Cannes 2011 highlights: Woody Allen, Lynne Ramsay, the Dardennes Brothers and more

By Kevin Lally

FJI contributor Daniel Steinhart offers the first of several dispatches from the 2011 Cannes Film Festival.

The Cannes Film Festival is many things to many people. For some journalists, programmers and distributors, Cannes is the preeminent showcase of international cinema. For producers, sales agents and film offices, the festival is a bustling film market. For celebrity hunters and those just wanting to be seen, Cannes is the place to be. Perhaps French director Agns Varda put it best: "Cannes is both the pinnacle of cinema, a film fair and a big, slightly vulgar bazaar." Whatever it is, Cannes is back, running May 12-22.

Since the early days of the festival, Cannes has had an ambivalent relationship with Hollywood, at times oppositional (promoting an alternative to the industry), but more often symbiotic (tapping Hollywood for attention-grabbing premieres and celebrities). So in a way, it was fitting that the festival opened with Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, a Franco-American collaboration that recalls postwar Hollywood films such as Moulin Rouge, Funny Face and Gigi. Like these pictures, Allen's new film captures the City of Light while paying homage to French culture. Gil Pender (Owen Wilson), an American screenwriter turned novelist travels to Paris with his uptight fiance (Rachel McAdams). Smitten with the city, he takes to late-night flnerie, which (SPOILERS afoot!) transports him back to 1920s Paris, where he meets a who's who of the Lost Generation (Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein) and begins to reevaluate his life.

This is a film of cameos: real-life celebrity cameos (France's First Lady Carla Bruni), historical celebrity cameos (Cole Porter), and celebrity playing celebrity cameos (Adrien Brody as Salvador Dali). But not just a mere gimmick, these appearances make up a solid comedy of foils, in which these figures bring Gil's foibles into relief. Insecure about his prose, he seeks advice from a cocksure Hemingway. And uncertain if he should reveal to a charming artist's model (Marion Cotillard) that he's from a different time and place, he raises the issue with Dali, Buuel and Man Ray, who mistake him for a fellow surrealist. The amusing results feel a bit like a cultured all-star talk-therapy session.

Much has been made in the press about last year's absence of films by female directors in the main competition and this year's stronger showing (four out of 20 films). Kicking off the competition was novelist-turned-director Julia Leigh's Sleeping Beauty, a venture into the dark side of sexuality about an Aussie college student named Lucy, who takes a job letting men have their way with her body while she's sedated. Unfolding like a nightmarish fairy tale, the film takes an oblique strategy to storytelling, giving the audience only the barest of details: We see her juggling multiple jobs, frequenting a high-end bar where she may or may not prostitute herself, and visiting her sick friend Birdman. By design, the fragments don't make up a cohesive whole or an easy answer for why she takes up her deviant trade (aside from the easy money), but they do create an evocative mystery, in which the details�a medical experiment, narcotics, a berry tree�resonate through repetition. The film is also a study in the loss of agency as we see Lucy relinquish control of her body, an act that implicates our own viewing.

It was with great interest that Scottish director Lynne Ramsay offered We Need to Talk About Kevin, her first film in nine years. With two excellent features (Ratcatcher and Morvern Callar) to her name, her new movie re-confirms her status as a first-class filmmaker. An adaptation of Lionel Shriver's novel, Kevin explores the relationship between a mother (a very good Tilda Swinton) and her son, who's accused of carrying out a high-school murder spree. Jumping back and forth between past and present, the film examines whether this veritable demon child is a product of nature or nurture. Rendered in expressive Pop Art colors and carefully composed widescreen images, the film depicts parenting as a fever dream.

A different sort of parent-child relationship is explored by the ever-reliable Dardenne Brothers, who revisit familiar territory with Le gamin au vlo. Coming off like a sequel to their Palme d'Or winner L'enfant, the film follows a boy who, in the process of trying to track down the father that abandoned him, is taken in by a hairdresser, who tries her best to tame this wild child. From film to film, the Dardennes have become so good at eliciting and capturing gutsy physical performances and developing scenes of unexpected suspense and emotion that I can't help but think there's something a little rote in what they're doing. Still, any Dardenne film is welcome one.

Following up his war movie Beaufort, Israeli director Joseph Cedar presented combat of another kind with Footnote. In the rarefied world of Talmudic Studies, an academic superstar has long surpassed the modest accomplishments of his professor father, a source of tension between the two. But when the father is awarded the illustrious Israel Prize for his research, the egos and rivalries of father and son come to a head. Against a background of shadowy libraries, cramped windowless offices and clandestine committee meetings, Cedar stages the film like a taut intrigue picture, in which research claims become territorial fights capable of ripping apart family ties.

Alongside the main competition has been the Un Certain Regard sidebar, which opened with Gus Vant Sant's Restless, a minor work that returns the director to the role of journeyman. Here, he's at the service of performance and a twee script about a romance between a girl dying of cancer and an orphaned boy with an imaginary friend. In look and feel, this seems like run-of-the-mill Sundance fare.

For this stringer, the standout of the sidebar has been the Mexican film Miss Bala from director Gerardo Naranjo. When Laura, an aspiring Miss Baja California, witnesses an execution-style massacre, she finds herself coerced into assisting a violent gang. For the film's entire running time, Laura is shuttled from one vehicle to another, from one crooked plot to the next, always hunted down whenever she tries to escape. The film elicits both surprise and suspense by planting us within Laura's experience. We know as much as she does, so that the murky layers of corruption induce paranoia at every turn. And when gun battles break out�often shot in bravura long takes�we, like Laura, see the action from the floor of a truck or from under a bed. The effect is both visceral and harrowing.

The film ends with a coda about the toll that Mexico's ongoing drug wars have taken on its population, a point that raises another function of Cannes: that of a diplomatic forum. Playing to packed rooms of international journalists, topical films can spread their message in ways that even some rights groups might have trouble doing.

FJI contributor Jon Frosch is also reporting from Cannes. Check out his blog here.