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TIME International
June 3, 1996 Volume 147, No. 23
RICHARD CORLISS/CANNES
Chen Kaige says that the first time he came to the Cannes Film Festival, in 1988, "I knew nothing about it. I thought I was going to win the Palme d'Or and was disappointed when I didn't. But I was quite moved by the way filmmakers were received here--you literally get the red-carpet treatment. And the funny thing is that when I put on my tux and sat in front of the flag of the People's Republic, I really felt that I represented China."
It's not so funny. The movie Chen brought with him, King of the Children, was the first evidence in the competition section of the world's most famous film festival that China had a vital new cinema. And Chen helped create it. He has returned three times; in 1993 his Farewell My Concubine did win a Palme d'Or on its way to international success and stardom for its leading players, Leslie Cheung and Gong Li. This year Chen, Cheung, Gong Li and Concubine's producer Hsu Feng were back again with another period drama, Temptress Moon.
But in a competition top-heavy this year with world-class auteurs--Bernardo Bertolucci, Robert Altman, Stephen Frears, the Coen brothers and David Cronenberg, in addition to Chen--most of the big winners were from Europe. Mike Leigh's blithe, London-based family drama, Secrets and Lies, won the Palme d'Or, with Leigh's leading lady, Brenda Blethyn, earning the nod for Best Actress. Danish director Lars von Trier's hyper-emotional Scottish fable Breaking the Waves took the runner-up Grand Jury Prize. France's Jacques Audiard received the screenplay award for A Self-Made Hero, and the Best Actor citation was shared by French star Daniel Auteuil and Pascal Duquenne--a Belgian actor with Down's syndrome--in Jaco van Dormael's bathetic buddy movie The Eighth Day. Chen and Hou Hsiao-hsien, the master filmmaker from Taiwan who showed the opaque gangster saga Goodbye South, Goodbye, were shut out.
"It is survival for Asian movies to be in the big festivals," says Tran Anh Hung, the Vietnamese-born, Paris-bred director who served on this year's Festival Jury. Tran should know: his The Scent of Green Papaya was a hit three years ago at Cannes, and last year his Cyclo won the big prize at Venice. But Cannes is not only the 22 films in competition. It is many festivals within a festival: a hothouse for art films, a busy market for action movies, a 24-hour-a-day beach party, a place to sell and, if the price is right, sell out. With Jackie Chan and director John Woo breaking out of the Asian ghetto and graduating to stardom in the Hollywood firmament, other Pacific Rim filmmakers and producers at Cannes are scrambling to make money, close deals, colonize distant lands.
"A third or more of Hong Kong movies can travel to the West," says Gordon Cheung, distribution vice president for the huge Golden Harvest film company. "In Europe the Shaw Brothers are investing in a Chinese channel based in the U.K. And with Hong Kong going back to China next year, there will be talented directors from the mainland making films in Hong Kong, with perhaps more co-productions that will automatically be distributed in the P.R.C." Golden Harvest also plans to build theaters in Thailand, Korea, Vietnam, Burma and, of course, China. You can almost hear Cheung's smile as he anticipates the exposure of Hong Kong films to a potential audience of 1.2 billion.
Gordon Cheung has come to Cannes to beat the drum; Maggie Cheung is here to take in the show. "During the day, Cannes seems like any other beach town," says the pert star of some 70 Hong Kong movies, including five Jackie Chans. "It's like Los Angeles, but without the Rollerblades. Then at night you see all the good-looking people going to screenings in formal dress." Cheung is starring in Olivier Assayas' prankish, behind-the-screen docu-farce Irma Vep, playing a Hong Kong actress named Maggie Cheung hired to star in a low-rent Left Bank film. The results are by turns goofy and annoying, but Cheung has a lithe charm that carries her through the film's seedier patches.
Looking pretty and speaking perfect English (she spent her adolescence in London), Cheung might be expected to follow John Woo and actor Chow Yun-Fat to America. But Cheung, who declares herself "quite optimistic" about Hong Kong's prospects after the Chinese takeover, says that the threat of earthquakes would keep her from moving to Los Angeles. "Earthquakes in L.A. are like us in Hong Kong having 1997 on our back. But at least we know when the shake-up is going to happen."
In a cramped torture chamber at the Noga Hilton, Takeshi Kitano begins one more interview about his film Kids Return. "It's my first time at Cannes, and it's just crazy, crazy, crazy," he says. "I came to attend the festival, but all I know is this room." Called "Beat" Takeshi at home, the dour actor-director (Violent Cop, Boiling Point, Sonatine) is also an international cult star: in Britain three of his films are among the all-time top-selling foreign-language videos. In his ultraviolent crime epics, the deadpan star dishes out inhuman punishment and takes it, like a Zen or zombie Clint Eastwood. As for the once flourishing Japanese cinema, right now he's it. "I don't think 'terrible' quite describes the current state of the Japanese film industry," he says. "If there were a stronger word, I'd use it. The studios want huge, Hollywood-style hits, but they also want artistic films. The result is a big mediocrity--an industry with no direction."
Chinese cinema--on the mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan--is going in many directions, and film people have to learn to follow the ricocheting trends. Those in Cannes have certainly learned to cope with the sudden world spotlight. "My first couple of trips here I was very innocent," says Gong Li, China's ambassador actress to the West. "I didn't question anything. Now I question everything. I ask, 'Why am I here?' And why, at all the interview luncheons, do journalists get to eat but I don't?" Her director sees a different kind of repast at Cannes. "It's a big banquet of films," says Chen. "I love the festival because it's an international club, and I want to be a member of it. I come to Cannes to make sure there's a chair in that club for me."
This year Cannes pulled the chair out from under him. Though well received at Cannes' public screenings, Temptress Moon was panned by the French critics. It also had a poorly received premiere in Hong Kong. "Critics there called it a boring, draggy movie," Leslie Cheung notes. "They said it was made only for Westerners." Obviously, many Western reviewers don't think so. To them it is the sort of bad film a good director can get out of his system only by making it.
Yet to dismiss Temptress Moon is to be blind to the voluptuous passion and precision of its visual style (ace cinematographer Christopher Doyle shot most of the scenes with a sinuous Steadicam) and the bravura performances by Leslie Cheung and He Saifei as two siblings corrupted by the decadent wealth of a diseased clan. Set in Shanghai in the 1920s, this lavish, humid drama has a devious plot that can be hard to parse on first viewing; it is as if the members of this incestuous family are speaking in a poetry only they can understand. Unlike so many other Cannes films, which stretch a thin anecdote to feature length, this one sometimes plays like an eight-hour story distilled to its most beautiful images, if not always its clearest. This is Chen's most daring, experimental film in a career of many artistic and personal risks.
"I'm an observer, not a politician," Chen says. "I don't tell you what to think; I show you what I see." Yet even those not deeply versed in Chinese politics could see a parallel between the Temptress Moon story--family members, including an outsider from Shanghai, scheme to take over a clan with an incapacitated leader--and the battle among Deng Xiaoping's putative successors, including the former mayor of Shanghai. So Chen could not have been surprised when, a few weeks before Cannes, he was told that Chinese authorities had banned the film, as they had done with most of his five previous features. "I was sad rather than angry," he says of the ban, which could still be lifted. "The film is about contemporary Chinese society. In a way, everybody who is sitting in the theater is in the film."
Meanwhile, other directors express nostalgia for a Cannes past, before so much was expected of Asian films and filmmakers. Tran, the Vietnamese emigre, recalls bringing a short film to Cannes seven years ago. "I was not invited; I had no badge to see movies; I existed on sandwiches," he says. "Yet it was nicer. I was more sensitive to the changing light. I'd wake up and see a bit of light on the yellow wall. And I thought, 'I'm here with a bad movie and a beautiful wife, and life is wonderful!' This time I'm in a fancy hotel and I have a car, but I don't have time to appreciate things. To make good movies, you know, you must never forget that little yellow light on the wall."
This year Cannes gave Asian films a yellow light: a signal of caution that a decade of artistic achievement and critical success may be waning. Yet the failure of Temptress Moon or Goodbye South, Goodbye to win a prize at the world's leading film festival means much less, practically speaking, than the box-office tally for films by Jackie Chan and John Woo, or the Hollywood interest in Ang Lee and Chow Yun-Fat. Perhaps it is not Chen or Hou who failed to seize the day, but Cannes that failed to see how Asian cinema--in its bustle and ambition, its commandeering of the worldwide market--has reached high noon.
--Reported by Jeffrey Ressner/Cannes