This year's Cannes Film Festival has been marked by history-spanning visions of anti-establishment activism and popular revolt. The tone was set early on by British director Ken Loach's The Wind That Shakes the Barley, the first film to screen in the official competition and, as the festival enters its final stretch, still one of the strongest. Set in Ireland in the early 1920s, it's about the struggle for Irish independence from England and the early days of the IRA, as ordinary young men take up arms against the occupying "Black and Tan" forces. The film's central figure is a young medical student (played brilliantly by Cillian Murphy) who puts his career on hold in order to join the fight, only to eventually find himself pitted against his own brother, who begins the film as an idealistic freedom fighter but ends up having his ideals softened by compromise. Loach, of course, is something of an idealist himself, and like all of his best films, this one is awash in scenes of people on opposing sides of an issue arguing their respective cases so passionately that we are left with no choice but to examine where out own loyalties lie. But The Wind That Shakes the Barley is equally a gripping, Melville-like thriller in which bands of men in dark coats and wool caps move stealthily through the grassy highlands, plotting their subversive actions and dispensing with traitors swiftly and mercilessly.

This is the second historical film made by Loach — who's better known for his chronicles of contemporary working-class life — following 1995's masterful Land and Freedom, which told of a Liverpool Communist who goes off to fight in the Spanish Civil War. In both cases, Loach's interest lies less in the past per se than in what we might learn from it, lest we be doomed to repeat it. And to that end, in its discussion of the seeds of terrorism, of centrism at odds with extremism, and of political interests placed ahead of human ones, The Wind That Shakes the Barley may be the most relevant film screening in Cannes in 2006.

In Richard Linklater's Fast Food Nation, the war at home isn't about land rights, but rather our daily bread. Adapted by Linklater and Erich Schlosser from the latter's best-selling non-fiction tome, the film is a muckraking expose of the meatpacking industry that suggests all too little has changed in the 100 years since Upton Sinclair published The Jungle. Greg Kinnear stars as the marketing executive for a barely fictionalized fast-food giant — Mickey's Burgers — whose discovery of fecal content in the company's meat sets him on an investigative odyssey that leads to a Colorado slaughterhouse and a blunt cattle supplier who calmly advises Kinnear that, in life, we all have to eat a little shit. (That said supplier is played by Bruce Willis only furthers the film's connection to the animated Over the Hedge, also screening in Cannes and starring Willis as a wily raccoon who promotes the virtues of junk food over organic.)

To an extent, Fast Food Nation seems the work of a conflicted revolutionary. Like Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock before him, Linklater wants to open Americans' eyes to institutional corruption within our borders, but he's also resigned to the near impossibility of causing widespread change in a society that believes what it doesn't know (or chooses to ignore) can't hurt it. As many have suggested, the movie is also baggy and shapeless, crammed with too many characters jockeying for not enough screen time — watching it, you get the feeling that Fast Food Nation may have begun life as a more sprawling, Altmanesque epic that gradually got whittled down to a conventional length. But what's here is still a duly scabrous portrait of a country moving (and eating) too fast for its own good, and also a Western of sorts, about those vanishing amber waves of grain and the shopping malls and chain stores being erected in their stead.

Ironically, the film in this year's Cannes competition that many expected to be the most politically incendiary turns out to be not so very political at all. Directed by the gifted Italian director Nanni Moretti, The Caiman is the humorous tale of a beleaguered schlock movie producer (the wonderful, hangdog-faced Sylvio Orlando) who pins his comeback hopes on a spec script about a corrupt, charismatic entrepreneur who manages to become Prime Minister of Italy. Only later does the producer realize that the script is actually a thinly-veiled portrait of Sylvio Burlusconi. From there, The Caiman turns into a whirligig farce that may qualify as Moretti's most complex juggling act to date, juxtaposing scenes from the producer's personal and professional lives against scenes from the movie-within-the-movie and actual news footage of Burlusconi at his most absurd (including the infamous incident in which he advised a German parliamentary leader to audition for the role of a kapo in a film about the Holocaust).

Moretti, who has sometimes been called the "Italian Woody Allen," and who won the Palme d'Or in Cannes in 2001 for his melancholic family drama The Son's Room, has been making his contempt for Burlusconi public since at least as far back as his 1998 diary film, Aprile. But given the torrent of Fahrenheit 9/11-style hype that has attended The Caiman since its March opening in Italy — where its release was timed to coincide with the national elections that ultimately ousted Burlusconi from office — the surprising thing about the film is that it's not really very much about Burlusconi at all. Which maybe isn't such a big surprise. Rather, like just about every movie Moretti has made since his aptly-titled shot-on-Super-8 feature-debut, I Am Self-Sufficient, The Caiman is a wry and deeply personal comedy about the struggle to be a good husband, father, artist, citizen and generally well-rounded human being. And at that, The Caiman succeeds so well that it's inexplicable why Moretti, in the final reel, turns up the anti-Burlusconi rhetoric to such a stifling, Moore-like degree that you leave the theater feeling as though someone has been chiseling anarchist propaganda on to your skull.

The counter-cultural sentiments in Cannes have hardly been limited to the movie screens. On the streets, a delegation of Korean filmmakers (including the brilliant actor Choi Min-Sik, who starred in the Cannes award-winning films OldBoy and Chiwhaseon) has been protesting the increasing efforts of the American film industry, via the MPAA, to reduce or eliminate the quota system that currently prevents Hollywood films from completely monopolizing Korean cinemas. In the months since I first wrote about the quote dilemma in my report from the 2005 Pusan International Film Festival, the Korean government caved to U.S. pressures and agreed to reduce the number of calendar days that Korean cinemas must screen locally-produced movies from 146 to 73, prompting MPAA president Dan Glickman to comment: "We look forward to the opportunity to compete on a fairer basis with the growing Korean industry." And as Korea enters into Free Trade talks with the U.S., there are widespread fears in the local film industry that the quota could become further endangered. Evidently, where Hollywood's domination of the global entertainment marketplace is concerned, enough is never enough.

And to think, I haven't yet gotten to the one film in Cannes about a literal revolution: Sophia Coppola's Marie Antoinette. More to come. Stay tuned.

--------

Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://mt.laweekly.com/mt-tb.cgi/35336