A Celebration of Reel Life

Sylvester Stallone

Hollywood, Calif.

Dear Sly,

We missed you here on the Cote d'Azur. The Cannes Film Festival thrives on glamour and muscle, and the expected appearance of Rocky-Rambo at the 39th installment could have provided both. It matters little that you may never have intended to show up. French commentators spoke scornfully of American stars so cowed by the paranoia blitz of the U.S. media that they refused to visit one of the world's swankiest resort towns, sip champagne kirs, scarf down strawberries the size of winesap apples and be treated like pashas in a mythical movie monarchy. Too rough for Rambo? C'est dommage.

The French had their revenge. First they ordained that the Cannes fortnight, cold and wet the past two years, would be blessed with picture-postcard days and balmy nights. Then, realizing they could not report on your presence, they determined to invent it. The festival's hottest rumor had you lounging incognito at a beyond-posh hotel down the coast. Finally, the festival jury, headed by U.S. Director Sydney Pollack, reversed a recent trend of awarding its top prize to a European art film and bestowed the Palme d'Or on an Anglo- American epic called The Mission --just the sort of lumbering white elephant most esteemed by the Hollywood moguls who finked out and stayed home.

As you may have heard, you weren't the only no-show at Cannes. Libyan commandos took two weeks off, and the only bombs here were on the screen. If there were any terrorists in town, they must have spent their days on the Carlton beach and their evenings dining at three-star restaurants, and are now, no doubt, back home trying to explain a bloated expense account to Abu Nidal. Meanwhile, the Cannes constabulary hovered inconspicuously and frisked all moviegoers, with special attention to attractive young women. This was a party, not a wake. On the festival's opening day one TV network showed a local motorcade headed by eleven policemen balanced pyramid-style on their speeding cycles. Right this way, folks, the circus is in town.

A more dexterous turn was performed by Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, the Israeli-born moviemakers who run the Cannon Group. In Hollywood, of course, Golan and Globus are still thought of as a crass act, even though they recently signed you, Sly, to a $12 million movie deal. In Cannes they are seen as little guys who made good--the patron saints of every "independent producer" hustling nonexistent pictures from his tiny hotel room. So here is Menahem summoning the press to announce, "I have good news for you. We didn't buy anything today." There is Yoram telling a TV interviewer of his passion for movies: "I wake up with cinema, I eat cinema, I sleep with cinema." By the end of the festival, Golan had won no prizes, inspired a barrage of Menock-knock jokes and boasted that Cannon had done $100 million worth of business at Cannes. Imagine if it were real money.

They show movies here too--a thousand or so for every conceivable taste. As an actor who tests himself spiritually as well as physically with every role, you would have appreciated Alain Cavalier's Therese, the austere yet accessible biography of St. Therese Martin. As the auteur of Staying Alive, you would have been impressed by the cinematic virtuosity of Andrei Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice, an end-of-the-world antidrama in which all the excitement is in the composition of images, the balletry of actors and camera, the surprise of lighting, the big crazy fire at the climax. As a sympathetic director of women (who could ever forget Adrian's birth scene in Rocky II?) you might be appalled by Bertrand Blier's Tenue de Soiree, a raucous romantic farce in which Macho Thief Gerard Depardieu gets the raging hots for Winsome Wimp Michel Blanc, and they both end up in drag. Still, the film is so ingenuous and vigorous that even an ardent feminist like yourself might surrender to its skewed charm.

All three pictures were contenders for the grand prize, and Tarkovsky, a Soviet emigre who lay ill with cancer in a Paris hospital, was the emotional favorite. But the jury was moved by different emotions. The Mission is a $23 million epic, starring Robert De Niro and Jeremy Irons, made by a powerful producer (David Puttnam of Chariots of Fire and The Killing Fields) and financed by a company (Goldcrest) on the brink of bankruptcy. Set in 18th century Peru, it is a parable of 20th century liberation theology, of religious imperialists (the noble Jesuits) vs. economic imperialists (the venal Spanish and Portuguese). And from first scene to last, it is dead in the water--a logorrheic tale of heroic masochism in which the good guys all wear designer hair shirts.

Presumably, the Cannes jury did like The Mission. To Tarkovsky's defenders, though, it seemed a demonstration that in Cannes 1986 as in Peru 1755, materialists could still defeat champions of the spirit. Even in the movie business, reality is ever intervening. Throughout the festival, the $6 million ship built for Roman Polanski's Pirates stood gallantly in the Cannes harbor, a toy boat of CinemaScope dimensions. On the day after the festival ended, it was joined by a bigger ship: the aircraft carrier U.S.S. America from the Sixth Fleet, fresh from its raid on Libya. The circus has left town, and real- life Rambos have arrived. You'd go for it, Sly.

As ever,

Richard Corliss