The Cannes International Film Festival.

As every cinephile knows, in May 1968 the Cannes Film Festival was brought to a halt by a group of activist filmmakers who interrupted the usual blithe spectacle and expressed solidarity with the rumblings from students that had begun to reverberate in Paris. Cinema played an important part in the events of '68; the student uprising had been presaged by filmmakers confronting the government over the firing of the much-loved Henri Langlois, head of the Cinematheque francaise. And by the time Cannes rolled around, the ritualized cycle of business and frivolity on the Riviera came to be seen as irrelevant, or even, given the era's political zeal, counterrevolutionary.

Cannes 2008 proved a peculiar place to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of May '68. It was almost impossible to believe that the annual rituals of commerce and hype were once challenged--let alone immobilized for a year. Olivier Jahan's 40 x 15, a documentary chronicling the history of Cannes' prestigious "parallel festival"--La Quinzaine des Realisateurs, or Directors' Fortnight--provided the one tangible reminder of those tumultuous days (as well as one of the highlights of the Quinzaine itself.) The Quinziane begin in 1969 as a response to criticisms of Cannes' hidebound programming policies and Jahan documents the affinities between the Fortnight's antinomian cinephilia and the spirit of '68, particularly as exemplified by the innovative agenda spearheaded by Pierre-Henri Deleau, the director of the sidebar during its formative years. Ken Loach maintains that the early decades of the Quinzaine represented a cherished pocket of "subversion," and Jahan's film is peppered with similar fervent testimonials from directors ranging from American independents such as Spike Lee and Jim Jarmusch to European cineastes like Chantal Akerman and Werner Herzog. The Directors' Fortnight also played an important role in introducing audiences to what was once termed "Third World Cinema"; a major figure in African cinema, the late Djibril Diop Mambety, expresses his gratitude to the Quinzaine for helping him avoid the ghettoization that would have resulted if his films were confined to screenings at exclusively black, or African, film festivals. In recent years, it's not surprising that many of the filmmakers showcased at the Quinzaine, like most everyone else, yearn for lucrative distribution deals and conventional fame and fortune. But Jahan's film locates the vestigial idealism and communal bonhomie that still occasionally surfaces at this alternative festival within a festival. To wit, the Quinzaine's penchant for thought-provoking, and resolutely uncommercial, features continued with audacious films such as Beur director Rabah Ameur-Zaimeche's Le Dernier maquis, a provocative take on the collusion between Islam and capitalism in a grim French industrial park, Albert Serra's frequently hilarious retelling of the story of the Three Wise Men's pilgrimage, El cant dels ocells, (with Cinema Scope editor, and occasional Cineaste contributor, Mark Peranson playing Joseph--in Hebrew; Serra's film must be the first film in history to include dialog in both Hebrew and Catalan) and Argentine wunderkind Lisandro Monso's austerely beautiful Liverpool.

Even though several of the films featured in Competition reflected a similar altruism, the glitzy context of the Palais was about as far removed from the spirit of '68 as humanly possible. (It is always jarring to walk past Chanel and Yves Saint Laurent boutiques on the way to films devoted to Cuban revolutionaries or beleaguered Chinese factory workers). Many of the Competition films were rather lackluster examples of auteur cinema at the end of its tether; despite lingering affection for their achievements, few critics could honestly claim that Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's latest film, Le Silence de Lorna, approached the quality of their best work. In fact, this surprisingly generic tale of an Albanian woman's entanglement with gangsters offered convincing evidence that the brothers' esthetic prowess is waning--and even that the raw immediacy of films such as La Promesse and Rosetta has congealed into a formula in which societal victims experience grueling traumas before the respite of a concluding redemptive epiphany. Of course, the Dardenne's disappointing film was masterful in comparison to Wim Wenders' major Competition embarrassment, The Palermo Shooting. An often unintentionally hilarious exercise in directorial cluelessness, this folie de grandeur was only of interest as a sad case study of a once-talented director seduced by a vacuous high concept scenario. Finn (played with studied impassivity by rock star "Campino"), an ultra chic photographer with a debilitating death wish, decamps to Palermo, the Sicilian city known for its alluring beautiful decay, and finds himself on the run from a mysterious assassin. He also encounters a spectral Lou Reed (played, alas, by Reed himself) and the devil as personified by Dennis Hopper. Burdened by empty, if ostentatiously gorgeous, digital cinematography, this is filmmaking at its most gallingly meretricious. When the film's final credits culminated in Wenders' dedication--to the memory of "Ingmar and Michelangelo"--the audience laughed and jeered.

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Many critics no doubt feared (or perhaps sadistically relished the prospect) that Steven Soderbergh's two-part, four-hour plus Che would prove equally preposterous. Yet Soderbergh's admittedly flawed biopic was refreshingly compelling and much superior to the last Che homage (and, perhaps, not coincidentally, Cannes Competition film), Walter Salles' saccharine The Motorcycle Diaries. What is perhaps most impressive about Soderbergh's retread of Che's familiar saga is his relative lack of interest in the usual enshrinement or demonization of a man either hailed as a secular saint or damned as a misguidedly romanticized ideologue. Despite an impressive performance by Benicio del Toro in the lead role, Che's heroism is less the focus than the minutiae of guerrilla warfare and his contributions to the military strategy that wrested power from Batista. The film's refreshingly analytical component is no doubt attributable to the participation of Che biographer Jon Lee Anderson as a consultant on the film. As we go to press, Che has still not been picked up for commercial distribution--and it is unfortunate that the film, or the Cannes version at least--may never see the light of day in American movie theaters. (Todd McCarthy's hostile Variety review will certainly not provide much encouragement to potential buyers.)

A recent article in The New York Times asserted that the prizes awarded to two Competition films--Matteo Garrone's Gomorrah and Paolo Sorrentino's II Divo--marked a resurgence in the prestige of the once-venerated Italian cinema. While this seems overblown (two films do not constitute a wave), Garrone's film (I skipped II Divo since I found Sorrentino's previous efforts stylistically fatuous and thematically empty) was certainly one of the festival's highlights. Based on Roberto Saviano's book of the same name, an astonishing piece of fearless journalism on the Naples Camorra told with novelistic flair, Garrone pulls off an analogous tour de force that was perhaps the most bravura example of cinematic technique at Cannes. What is most impressive about Gomorrah is that, unlike Crash, Babel, and numerous other recent gimmicky films foregrounding intersecting narratives, Garrone's narrative tapestry never seems overly schematic or marred by facile coincidences. This is perhaps because this powerful chronicle of the links between ingrained Italian corruption and new patterns in global capitalism never wavers from an exceedingly hard-nosed and unsentimental stance. The five narrative strands are mercilessly free of any of the cute metaphysical ironies proffered by films such as Babel. Like Saviano's book, the film traces the tentacular reach of the Camorra. The protagonists either capitulate to the Camorra's brutal capitalist ethos or risk not only their livelihood, but also their lives. For example, in one of the most haunting mini-narratives, young men barely into their teens (and thoroughly infatuated with Brian De Palma's Scarface) attempt to freelance in ventures controlled by the Camorra and face inevitably dire consequences. In another skillfully etched portrait of corruption gone wild, a cynical specialist in "toxic waste management," who dismisses a young underling's pangs of conscience as weak-willed, emerges as symptomatic of Italy's ongoing moral quagmire. In addition to his talents as a storyteller, Garrone also possesses a superb knack for creating potent images; a shot of a bullet-ridden car in the countryside amongst replicas of Greco-Roman statuary offers a moment of viscerally brutal lyricism.

2008's Palme D'or winner, Laurent Cantet's Entre les murs (The Class) was undeniably crowd pleasing, if somewhat less profound as a cinematic statement on the state of French education than the many ecstatic reviews indicated. A slightly more insightful twist on the classroom film popularized by Hollywood chestnuts like Blackboard Jungle and Dangerous Minds, Cantet's saga of a charismatic, but flawed, junior high school teacher confines its action, as the title indicates, to the four walls of a multi-ethnic classroom that becomes the scene for entertaining, and occasionally edifying, pedagogical vignettes. Based on Francois Begaudeau's autobiographical novel (and starring Begaudeau himself as the frequently smarmy teacher), the film touches upon important controversies concerning the structural inequality of French education while also making sure that its heroic teacher, despite various missteps crucial to the narrative, triumphs in the end. Hailed as a comeback for Cantet after the disappointing Vers le sud, The Class can no doubt look forward to a bright future in American art cinemas where superficially daring, if ultimately safe, foreign films rule supreme.

Jia Zhangke's 24 City was something of the odd duck of the Cannes competition--a film that many respected but few, if any, critics could explicate with much precision. 24 City is the kind of film that perfectly illustrates the folly of viewing five or six films a day at a frenetic festival. Jia's languid editing rhythms and highly ambiguous didactic thrust are not particularly well suited to a regimen that necessitates rushing around a congested resort city while sustaining oneself on overpriced sandwiches and quickly gulped cups of coffee. An audacious stylistic exercise, Jia's poetic dirge for the destruction of "factory 420" in the city of Chengdu (torn down to make way for luxury apartments) intersperses interviews with five factory workers with monologues by four professional actors--loan Chen, Lv Liping, Zhao Tao, and Chen Jianbin. In his Cannes report in The Village Voice, J. Hoberman termed 24 City an "ambivalent exercise in Communist nostalgia." But if Jia mourns the eclipse of Chinese working-fervor by yuppie consumerism, what aspects of bygone Chinese communism is he nostalgic for? Despite dispiriting social and economic developments in a country christened "The People's Republic of Capitalism" by a recent television documentary series, he can't really be nostalgic for the forced industrialization of the "Great Leap Forward?" Or can he? Answers to such questions require additional viewings, as well as more contemplation than is possible during Cannes' chaotic routine.

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Considerably less opaque but equally bracing, Terence Davies's Of Time and the City (shown out of competition), his first film since 2000's The House of Mirth, proved full of visual and aural delights--a definite festival high point. Both a skewed tribute, as well as something of a poison pen letter, to his native Liverpool, Davies' highly idiosyncratic documentary essay employs his hometown as a catalyst for a grab bag of ruminations that summon up both the hardships and transient pleasures of life in post-World War II Britain. Intoning his own voice-over commentary, peppered liberally with excerpts from T.S. Eliot and A.E. Houseman, among others, he certainly has little nostalgia for the repressive Catholic Liverpool of his youth that condemned his homosexual yearnings (and rather gleefully includes footage of a former church which has been converted into a posh restaurant). Nonetheless, in his own rather self-mocking fashion, he does find intermittent moments of grace scattered among the postwar rubble. In particular, he slyly pontificates against the advent of rock music (he's one Liverpuddlian without any residual affection for The Beatles) and the death of the old movie palaces that inspired his childhood reveries, as well as some of his finest films--most notably The Long Day Closes. Basically a TV film (produced by the BBC), it was a pleasure to view Of Time and the City on a wide screen augmented by a proper sound system that did justice to the strains of Davies's beloved Mahler.

In short, 2008 was something of a bittersweet year at Cannes. The most highly anticipated films were often clinkers while the best work was likely to be overlooked amidst the din of the paparazzi on the hunt for snapshots of Angelina Jolie or Gwyneth Paltrow. Cannes remains a useful predictor for what will prevail in art houses over the next year. But it remains worrisome that the festival and the lemmings of the mainstream press tend to shower attention on the most mediocre offerings while overlooking, or damning with faint praise, the films likely to stand the test of time.

For more information on the Cannes Film Festival, visit www.festival-cannes.fr/en.html