On location in the French Riviera, GAUTAMAN BHASKARAN reports from the 60th Festival de Cannes.

OFTEN, the Cannes Film Festival sparkles not so much for its cinema as it does for its newsmakers. Three years ago in 2004, when Bush basher and documaker Michael Moore came to the French Riviera with Fahrenheit 9/11, he caused enough fire and heat to make the American President uneasy across the Atlantic. When the jury crowned Moore with the Golden Palm, it seemed like the French were gleefully agreeing with the helmer’s view of all that was wrong with America’s First Man.

Mr Moore is not one to rest on his laurels, and three years is long enough for him to have digested (and burped) Cannes’ glorious Palm. This year, the man is back with his latest attack on Bush’s land. Called Sicko, Moore’s documentary is a powerful indictment of the U.S. healthcare system, revealing how it helps a few rich at the expense of many. The movie pans from humour to sorrow to outright anger as it compares the medical care in America with that of other countries.

At the May 19 Press meet at Cannes, Moore urged for “action” and said that the Bush Government’s attempt at charging him with an illegal trip to Cuba was a pathetic ploy to divert and distract people’s attention from a real and pressing issue. Employing his standard narrative style of poor David being crushed by the mighty Goliath, Moore also blamed American insurance and pharmaceutical companies of being hand in glove with the Bush administration. “What has happened to us as a people,” he asked. “Where is our soul?”

One criticism against Sicko is that it paints a very rosy picture of the healthcare in countries such as Canada, Britain, France and Cuba, models that the director uses to compare the U.S. system. That may be, but Moore’s work can neither be underestimated or ignored. However, I sometimes wish that the gentleman would let his work do the talking rather than himself.


The Dubai International Film Festival and the Abu Dhabi International Film Festival have brought their fight to the French Riviera. Abu Dhabi officials, including royal family member Sheikh Sultan bin Tahnoon al Nahyan, are at Cannes to announce the creation of a new festival that will run in the second half of October. This is being planned to rival the Dubai Festival, which opened in December 2004. Said to be far richer than Dubai, Abu Dhabi with its enormous natural wealth is all set to eclipse the older festival. And, sadly Dubai has run into problems with its Director, Neil Stephenson, being “sacked”. He has vowed the take the Festival authorities to court. Will Dubai sink, and Abu Dhabi rise?


That great French actress, Juliette Binoche, will now illuminate Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami’s next work, The Certified Copy. Lensing will begin this October on a script written by Kiarostami – the story of an art gallery owner (Binoche) who enjoys a brief encounter with a middle-aged English writer at an art conference. The picture is set near Florence in Italy.


Sometimes, I wonder whether filmmakers forget that their audiences just might be intelligent. There have been several examples at Cannes. David Fincher’s Hollywood thriller, Zodiac, is a well executed, gripping movie that is based on an American serial killer who first struck on July 4, 1969 in a secluded lovers’ lane in Vallejo, Calif. He walks up to a parked car and shoots the occupants. The woman certainly dies, but her male friend is shown wounded. We do not know whether he ultimately survives.

The serial killings go on for decades, with the murderer sending periodic teaser-letters to the police and newspapers. A crime reporter, an editorial cartoonist (because of the cipher in the letters) and a police officer become obsessed with the crime and the criminal, and their lifelong search for the elusive man goes in vain.

But as the film progresses from frame to frame, one thing is clear. There are at least two eyewitnesses; one of them certainly lives, and I fail to understand why the investigation team never uses them to identify the killer from the suspects.

Ultimately, the cartoonist carries on the probe, the police officer and the reporter having called it a day, and when he is about to bring the guilty to book, the guy dies of a heart attack.

Fincher – who grew up in San Francisco’s Bay Area – was aware of the killer, known as Zodiac, and he translates his fears and imagination into a visually absorbing film. Harris Savides’ digital photography aids Fincher’s work in bringing back the texture and colour palettes of the late 1960s and the early 1970s.


Kim Ki-duk’s Breath is yet another Competition entry that relies on a weak script that is unbelievable to the core. We see a married woman visiting a man on death row and pretending to be his ex-lover. It is only vaguely clear that she is unhappy in her marriage and finds a way to shock and anger her husband. She manages to have a private meeting with the prisoner with a guard in supervision. While the two freely have sex in the room that the woman decorates with bright wallpaper conveying seasons, the guard stands there watching the fun. Do prisons allow this? I am not sure, and Breath leaves other questions unanswered. Why does the prisoner play along? How does the woman’s husband, who finds out about his wife’s visits to the jail, seem so tolerant? These questions remain unanswered.


The Festival celebrated its 60th birthday in style by presenting a movie – To Each His Own Cinema – where 35 directors each contributed a three-minute film. The compilation was conceived and produced by the Festival President, Gilles Jacob, and it was indeed a wonderful attempt at looking at cinema, and only cinema. The auteurs were asked to express “their state of mind of the moment as inspired by the motion picture theatre”. They were all well known on the Croisette, with many Golden Palm winners among them.

Most directors visualised the end of the old film theatre. Men like Takeshi Kitano, Theo Angelopoulos and Hou Hsiao-Hsien showed how cinema was losing its value and importance. One noticed an immense sorrow at the disappearance of old Euro-style art cinema.

This is one of the best compilations I have ever seen. Every short was engaging, and had that little touch of the mysterious. Walter Salles’ Brazilian entry showed a group of musicians singing outside a rundown theatre screening Francois Truffaut’s 400 Blows. They talk about what it is like to be at Cannes, and quip that the Fest is run by some “Gil”. David Cronenberg appears in person in his own intense piece about the last Jew in the world, in the last cinema in the world. Kitano contributes a brilliant short about a solitary hall in the middle of nowhere whose sole occupant, an old man, gets to see a movie in fits and starts.