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Racism movie leads critics' picks
Michael Haneke's Hidden has picked up two honours, making it a Palme d'Or favourite. Cannes '05
A subtle French movie on racism starring Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche is leading the critics' picks at the Cannes film festival which was to award its prestigious Palme d'Or award Saturday.
Hidden, by Austrian director Michael Haneke, on Friday picked up two honours, one by the International Federation of Film Critics and one by the Ecumenical Jury. The trade magazine Variety said Sony Pictures had also picked the movie for North American distribution.
But the judgment of critics and the Cannes jury often diverge, and there was no telling whether that movie would be the one to be plucked from the 21-strong field screened over the festival.
Reviewers who have emerged bleary-eyed from 10 days of sitting in cinemas said this year's line-up, stacked with Cannes veterans, is strong -- but no one movie has emerged as a clear-cut masterpiece.
"What this year's Cannes unquestionably lacked was a great film or anything close to it," Todd McCarthy, head critic for the US trade magazine Variety, said.
Nevertheless, a consensus had formed around Hidden, an intelligent and slowly-developing examination of Western bias against Arabs, and it topped most of the guess-lists compiled from reviewers' opinions. The film makes its points through a tale set in Paris and starring Daniel Auteuil.
Other movies were seen as close contenders, among them Last Days by US director Gus Van Sant, which won over Japanese and French critics for its minimalist portrayal of a rocker, much like the late grunge singer Kurt Cobain, who mumbles incoherently and staggers around, sometimes in drag, before ending his life with a shotgun blast.
Against Van Sant, however, was the fact that he won the Palme d'Or in 2003 for Elephant, his take on the Columbine High School massacre.
Two movies proved almost universally popular, yet some contended that they lacked the intellectual edge Cannes usually takes pride in.
Both A History of Violence, a deceptively simple thriller starring Viggo Mortensen and directed by Canada's David Cronenberg, and Broken Flowers, by US director Jim Jarmusch and starring Bill Murray as a man visiting past loves to find a son he never knew he had, scored big hits -- and predictions of commercial, if not Cannes, success.
The Child, a Belgian film about a small-time thief who sells his son only to turn around and desperately search to get him back, also got solid scores, but mainly for the performances.
There were also a few outright disappointments, of course.
Bashing, a Japanese film about a woman suffering ostracism when she returns home after being freed as a hostage in Iraq, failed to revive the controversy around the US-led war in that country that buoyed Cannes last year when Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 won the Palme.
Where the Truth Lies, a film by Canada's Atom Egoyan starring Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth, was widely panned as an inferior mystery brought down even further by the poor choice of leading actress (Alison Lohman), who was unconvincing.
This year, the Cannes jury is led by gruff, Sarajevo-born director Emir Kusterica and includes US Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison, Spanish actor Javier Bardem, Mexican actress Salma Hayek and Hong Kong action director John Woo.
What they were leaning towards was anybody's guess - and the subject of several rumours.
One of those, according to a New York Times critic, Manohla Dargis, was that a Mexican movie, Battle in Heaven was in with a big chance.
If that film by Carlos Reygadas wins, several reviewers would be unsettled - especially those who wrote it off for its explicit depiction of obese coupling.
"The film has radically divided critics, but I like the idea that something this offbeat might win," Dargis wrote in an online journal. "This is pretty trippy news, but then the jury is pretty trippy, too."
