Cannes Best Director Refn propels stylish action with 'Drive'

By Kevin Lally

FJI correspondent Daniel Steinhart concludes his series of reports on thehighlights of the 2011 Cannes Film Festival.

What at one point felt like the Cannes edition that would be remembered for Lars von Trier's "I'm a Nazi" comments will more likely be remembered as the year that Terrence Malick's ambitious The Tree of Life walked off with the Palme d'Or. True to form, the resolutely public-shy director wasn't on hand to accept the award at the closing ceremony, further enshrouding the film and its maker in mystery. Headed by president Robert De Niro, the competition jury spread the prizes widely across divergent work.

The Dardenne Brothers' The Kid with a Bike and Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Once Upon a Time in Anatolia split the Grand Prix, a gesture that brought attention to a pair of worthy films that were at risk of being overshadowed by the peculiarities of this year's edition. By mid-festival, appreciation of The Kid with a Bike seemed to dissipate amongst movies about planets forming and colliding and von Trier running off at the mouth.

Scheduled as the penultimate film in competition when festival fatigue had set in, Ceylan's strong but glacially paced police procedural was a challenge at nearly two hours and 40 minutes. But it's a sensitive work about power, the rules of conduct and life on the steppe, shot in painterly widescreen. The movie also contains one of the most striking scenes of any competition film, in which an angelic mayor's daughter serves tea by candlelight to an investigative team, reducing the accused to tears. In addition, Mawenn's overstuffed Poliss won the Jury Prize, which felt more like a token award.

The Best Actress Prize was granted to Kirsten Dunst for her unraveling in von Trier's Melancholia, which also stood as the vindication of an actress who risked becoming collateral damage to the director's "persona non grata" status. Frenchman Jean Dujardin claimed the Best Actor Prize for his silent performance in Michel Hazanavicius' The Artist, a crowd-pleasing and often clever homage to Hollywood's transition-to-sound era.

Joseph Cedar's Footnote deservedly took home the Best Screenwriting Award for its father-son character study, which injects the world of Talmudic Studies with all the intrigue of a taut thriller. Finally, the Best Director Award was given to Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn for his assured hand in Drive, one of the great pleasures of the festival.

With its pedal to the metal, the abstract crime film arrived like a muscle car. As good movies often should, the beginning economically lays out the rules of story and style. A getaway driver (Ryan Gosling) arranges a heist job by phone. Without a word, he picks up two masked burglars and eludes the police with amazing stealth. All the while, a Los Angeles Clippers game plays on the radio, a seemingly incidental detail that eventually pays dividends. By the time the opening credits roll, we know we're in the hands of expert driving, direction and screenwriting. From here, the film tracks the Driver, who, by day, works as a mechanic and stuntman and, at night, a wheelman. When he helps out an ex-con who moves back in with the neighbor he's fallen for (Carey Mulligan), the Driver finds himself chased down by the mob. Although based on a 2006 novel, the film recalls several car action movies from the 1970s, above all Walter Hill's The Driver, another Los Angeles-set caper about a getaway man known only as the Driver.

One of the pulpiest of contemporary European filmmakers, Refn has taken on drug dealers, prisoners and Vikings. With Drive, the director-for-hire works in similarly lurid territory, but here his characteristic bravado transforms into a cool confidence matched by the Driver's calm, most apparent during the near-wordless, smoldering scenes between Gosling and Mulligan. But Refn is also capable of unleashing moments of virtuosity, such as car chases and a love-cum-fight scene staged in an elevator that becomes a master class in tonal shifts.

It's curious that this film was selected for the competition, not that it didn't deserve to be; it did. But Drive recalls the B-westerns and crime pictures that Hollywood churned out in the '40s and '50s and then the artful action program movies of the '70s and '80s. Perhaps now that Hollywood has focused more of its attention on tentpoles instead of smaller genre work, these kinds of films are finding a home in the festival world. But the French have always recognized Hollywood's "low art"�often made by Europeans�and elevated them to "high-art" status.

Another vision of the United States through the lens of a European came from Italian director PaoloSorrentino's This Must Be the Place, an uneven mix of road movie, revenge tale and rock film (music and cameo by David Byrne). The film tells the improbable story of Cheyenne (Sean Penn), a retired American rock star living in Dublin with his firefighter wife (Frances McDormand). With the death of his Jewish father, he sets off across the mythic space of America to hunt down his dad's Nazi tormentor.

As with his previous films The Family Friend and Il Divo, Sorrentino builds an extravagant tapestry around a grotesque figure suffering from a kind of arrested development. Here, the character evokes various true-life aging rock stars: the glam styling of The Cure's Robert Smith, the haggard physicality of Ozzy Osbourne, and, probably inadvertently, the biography of Kiss' Gene Simmons, an Israeli-born son of a Holocaust survivor. Penn gives a strange and alienating performance, full of ticks, giggles and feeble mannerisms. Fascinating in their eccentricity, both acting and film ultimately are in need of being reined in.

In the Un Certain Regard sidebar, the jury, headed by Serbian filmmaker Emir Kusturica, split its main prize between Kim Ki-duk's Arirang and Andreas Dresen's Stopped on Track (the latter I missed.) In Arirang, the Korean Kim presents a quasi-fictionalized video diary of his retreat from a prolific directing career into a reclusive existence, in which he drinks, sings and works through his "director's block." What some called brave and others tediously self-indulgent, the film stands as a naked portrait of failure. The Special Jury Prize was given to Russian filmmaker Andrey Zvyagintsev's well-observed Elena, about the lengths that a mother will go to support her children.

The Directing Prize went to Mohammad Rasoulof for his B omid didar, a claustrophobic portrait of a woman subjected to and trying to escape from the heavy hand of Iranian authority. Critical of the Iranian regime, Rasoulof and colleague Jafar Panahi, whose newest work This Is Not a Film was snuck out of Iran to play the festival, have been sentenced to six years' imprisonment and banned for 20 from producing films and leaving the country. These two directors' presence onscreen and absence off were sobering contrasts to the dissonance of Cannes, where one often moves from watching serious-minded, harrowing films out into the circus of the sunny Croisette. The work and lives of these filmmakers brought home that in some corners of the world, what happens on-screen and off can have a direct and devastating impact on each other.