At the Cannes Festival, Samir Farid samples the year's crop While Ridley Scott's Robin Hood was an astounding opening to the 63th Cannes Festival, Tournée (On Tour), Mathieu Amalric's fourth film, was a mediocre opening to the official competition. Amalric is a great actor, but his directorial work is of limited value. The choice of a mainstream French commercial comedy was apparently intended to vary the programme, but to my mind this does not justify its inclusion in the world's most prestigious official competition. Sabina Guzzanti's Draquila: L'Italia Che Trema (Draquila: Italy Trembles), the fourth full-length documentary by this director, confirms her status as the Michael Moore of Italy; she came to documentary films from the world of acting, theatre and television, where she had already built a reputation for scathing political satire. Draquila is about the Aquila earthquake, which killed 300 and made 120,000 homeless in Abruzzo, central Italy in 2009, and to which the government failed to respond adequately. Of the victims only 30,000 have been re- housed, while some 40,000 live in hotels and 50,000 in tents; Aquila remains a ghost town. The film specifically reveals how Berlosconi exploited the catastrophe, with rebuilding at many times its cost beginning six months too late on the prime minister's birthday! This screening at Cannes perpetrated a diplomatic crisis between France and Italy when, on 8 May, the Italian minister of culture Sandro Bondi turned down an invitation to attend the festival, stating that it featured a film that was nothing but political propaganda which falsified the truth and disgraced the Italian people. It was against the backdrop of this crisis that Draquila premiered in Italy a day before it was screened at the festival, showing on 120 screens and grossing Euro 260,000 on its first day. The fifth generation of Chinese filmmakers managed to take their work outside China to the rest of the world in the 1980s, while China was emerging as a world power. Few of these films, however, dealt with contemporary reality -- a task that was left to the sixth generation, who either circumvented or clashed with censorship -- in the 1990s. Wang Xiaoshuai, whose Rizhao Chongqing () is on the official competition programme, is among the most significant of the latter. I had the pleasure of knowing him closely when were together on the 2003 Salonica Film Festival jury, and discovered not only a talented director but a wonderful man. I was deeply pleased when he won the jury prize at Cannes in 2005; he had already won the Berlin Film Festival jury prize in 2001. In this, Xiaoshuai's tenth feature and the only Chinese film in the competition, he concludes a trilogy on three Chinese towns; and while the whole world knows about China's political capital, Beijing, and its cultural capital, Shanghai, no one knows about Chongqing where the sun shines so rarely the place is known as Fog Capital. The Rizhao of the title is another town whose name in Chinese means Sunrise: the title of the film connects sunshine and lack of sun. The film opens with the hero, who has lived in Rizhao for 15 years, returning to Chongqing. The Blues in the English title is equally appropriate, however, since the colour blue suffuses the film from start to finish. The sea captain Lin Quahni (Xueqi Wang) returns after being told that his 25-year-old son Lin Bo (Yi Zi) was gunned down by a policeman at the mall after he captured a hostage and threatened to kill her; we realise that Lin left his wife and son while the latter was ten, settling in Rizhao, where he married another and bore children, never seeing his son again. In Chongqing, Lin seeks out Xiao Hao (Hao Qin), his son's closest friend, to find out what actually happened. Yet the latter refuses to speak with him, so does his divorcee (now married to another with children of her own). Lin also tries to meet the policeman who killed his son but the authorities will not let him. Finally he manages to speak with the doctor and Lin Bo's girlfriend, and Xiao Hao eventually begins to talk as well. Lin Bo had been attempting to cut his own wrist in the mall when a shopkeeper tried to stop him -- he stabbed her. A doctor who had been shopping at the mall tried to save them, but Lin Bo locked her up in a storeroom. It eventually becomes clear that Lin Po was driven to suicide after his girlfriend decided to leave him. From the events recorded o n the mall's security camera, the young man appears innocent and desperate, his only intention being to kill himself. Xiaoshuai contributed to writing the script, which is based on a true story that took place in 2008. The dramatic treatment expresses the problems resulting from the disintegration of the family, divorce and intergenerational strife in Chinese society. This is made clear when the father of Xiao Hao falls ill and Lin goes to visit him -- only to be told by Xiao Hao, "I have always hated my father who was always present in front of me, while Lin Bo always loved you while you were away." The new generation is constantly playing handball; they have no major issues of concern, no profound interests or emotions. Lin is distressed when he realises there is no photograph of his son who hated being photographed, and when he asks Xiao Hao to blow up a still from the video, it ends up looking featureless and unclear. The policeman who killed Lin Bo suddenly asks to meet Lin, explaining that he had forgotten the event completely but started thinking of it again when Lin asked to meet him. He assures him that he was only doing his job, his intention being to save the hostage. In the end, before returning to Rizhao, Lin burns the useless picture Xiao Hao blew up for him. The film opens and closes with the sight of the telepherique that takes people into Chongqing, with views of the port, the industrial skyscrapers contrasting with the residents' miserable housing, and the merchandise boxes looking like telepherique compartments. A work of neorealism with powerful cinematic elements, the film frequently gives way to poetry. Yet the film is at least 20 minutes too long, and the use of widescreen isn't always strange. His visual achievement rather is the way he translates the security video from black and white to colour. Among this year's highlights is Manoel de Oliveira's O Estranho Caso de Anglica (The Strange Case of Angelica), which opened the Un Certain Regard programme. I found out that the festival administration asked to screen the film in the competition but the director, who turned 100 in 2008, preferred to have it screen outside it. With this film the great Portuguese filmmaker is the world's oldest -- and the only one who has worked nonstop since the days of the silent pictures. De Oliveira also directed most of his important films after the age of 80. At a press conference following the screening he announced that he was writing his next film. Suspecting that the film would be about death, I wondered whether de Oliveira felt the way Chaplin felt when he turned 80, saying he was like a man condemned to capital punishment. But it was clear from the film that de Oliveira sees death, by contrast, as an opportunity to free the spirit. He is in better health than Chaplin was at 80, and this no doubt contributes to his positive outlook. The film, shot on a small budget in the course of only one month, is based on a script de Oliveira wrote in 1952 which has been updated, introducing topics like climate change and the global economic crisis. Unlike most feature films, it has no plot in the usual sense. Rather it resembles a poem or a painting. Set in the Duoro valley, it is the story of the photographer Isaac (the director's grandson and regular lead, Trêpa), who lives and develops his photos in a hotel room. One night Isaac is asked to photograph the deceased bride Angelica (López de Ayala), the daughter of a rich family, before her burial the next morning. He does. But while he works, and again when he develops the pictures, Angelica opens her eyes and smiles at him. Isaac speaks to no one of this, but he becomes obsessed with Angelica. He attends the funeral but is too late for the burial and when he gets there the cemetary is already closed. He goes about his life, but thinking of nothing else. At the hotel, during dinner, the boarders talk of current world crises, but Isaac is completely silent. At night he dreams that Angelina comes to him and carries him away -- they fly in a tour of the river: de Oliveira's first ever digital sequence, and a brilliant achievement to boot. He awakes crying, "My God! Why all this?" In the morning, once again he makes his way to the cemetary; once again it is closed. He runs towards the olive groves, where he falls unconscious and is carried to his room. He is completely silent while the doctor is checking him; suddenly he gets up and falls dead before the window. Angelica appears at the window, and we see her taking him and ascending while his body remains on the floor. De Oliveira, who made his first film, Duoro, in 1931, started his artistic career as a painter and sculptor; and every frame of his new film is a work of art whether it is executed in black and white or in colour -- often framed by a window in the actual set -- displaying the influence of Chagal, with humans and angels coexisting. The camera seldom moves except in the descriptive scenes. In the present film de Oliveira returns to the setting of his first film, celebrating not only this part of Portugal but of nature in general. It is a powerful statement on the beauty of nature and love and song, a celebration of working by hand -- Isaac's photographic technique reveals him to be something of a luddite -- and, more generally, a rejection of the Machine. The relation of the soundtrack to the film is dialectical, with the sources of various sounds not always appearing on the screen while they are heard. The film opens and closes with the same panoramic view of the valley by night, a shot frequently repeated while the cycle suggesting intense awareness of the Hereafter -- of love, death, the power of creativity to bring them closer and closer, and the transience of life in the hotel of life -- is slowly completed.
