Cannes Report: The Joy in the Bubble

When The Diving Bell and the Butterfly opens in the U.S., it will have subtitles. But the Cannes competition film most in need of translation may be We Own the Night, a turgid and overwrought cop thriller from American writer-director James Gray, whose first two features (Little Odessa and The Yards) did little to impress U.S. critics or audiences, but have inexplicably turned Gray into a Gallic fetish object. Last year, when We Own the Night (which stars and was produced by Yards alumni Mark Wahlberg and Joaquin Phoenix) was still in the editing room, one French critic I know made a special pilgrimage to L.A. to interview Gray and see a rough cut of the film. This year in Cannes, another French critic, whose opinion I generally respect, raved to me about Gray's "classicism" while reminding me that, ever since the 1950s, the French have played an important role in championing great American directors whose work is insufficiently appreciated in America. "Why would we start to be wrong now?" he asked rhetorically. Well, there's always a first time for everything.

One thing everyone (more or less) could agree on was that the Coen brothers, after floundering with Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers, made a striking return to form with No Country for Old Men, a stark modern-day western based on the Cormac McCarthy novel and featuring Javier Bardem as the creepiest movie psycho this side of Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs.

Also scoring high marks (and a special 60th anniversary prize from the jury, "for his career and because he made a lovely film") was Gus Van Sant, whose Paranoid Park continues his recent string of low-budget films made with mostly unknown actors in and around his native Portland. Here, though, working from a source novel by Blake Nelson about a high-school skateboarder trying to make sense of his involvement in an accidental murder, Van Sant carries his ongoing experiments with image and sound design to new levels of sophistication. (The cameraman is the brilliant Christopher Doyle). The result is a fragmentary, dreamlike portrait of teen alienation — the movie Van Sant was trying to make with Elephant — in which every artistic decision seems to flow organically out of the material rather than being lacquered on top (à la Schnabel). Van Sant is now fully unrecognizable as the director who once guided a slick Hollywood package called Good Will Hunting to massive box-office returns and nine Oscar nominations. No wonder that, by the end of Cannes, Paranoid Park had yet to find a U.S. distributor. (As this article was going to press, Variety announced that IFC First Take had once again come to the rescue.) Even less surprising is the news that Van Sant's latest was fully financed by — you guessed it — the French.