It's a Wrap at Cannes

Just before announcing the awards on the closing night of the 61st Cannes Film Festival, Sean Penn, the president of this year's jury, recalled that he had once served in the same post at another festival. He'd run into Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar, who exclaimed, "Sean Penn, can you believe you're the president of anything?" The actor-director, a longtime critic of George W. Bush, then told the black-tie audience, "And I'm not the only president whose answer should be 'no.' " The crowd erupted into the applause of political solidarity.

International art cinema, as opposed to the red-meat Hollywood variety, is a left-wing enterprise. At Cannes, you simply will not find, say, a film on Northern Ireland's Troubles that is sympathetic to its English occupiers, or an Israeli film hostile to the Palestinians. This year, Hunger, the story of IRA leader Bobby Sands' fatal hunger strike in 1981, won the Camera d'Or (debut film) prize for Afro-Irish director Steve McQueen; and Waltz With Bashir, an animated documentary about Israeli filmmaker Ari Folman's sense of guilt over the Sabra and Shatila massacres of Palestinian refugees in 1982, was one of the critical favorites in the main competition, though Penn's jury gave it no award.

The top prize at Cannes, the Palme d'Or, went for the first time in 21 years to a French film: Laurent Cantet's Entre les Murs (The Class), which traces a year in a Paris junior-high class. This judicious, quietly touching film was made with nonprofessional actors, including the teacher, François Bégaudeau, on whose memoir-novel the film is based. When the unanimous award was announced, Cantet, Bégaudeau and the rainbow coalition of kids all swarmed onstage for an ecstatic reunion.

Among the other laureled films were two from Italy: Matteo Garrone's remorseless Gomorrah (the Grand Prize, or second place), about a Mafia clan's reach throughout the country, and Paolo Sorrentino's Il Divo (the third-place Jury Prize), a snazzy-looking, corrosively cynical biopic of three-time Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti. When he was shown the film before Cannes, Andreotti called it "the act of a scoundrel." After Il Divo won its prize, he took the longer view. "For anybody in politics, it seems to me, to be ignored is worse than to be criticized," he said, adding, "I'm happy for the producer. If I'd had a share in the profits I'd be even happier."

European films snagged most of the main awards. The Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne were given the Screenplay prize for their immigrant crime drama The Silence of Lorna, and Nuri Bilge Ceylan, from Turkey, was named Best Director (a consolation prize here) for Three Monkeys, his study of corruption within a business and a family. The Best Actress award went to Sandra Corveloni, who played a pregnant single mother trying to keep her poor family together in the Brazilian Linha de passe (Line of Passage). Only one U.S. picture was fêted: Benicio Del Toro was named Best Actor for his role as Ernesto Guevara in Che, directed by Steven Soderbergh. The movie's dialogue is almost entirely in Spanish, which means that, for the second year in a row, no English-language film took home any of the main jury's prizes.

This is not to say that Cannes (or Venice or Toronto) is immune to Hollywood star quality. The big festivals need celebrities to grace the red carpet, to be photographed by the paparazzi and TV crews, to glean worldwide publicity for the event. So the premiere of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the first Indy movie since 1989, was headline news. Producer George Lucas, director Steven Spielberg and leading man Harrison Ford showed up to promote their familiar if robust revival of the archaeologist adventurer. Jack Black and Dustin Hoffman appeared with their sweetly vigorous animated comedy Kung Fu Panda, and Woody Allen presented a very agreeable romance, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, with star Penélope Cruz in tow.

All these films were shown outside the main competition for the Palme d'Or. Hmmm, let's see. Is Angelina in the new film directed by Clint? (No surnames needed.) Then they will be there, if only to spark a new tabloid nickname: Clangelina. (And Brad came too.) Actually, Eastwood's movie, Changeling, is an honorable, fact-based drama about police corruption and child abuse in 1920s Los Angeles, with Jolie somewhat miscast as an ordinary single mom whose son is kidnapped, then found, only for her to discover that another boy claiming to be the son has returned in his place. Eastwood has brought five films to Cannes in the past quarter of a century, and for the fifth time his movie was shut out at the Palme ceremony, though the jury gave him the thanks-for-hanging-in-there gift of a life achievement award.