By Nick Davis on May 17, Three years ago, I launched a springtime tradition of revisiting a past Cannes, gathering every film I could find from each section of the festival and watching them in the order of their initial unveiling. The sheer, Herzogian pleasures of monomaniacal zeal also allow for a gratifying completism: you can survey a film festival much more comprehensively in retrospect than you ever can in real time.
Each viewing confirms some reactions I had when I first saw some of the films but alters others. Even better, I discover a huge sampling of titles, eclectic in genre and nationality, that previously eluded me and barely registered in published reportage. This May, I embarked upon a 30th-anniversary return to Cannes , which bears two chief claims to fame. Even in its homeland, though, the movie never made the leap to disc.
The gender politics are far from progressive, but the gutsy synthesizing of ancient lore and cutting-edge photography is quite sophisticated. Already he evinces a knack for subtle but potent ironies, starting and ending his knotty plot of embattled loves and family rivalries with two visits from a UN truck to the same rural village, providing not enough rice to too many people.
The main story, then, is both an engrossing melodrama rendered in unpretentious images and a secondary concern amid a basic quest for individual and regional survival.
Other entrants in the festival have not retained their initial dazzle. Its three-part story, about a medical student who becomes a Communist apparatchik, an underground resistor, and an apolitical equivocator in three versions of the same life-trajectory, is handsomely shot and politically trenchant.
