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 cannes 2004 roundup: part two
Eastern promise masks the festival’s anti-climax. Now that the red carpets have been rolled up, the billboards stripped down and the tuxedos folded away, some small perspective is gained on Cannes 2004. While jury don, Quentin Tarantino, energetically denied Michael Moore’s anti-Bush documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 was a political choice for the top prize in an American election year, fellow juror, Brit Tilda Swinton, joked that Bush should have got a prize for best comedic performance. All very controversial in the sealed film universe, but the question hangs - is anyone in Middle America really going to care? 2046 Other contenders for the Palme D’Or were rife with disappointment. Wong Kar Wai’s unfinished 2046, which was years in the making, still felt incomplete and baffled critics as much as it provided a visual turn on. Tarantino’s rumoured personal fave, ultraviolent South Korean shoot- em-up/pull-their-teeth-out/cut-their-tongues-off thrill ride, Oldboy, which nabbed the Grand Prix, was certainly an acquired taste. And the fact that Walter Salles’ beautiful and earnestly made The Motorcycle Diaries was largely ignored raised eyebrows even further into hairlines.  Walter Salles' Motorcycle Diaries Better now to think back on some of the films that deservedly caught attention. Getting a special mention for political content alongside The Motorcycle Diaries and Fahrenheit 9/11, Machuca was one film that earned its revolutionary stripes. This Chilean buddy film about kids from opposite sides of the tracks, set in the year Pinochet came to power, filtered its politics through the fragmented understanding of 11-year-olds, and felt alive with a sense of time and place.  Machuca and Somersault Another mesmerising coming of age movie came from the opposite side of the globe, Australian Cate Shortland’s existential black fairy tale, Somersault. Following lost-girl heroine Heidi through the half-light between adolescent sexual confusion and grown-up acceptance, this is a teen film that finally gets everything right. Katsuhito Ishii – the man responsible for the animated sequences in Kill Bill: Vol 1 – opened the director’s fortnight with the sorely underrated The Taste Of Tea. A part-animated story of an offbeat Japanese family that showed off a similar imaginative haemorrhaging to the director’s inspirational touchstone, Spirited Away. This was a blissed-out two and a half hours of gentle Japanese whimsy.  The House Of Flying Daggers The festival’s one point of consensus, House Of Flying Daggers, screened to a background soundtrack of constant riotous applause. Starring Chinese “it” girl Zhang Ziyi, Daggers’ period piece martial arts, mixed with a story of unrequited love, raised kung fu movie status to even greater heights. An early action sequence where Zhang swordfights using the folds of her robe was so beautiful it felt like time had stopped.
Skye Sherwin
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