Cannes 1995: Day 8: May 24

Ulysses' Gaze, Greece, dir. Theo Angelopoulos

Fewer films than usual on offer today: Critics' Week had ended, and many of the Quinzaine and Un Certain Regard titles proved elusive. But what remains is a full meal. Some might even say over-full. I imagine critics arrive to every Cannes with certain days in the schedule circled in boldfaced marker, and this would have been one of them. Theo Angelopoulos' Ulysses' Gaze, which finds the legendary Greek auteur pondering the evisceration of the Balkans and the evanescence of film, and Zhang Yimou's Shanghai Triad, with its visually and narratively operatic story of gangsterism and bitter redemption, had figured instantly on everyone's list of likely plays for the Palme d'or. By "everyone," I include the filmmakers.  Neither was renowned for hiding his light under a bushel, but even by those standards, they pull out all the technical and rhetorical stops in these projects.  I don't doubt their sincere commitment to their visions, but I also sense they can smell the velvet in the trophy case. Neither of these statement-pieces went home empty-handed, even if Angelopoulos' famous hissy-fit upon winning the runner-up prize suggested otherwise, but nor did they unite critical opinion or endear themselves uniformly to audiences. I found plenty to chew on in both, but oscillated like so many others between awe and skepticism. If anything, I was more galvanized by a one-hour Malaysian adaptation of William Faulkner's "Barn Burning" that slipped into Un Certain Regard to less acclaim than it deserved. You could watch it three times in the span it takes to screen Ulysses' Gaze, though that's not an automatic point for or against either of them. Good things come in big and small packages.

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Cannes 1995: Day 6: May 22

Land and Freedom, UK, dir. Ken Loach

And now we're finally talking. Ken Loach and Hou Hsiao-hsien serve up the meatiest, chewiest Palme contenders so far, and without pushing too far outside their stylistic comfort zones, they make some of the most forceful work in either of their filmographies. Regrettable, maybe, that Kids stole a lot of the media attention, but in the context of Cannes, it proved something less of a sensation than its makers and distributors might have hoped. Meanwhile, Chris Newby premiered some British cinema as dissimilar as you could imagine to Land and Freedom, except perhaps in its ethic of unanticipated affinities and identifications across difference, and Iranian master Mohsen Makhmalbaf furnished one of the most austere but committed of several films overtly commemorating the 100th anniversary of the medium...

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Love in Any Language

Still plowing through my personal awards categories. Wherever you're reading from, I hope you have access to these movies, and I hope you'll file some recommendations for other movies we should all be hunting down from around the world.