In a Bunker on the C

By RICHARD CORLISS

Surly spirits at Cannes when the film festival loses fizz

Heaven knows they tried. The burghers of Cannes spent more than $50 million erecting a new palace to house the convocation. The national TV networks sprayed coverage of the event all over prime time, with Jerry Lewis commenting on the news one night, a line of topless lovelies parading their charms another. Even the Cannes medical students chipped in; angered by the French government's proposed restrictions on their curriculum, they enlivened one afternoon with a bonfire of Michelin tires and an occupation of the palace that ended with flying fists and tear gas.

Still, nothing could keep the 36th International Film Festival--the world's largest and most glamorous meeting of movie professionals--from developing a giant, 13-day hangover. Last year Cannes sailed through sunny weather and provocative films to a memorable festival, capped by a rapturous reception for the world premiere of Steven Spielberg's E.T. At this year's meeting, some 35,000 of the faithful staggered through chills and intermittent rain, through failures of organization and not a few fiascoes onscreen.

The top prizes were determined by a jury headed by Novelist William Styron, who got the job in the course of the French government's conference on Creation and Development held last February in Paris. The award reflected a retreat to the ordinary concerns of cinema. Last year's Palme d'Or winners, Missing from the U.S. and Yol from Turkey, played like news bulletins from Third World battlegrounds. This year's winner, Shohei Imamura's The Ballad of Narayama, is a harshly elemental lyric about Japanese mountain folk that could have been made any time in the past three decades. Two survivors of the international film wars won special consolations, Grand Prize for Cinema Creation: France's Robert Bresson for L 'Argent, a lucid, listless parable about how money corrupts, and the Russian Andrei Tarkovsky for Nostalgia, an agonizing stylistic exercise about a Soviet intellectual in Italy. Monty Python's the Meaning of Life won the Special Jury Prize. At the closing-night ceremony, Python Terry Jones thanked the jury members by name and quipped, "Your money is behind the wash basin." This was the first year since 1967 that no American film won a single jury prize, thus ensuring the cynicism of the huge U.S. contingent.

Some of the malaise could be attributed to birth pains of the Palais des Festivals, a new brutalist slab that opened its doors after five years of construction delays. Unlike the older, airier Palais, the new building invited nothing but business, despite the exertions of Veteran Starlet Edy Williams, who would display herself whether anyone asked her to or not.

The new Palais did afford increased seating for citizens of Cannes, who contribute a third of the festival's $1.3 million annual budget and reap many more millions of tourist dollars. The gentry could be generous to films from abroad, including Martin Ritt's U.S. entry Cross Creek, a dewy-eyed swamp drama starring Mary Steenburgen as Novelist Marjorie Rawlings, and Carlos Saura's dance film, Carmen. But for the four French films in competition--Jean Becker's One Deadly Summer, Patrice Chereau's The Wounded Man, Jean-Jacques Beineix's The Moon in the Gutter and even Bresson's L'Argent--the locals saved their special scorn. At the end of each of these films the crowd whistled derisively and stomped their feet. When Bresson, 81, appeared onstage closing night, he was bombarded with boos. L'Argent at least had its partisans among the critics. Beineix, whose 1981 film Diva had become a popular success in France, was not so lucky with The Moon in the Gutter, a moody melodrama about a dockworker obsessed with his sister's death.

Its star, Gerard Depardieu, had lambasted the film even before it played the festival: "The moon is in the gutter, but the movie is in the sewer." At the most vituperative Cannes press conference in memory, Beineix, flanked by his female leads Nastassia Kinski and Victoria Abril, gave as good as he got. "They are called moving pictures, not text," he argued. "My film is a symphony of images."

While Beineix was dodging or tossing custard pies in the main competition, three other directors--all women, all in their 30s--were earning praise outside it. Boat People by Ann Hui of Hong Kong was withdrawn from competition, reportedly at the insistence of the French government, which is seeking to solidify its relations with the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam. The caution is understandable: this film, shot partly in mainland China, is a powerful piece of humanist propaganda about a family trying to escape Da Nang three years after the U.S. forces evacuated Viet Nam.

In Coup de Foudre, French Film Maker Diane Kurys (Peppermint Soda) etched an acute, critical portrait of her own family in the early 1950s and drew splendid performances from Miou-Miou, Isabelle Huppert and Guy Marchand. Chantal Akerman, a Belgian director whose monumental minimalist soap opera, the 1975 Jeanne Dielman, has made her queen of the European film avantgarde, confounded all expectations with a sprightly, witty musical called The '80s. The Cannes audience came to snooze and stayed to cheer.

Alas, these minor revelations--and two marvelously vigorous films from old masters, Italy's Ermanno Olmi (Camminacammina) and Poland's Andrzej Wajda (Danton)--were not enough to keep businessmen and journalists from grousing, as they lolled for a fortnight in one of the world's lushest garden spots. Nor will a disappointing festival keep these congenital optimists from returning next year to this bunker on the Cote d'Azur. -- By Richard Corliss This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.