As Cannes Film Festival 2001 moves toward its close Sunday night, this year’s greatest moment continued to come from one stunning look back, at the reedited new version of Francis Coppola’s 1979 Vietnam War epic, “Apocalypse Now.”
Audiences remained somewhat shell-shocked by the 3 1/2-hour recut, called “Apocalypse Now Redux.” Back in 1979, Coppola’s first “Apocalypse” won Cannes’ Palme d’Or (shared with “The Tin Drum”). And it’s clear by now that, if “Apocalypse Now Redux” were in competition, it might well win this year — and deservedly so.
No other Cannes 2001 entry, from the dazzling opening night flash of “Moulin Rouge” to high spots like Nanni Moretti’s “The Son’s Room,” Manoel de Oliveira’s “Vou Para Casa,” David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive,” Jean-Luc Godard’s “Eloge de l’Amour” or the Coen brothers’ “The Man Who Wasn’t There,” has been able to match it.
Indeed, for some, the stature this 22-year old movie is proof that the current festival is a bust. I disagree. Never mind that new films by two-time Palme d’Or winner Shohei Imamura (“Warm Water Under a Red Bridge”) and Venice Grand Prize-winner Hou Hsiao Hsien (“Millennium Mambo”) had yet to be shown as I wrote this. Never mind that no single movie has yet emerged as a clear favorite for the Palm.
Perhaps the sheer opulence and ambition of Coppola’s “Redux” is blinding people to the rest. Cannes 2001 marked a terrific return to form for Godard and Jacques Rivette: two old compatriots from both the French ’60s New Wave and the legendary ’50s staff of the film journal “Cahiers du Cinema,” which celebrated its 50th anniversary this year at a festival party.
Shot mostly in high contrast black and white, Godard’s “Eloge de l’Amour” is about a mysterious project on France’s WWII French Resistance, and both the gravitas of the subject and the inspired cinematography help make this his best and most characteristic film since 1983’s “Prenom: Carmen”: impudent, allusive, irreverent and totally personal.
Cahiers cohort Rivette’s “Va Savoir” was also a delight, another smart variation on one of his favorite themes: a troubled play production, in this case among a touring Italian troupe in Paris, whose director hunts for a lost Carlo Goldoni manuscript while his actress wife is chased by an old lover.
Two excellent modern American films noir also surfaced. Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive,” resurrected from his aborted TV pilot, is a “Blue Velvet” style nightmare about making it in Hollywood. The Coen brothers’ wry, tense “Man Who Wasn’t There,” shot in brilliant ultra-noir black and white by Roger Deakins, has a dead-on Billy Bob Thornton as a henpecked barber ensnared in blackmail and murder.
“Vou Para Casa,” made by Portugal’s De Oliveira, still active at 93, is another of his serene, chilling portrayals of old age. But Ermanno Olmi’s “The Profession of Arms” is very untypical for this veteran Italian realist: a lush epic about the last 1526 battle of Giovanni de Medici. And Nanni Moretti’s “The Son’s Room” was a complete departure for him: the first serious drama — and a very moving one, about a family ravaged by death — from one of Italy’s best-loved star comedian-directors.
I was disappointed by Martin Scorsese’s four-hour documentary on Italian cinema “Il Mio Viaggio in Italia,” but only because its range is less than in his great 1995 American film chronicle, “A Century of Cinema.” There has been no bigger shock at the festival, though, than the sleeper from Bosnia: first-time writer-director-composer Danis Tanovic’s “No Man’s Land,” a hellishly comic-dramatic peek at the UN crisis caused by a three-man Bosnian-Serb standoff between lines.
Who will win the big prizes this year? It’s anybody’s guess. But my own personal Palms would include a joint Best Actor’s prize to Branko Djuric and Rene Bitorajac of “No Man’s Land” (with “The Pledge’s” Jack Nicholson as runner-up), a Best Actress prize to Emmanuelle Beart as the spoiled actress of “La Repetition” (runner-up: Isabelle Huppert of “The Piano Teacher”), a Best Director’s prize to Godard, Best Script to Moretti and Best Film to “The Man Who Wasn’t There.”
