Cast: Anouk Aimée, Maximilian Schell, Greta Scacchi, Ron Silver, Jenny Gabrielle, Zack Norman, Peter Bogdanovich, Camilla Campanale
Director: Henry Jaglom
Producer: John Goldstone
Screenplay: Henry Jaglom
Cinematography: Hanania Baer
Music: Gaili Schoen
U.S. Distributor: Paramount Classics
The experience of attending a film festival is a unique and surreal one. For a little more than a week, you step out of the realm of reality and enter a fantasyland, where days and nights are spent sitting in theater seats, taking short trips into the worlds of others' creation. The festival experience is an immersive one; it takes an event of the magnitude of September 11 to shatter it. Festival in Cannes, the latest film from indie director Henry Jaglom (Last Summer in the Hamptons), transports us to the 1999 Cannes Film Festival and gives us a taste of what it's like to be there. In crafting an insider's perspective, Jaglom has done an effective job. It's too bad that nearly everything else fails.
Of the hundreds of film festivals that take place every year, Cannes is clearly the most prestigious (although not necessarily the best). Jaglom starts off Festival in Cannes with a montage of black-and-white photographs featuring some of the stars to have appeared at the festival in years past. It's a nice touch that, if only for a moment, causes a pleasurable pang of nostalgia. Faces like those of Grace Kelly, Charlie Chaplin, and Alfred Hitchcock stir memories. After this brief prologue, however, the film moves to the present, and that's where things start falling apart.
Jaglom's style is to invent a bunch of characters, hire actors to play them, drop them into a real setting, and let them improvise their dialogue. There's not much of a plot, so there's no need for a beginning or ending. At their best, Jaglom's films are talky-but-intriguing affairs featuring genuine-seeming characters. Festival in Cannes is not Jaglom at his best. The characters are uninteresting stereotypes, the dialogue is trite, and the subject matter is explored only on a superficial level. Jaglom wants to make a statement about the war between commercialism and art in the film world, but his brush strokes are clumsy and broad. Compared to Robert Altman's The Player, which had a similar agenda, this is a feeble effort.
Festival in Cannes is an ensemble affair featuring six significant parts. Alice Parker (Gretta Scacchi) is an actress who has come to Cannes hoping to find someone willing to produce a film she has written. That person may be Caz (Zack Norman), a slick-talking con man who's trying to get into movie production. Alice is targeting French icon Millie Marquand (Anouk Aimée) as her leading lady, but Millie is also being wooed by big-time Hollywood producer Rick Yorkin (Ron Silver), who wants her to play The Mother in his new Tom Hanks movie. Millie's husband, a brooding director named Victor Kovner (Maximilian Schell), initially advises her to go with her heart, then changes his mind when Rick offers him the director's job on the Hanks film. Meanwhile, ingenue Blue (Jenny Gabrielle) becomes the sensation of the festival when her performance in the independent film Fire draws raves, and Rick seeks her out, trying to get her signature on a contract.
The acting is variable. Gretta Scacchi and Ron Silver acquit themselves well, seeming comfortable with Jaglom's relaxed, improvised approach. However, Anouk Aimée (who is probably best known for her role opposite Jean-Louis Trintignant in Claude Lelouch's 1966 classic, A Man and a Woman) gives an awkward, stilted performance. Zack Norman steals his share of scenes as the fawning and energetic Caz. The forced nature of Jenny Gabrielle's work indicates why she hasn't appeared in anything else. Festival in Cannes features a few cameos, including Faye Dunaway and William Shatner as themselves, but I would have expected more from a movie made in the midst of so much star wattage.
Aside from the scenery, which is gorgeous, and the "being there" perspective, there's not a whole lot to recommend the film. There are occasional moments when Festival in Cannes shines, but getting to them requires sitting through a lot of dull, meaningless chatter. The experience of going to a film festival is a rewarding one; the experiencing of sampling one through this movie is not.
© 2002 James Berardinelli