Sure Bets and Dark Horses

It's early Sunday morning here in Cannes, the locals are beginning to reclaim their streets from the hordes of festivalgoers, and homemade signs taped to the walls throughout the Palais des Festivals ask: "Going to the airport? Want to share a cab? Call me." For those who remain, there is one thing on their collective minds: the potential prizewinners at tonight's closing ceremony. But in any given year at Cannes, the awards forecasting gets underway well before all the films have been shown. Two of the trade publications that publish special festival dailies, Screen and Le Film Français, each hold annual polls in which a dozen or so major critics are asked to grade the festival films on a four-point scale. The results are then averaged out to determine which titles currently have the most widespread critical support. Meanwhile, the veteran British film critic Derek Malcolm takes things a step further by announcing odds for each of the competition films and running a betting pool over which will end up winning the Palme d'Or. Last I heard, Malcolm had Richard Kelly's Southland Tales pegged as a 5000 to 1 longshot. No doubt, amid reports that competition jury member Lucrecia Martel has said that she and her fellow jurors will be going out on a limb, Malcolm is starting to sweat.

Actually, after holding my own ear to the ground a bit over the last 24 hours, I suspect Malcolm need worry little about seeing Kelly or his artistic team ascending the stairs of the Grand Théâtre Lumière tonight. But the overriding sentiment here in Cannes is that we should expect the unexpected, and what's most surprising about that news is that people seem so surprised by it. For days now, prognosticators like Malcolm have been shifting the Palme's odds in favor of the two Cannes films that received the most uniform support among audiences and critics alike: Pedro Almodovar's femme-centric melodrama Volver (which does seem almost certain to net Penelope Cruz the best actress Palme) and Alejandro González Iñaárritu's multi-character, multi-lingual Babel (which is also generating award buzz for one of its stars, Brad Pitt). But I personally find it hard to imagine that such populist fare will curry much favor with a jury that includes not only Martel — the rigorous Argentinean filmmaker whose films are notable for their claustrophobic intensity — but also Palestinian director Elia Sulieman, whose absurdist political comedy Divine Intervention won the Jury Prize here in 2002; Tim Roth, who has worked as an actor for the likes of Robert Altman, Mike Leigh and Peter Greenaway, and whose own directorial debut, The War Zone, was about as audience-unfriendly as movies come; and this year's jury president, Wong Kar-Wai, who's well known for his own unconventional working methods. When I made that observation to one female colleague, she countered by saying that the rest of this year's jurors are "a bunch of lightweights" — apparently, her euphemistic way of suggesting that the three actresses in the mix (Helena Bonham Carter, Zhang Ziyi and Monica Bellucci) are simpletons or philistines. Me, I wouldn't bet money on that.

There may not have been this much uncertainty about where the Cannes chips will fall since back in 1999, when a jury led by David Cronenberg (and including the Swedish opera singer Barbara Hendricks and the French playwright Yasmina Reza) gave the Palme d'Or to Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne's Rosetta, the Grand Jury Prize (affectionately known as "second place") plus two acting prizes to Bruno Dumont's L'Humanité and a Special Jury Prize (i.e., "third place") to The Letter, by then 91-year-old Portuguese filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira. Almodovar, the popular favorite that year too (for All About My Mother) had to content himself with the best director award, and the knowledge that his was the only one of all the winners likely to make any significant money at the international box-office.

Such is where the lines continue to be drawn in the Cannes sands: not so much between Hollywood and the rest of the world as between those films likely to appeal to a large audience and those that may never play outside of the festival circuit. And that clash of sensibilities is very much what gives Cannes its vitality — the idea that there is room, in the same competition, for an elaborate period fantasy film (Pan's Labyrinth) by genre maestro Guillermo Del Toro, and also for a surreal and austere drama about the denizens of a gutted-out Cape Verde slum, cast entirely with nonprofessional actors and consisting of many long, static shots of two characters playing cards or lying on a bed watching TV. That film is called Colossal Youth and it is the latest work by the Portuguese director Pedro Costa, who many have hailed as one of the best filmmakers currently working in Europe, but who many more have fingered as the pet cause of elitist and/or obscurantist critics and festival programmers.

Before Cannes 2006 had even begun, one staunchly anti-Costa colleague predicted that Colossal Youth was sure to be the subject of the greatest number of audience walkouts in Cannes and the most effusive praise on the part of those still in their seats at the end. He proved to be right, but as it happens the jury members were among those who stayed — and applauded — and now there are rumors that Colossal Youth is the very limb upon which Wong and company are preparing to climb. If Costa's film (about which I will have more to say in nest week's print edition) wins any major award, it will certainly rank among the more radical gestures in Cannes history; but in a way the mere inclusion of the film in the competition is already that, and something for which this critic is most grateful.