors are an emotional lot; they're supposed to go crazy when
someone hands them the ego candy of a professional commendation. But what
about a director of rigorous art films in a harshly fundamentalist land?
Abbas Kiarostami, the leading auteur of the improbably blooming Iranian
cinema, is a cool dude whose appearance belies his background: tall and
slim, in Festival-regulation dark glasses, he would look at home with a
beeper by a Beverly Hills swimming pool. When Kiarostami was announced as a
Palme d'Or co-winner for his film The Taste of Cherry, he didn't give thanks
to Allah or the Ayatollah. Instead, he raised his gold-fronded statuette,
beamed a celebrity grin and said, in perfect American English,
"Unbelievable!"

There were few such savory moments in this golden-anniversary Cannes, and
except for Kiarostami's serenely beautiful film, those moments were mostly
off-screen. Off-screen, but on the stage of the Grand Palais auditorium,
where 28 surviving winners of the Palme d'Or gathered in one of the greatest
and most moving arrays of world filmmaking talent ever assembled. Waves of
ecstasy lapped at their feet for 10 minutes. Then came the Palme of Palmes,
chosen by these winners to laud a great director who had never won at
Cannes. That was Ingmar Bergman, who declined to come to the Festival. In
his place, Linn Ullmann, Bergman's daughter by actress Liv Ullmann, read a
statement: "After years and years, life has caught up with me and made me
shy and silent. With honor and humility, I want to say thank you very much."

By definition and default, this Festival was a celebration of cinema's past.
The halls were lined with posters of previous prize winners; more than a
dozen books reflected on the history of this glamorous, contentious Riviera
showcase. You couldn't walk into a hotel without bumping into a Hollywood
star: Travolta, Stallone and De Niro, Robin Williams, Bruce Willis and Demi
Moore. But even they carried the baggage of our movie memories. The
Festival's most exemplary star--because he is the strangest, the sweetest,
the scariest and most self-destructive--was Michael Jackson, in town to
promote an oddly mesmerizing 40-minute film in which he plays all the
important roles, from a cranky middle-aged white man to the spookily
white-faced Michael. The movie was called Ghosts; that word will be the 50th
Festival's defining epithet and epitaph.

Nostalgia soon overwhelmed expectation as the new films unfolded--by and
large a sorry, timid lot, with B-plus directors presenting B-minus works.
Whole continents and once-great national cinemas seem to have vanished.
South America was absent, as were the Eastern European countries, where the
vitality was sapped after the communist bosses left. Unable to lure the big
U.S. summer movies to Cannes, Fest boss Gilles Jacob settled for an
underachieving lot of American independents with pedigree acting talent:
Nick Cassavetes' She's So Lovely (a limping romance with strong turns by
Penn and Travolta) and Johnny Depp's broody, moody, ultimately hooted The
Brave (with a potent guest shot by Marlon Brando). Jacob's most entertaining
choice--the British charmer Love and Death on Long Island, about an English
novelist (John Hurt) who falls in love with the image of an American teen
star (Jason Priestley)--was not even in the main competition. It graced the
secondary showcase called Un Certain Regard.

In a sluggish year for new product, the Asians dominated Cannes as never
before. They took both slots in a shared Palme d'Or: there Kiarostami was
joined by Japan's Shohei Imamura, whose first film in eight years, The Eel,
was a tale of a middle-class murderer's regeneration that verged between the
stately and the ludicrous. Hong Kong's Wong Kar-wai won the Mise-en-scene
(best director) prize for Happy Together, his dazzling, vexing story of two
men whose love makes them miserable. And the Camera d'Or (best first
feature) went to Naomi Kawase for Suzaku, a minimalist epic about a Japanese
village torn apart by isolation, depression and a touch of incest. Even the
Screenplay award, to James Schamus for the U.S.-made family drama The Ice
Storm, represented a sidewise genuflection to that film's Taiwan-born
director, Ang Lee.

So Cannes' golden anniversary turned into a celebration of what has been
clear for years: that Asians have cornered the art-movie market. If there
was a surprise, it was that the Festival Jury, headed by French actress
Isabelle Adjani, chose to straddle the continent, from the newly hip
national cinema of Iran to the seemingly exhausted but now magically
resuscitated film community of Japan. Only one award went officially to any
of the three Chinese film industries--the mainland, Hong Kong and
Taiwan--which have been the focus of the international critics' rapturous
interest. The lackluster Chinese showing was partly due to the typically
suppressive machinations of the Chinese authorities, which had sparked
front-page stories in the West, and whispered scandal at home, long before
the Festival's opening night.

It began in March, when East Palace, West Palace--a delicate, powerfully
played, ultimately conventional chamber film about the grilling of a gay man
by a cop who has arrested him for cruising in a Beijing park--was selected
for Un Certain Regard. Director Zhang Yuan based his script on a news story
about the attempts by a Chinese aids research center to interview gay men.
None was willing to talk, so the research project recruited police to
interrogate gays. "For years the word 'homosexual' didn't exist in China,"
Zhang said in Beijing last week. "It's a vestige of the Cultural Revolution,
which shattered Chinese culture and made feelings taboo. But when I read
that story, my first thought was about the police, not the homosexuals. I
wanted to examine the relationship between power and sex."

Zhang soon discovered, to his regret, the relationship between state power
and independent films. Since East Palace, West Palace was part-funded by the
French finance and culture ministries, the Chinese authorities couldn't stop
its Cannes showing. But they could harass Zhang, who had made the film
without official permission. Under the bizarre pretext that his passport had
been reported missing, they seized Zhang's papers "for safe keeping," thus
preventing him from causing more trouble at the Festival.

But another Chinese film was still in Cannes' main competition: Keep Cool, a
modern comedy from the renowned Zhang Yimou (Raise the Red Lantern, Shanghai
Triad) and the first of his films not to star his former companion Gong
Li--who, to add spice to the stew, was a member of this year's Festival
Jury. Unable to leave bad enough alone, the Beijing censors forced the
withdrawal of Keep Cool two weeks before the Festival. The director
reportedly spent a full day hoping to get an explanation for the film's
rejection. Was he being punished for another man's transgression? Or had
some myopic bureaucrat confused Zhang Yuan and Zhang Yimou? He was told
nothing. Depressed and defeated, he called his old schoolmate and colleague
Chen Kaige and said, "For several reasons I can't explain on the phone, I am
not going to Cannes this year."

To outsiders, the clumsy censuring of China's most acclaimed cultural
exports makes little sense. But to Chinese filmmakers the big picture is
clear. "I understand why the authorities are acting this way," says Chen,
himself a frequent victim of Chinese censorship. "It's the handover of Hong
Kong. Social stability is the first consideration." But there was a
fratricidal element to the censors' decision. As Chen notes, "Some members
of the committee are filmmakers. That's like Martin Scorsese saying he
doesn't like a Francis Ford Coppola movie, so he bans it." Scorsese, who
like Chen was in Cannes being honored as a former Palme d'Or winner,
condemned the ban on the two Zhangs as "an outrage" and said, "The rest of
the world should put pressure on their government." Scorsese has felt the
authorities' pressure first hand: the Walt Disney Co. had been told it might
not to be able to put a theme park in China if it proceeded with plans to
distribute Scorsese's Kundun, a film about Tibet's Dalai Lama. Disney
refused to knuckle under.

Directors on the mainland court danger as if it were an irresistible woman
with a contagious disease. Other filmmakers, no less passionate, have to be
more cautious. Christopher Doyle, the lavishly gifted cinematographer of
Wong Kar-wai's films, says that Zhang Yuan asked him to shoot East Palace,
West Palace. "I told the director I had great respect for the
socio-political-cultural tapestry he was creating," the Australian-born
Doyle recalls with a wry smile, "but I didn't want to get shot. I mean, the
cinema is everything to me--but still, it's only a movie."

Wong and Doyle make "only movies"--exercises in pixillated style, wit and
desperation that lance the heart of today's seen-it-all young people, in
Hong Kong and around the world. Happy Together is a longtime-companion piece
to Days of Being Wild, Wong's 1991 drama of alienated love that starred
Leslie Cheung and Tony Leung Chiu-wai. Here, Cheung and Leung play gay men
stranded together in Buenos Aires, alternately arousing and annoying each
other, falling out of love and back in. Happy Together begins with the two
naked men in a bout of anal sex so rambunctious that the film earned a
Category III (adults only) rating in Hong Kong. Wong has a suggestion for
those who "have a problem with gays. They should come in a bit late. Then
maybe they think it's a story about two brothers."

That's not likely, since Happy Together makes explicit the homoerotic
bonding of all those Heroic Bloodshed films, the John Woo and Ringo Lam
action epics of Hong Kong's recent past. When the two men--Leslie, as always
the luscious Prince of Pout, and the easily exasperated Tony--aren't arguing
in their cramped flat, they are folding themselves into each other for
shelter from the storm within. The film is full of pathetic hugs and sweet
cuddles. The lovers share cigarettes, sponge baths, tango dances and one
fabulous kiss in the kitchen. Eventually Leslie walks out, and Tony finds
friendship with a young Taiwanese cook. They shake hands, then hug, in
Wong's trademark slow motion, and the young man whispers (on the
soundtrack), "All I could hear was my heart beating. Could he hear it too?"
A new tango is beginning.

At times the film trails off into rancor and repetition--following the curve
of any real affair--but it always engages the eye. Wong and Doyle, who shot
the 1995 Fallen Angels with a wide-angle lens, bring heat to wintry Buenos
Aires with a gorgeously garish palette. The Kodachrome oranges and
petrochemical sunsets make the film look as if it had been printed on
ancient nitrate stock about to catch fire. Why the shift in style? Because
Wong and Doyle are restless artists; and because elements of their earlier
films have been swiped by so many Hong Kong, Korean and Japanese directors.
"So we went to a place we'd never been," says Wong, "and touched on a
subject we hadn't dealt with before." Wong had also hoped that, by trekking
to a different hemisphere on the other side of the world, he could avoid
thinking about Hong Kong 1997. "It turned out that, wherever I go, I carry
Hong Kong with me. Happy Together has an optimistic ending but, in terms of
the impending handover," Wong says, "the film seems more like a wish than an
answer."

Wong's movies move at a city pace, streaking past in agitated syncopation.
Kiarostami's films have a rural tempo, more leisurely but no less acute;
they are stories told by a wise old man in a village square. The plot of The
Taste of Cherry is one such moral tale, unfolding mostly in real time, late
on a spring afternoon. A middle-aged fellow named Badii drives around Tehran
looking for someone who will do a little job for a lot of money. In turn he
takes three men (a young soldier, an Afghan seminarian and a museum curator)
for a ride in his Range Rover. Stopping on a hillside, Badii points to a
tree and proposes that the man come back to this spot the following morning
at six. There he will find Badii in a ditch. The man is to call out Badii's
name and, if there is a response, pull him out. If not--if Badii has indeed
died from the dose of sleeping pills he plans to take--the man is to cover
him with 20 shovelsful of dirt. For this job the pay will be 200,000 tomans.

Kiarostami, best known abroad for his poignant Through the Olive Trees,
keeps his new film starkly allusive--we never learn, for example, why Badii
wants to kill himself--and shoots it in a tone of majestic simplicity. Most
of The Taste of Cherry takes place in the front seat of the Range Rover, as
Badii (Homayoun Ershadi) searches for his burier or chats with the uneasy
candidates for this profane and sacred task. The actors playing these
characters rarely met; instead, they talked with the director as he sat
beside them and filmed them. Yet there's no estrangement. The conversation
flows persuasively, and in time each couple forms a small community as
intimate and edgy as the world of the lovers in Happy Together.

The film pulses with art and heart--and with audacity as well, considering
that it was made in a country whose ruling clerics forbid suicide as a
violation of God's law. For a few weeks in April, the picture was threatened
with withdrawal from the Festival. Finally Tehran allowed Kiarostami to
bring this work to Cannes. It is surely the most stringent verdict on the
Chinese film authorities that they are less enlightened, and less savvy
about world opinion, than the Iranians.

Kiarostami has called A Taste of Cherry an affirmation of life, which the
film, like any vital work of art, surely is. But it is also an affirmation
of death. It looks at a man at the end of his rope, at the end of a brutal
century, in a nation that stands accused of subsidizing terrorism, perhaps
also at a period in world cinema that seems lost in violent sensation. And
with sympathy and acuity, it dramatizes one man's belief that he has the
right to say, "Enough."

--With reporting by Jeffrey Ressner/Cannes and Amy Wu/ Hong Kong

-----------------------------------------------------------------------