At Cannes, the Boats Take a Bow
And the Festival Flicks Are Borne Back Ceaselessly Into the Past

By William Booth
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 22, 2008

CANNES, France, May 21 -- After dark, the swells go to parties aboard the superyachts, whose wide sterns, like oversize rumps, wiggle against the stone quay of the port, jostling for attention. Intimate dinners with just friends up in the hills above town? Not this crowd, mon cher. Invisibility is not the point.

So the other night guests aboard billionaire investor and four-time married man Ronald Perelman's 187-foot megayacht, the Ultima III, were wandering around his third story, the "Sun Deck," admiring the hot tub, feeling pretty good about things, like the bottomless gnocchi, the crates of champagne and Barry Diller, who arrived wearing a navy blue caftany thing -- and pulled it off. Then they notice. Ahoy there? The boat berthed right alongside. It is bigger and has a hot tub and a swimming pool. It cannot be denied. That one is just more mega. And suddenly, a palpable longing, to be aboard the Ultima IV. (Build her, and we will come.)

And so goes the Cannes Film Festival, where this year a round of polite applause greets a slate composed mostly of very okay movies. There are no unmitigated disasters (yet), but no films that have people jabbering like zoo monkeys at feeding time. It's like a classroom filled with B+ students, who study too hard. There's just something . . . missing.

Perhaps it is the Riviera, where it has been drizzling. Perhaps it is seeing Indiana Jones fleeing a mushroom cloud. That is disconcerting. Perhaps is it the weak dollar, which is getting sand kicked in its face by the bully euro. But it's not like the price of gas is getting the Canners down. Some of the film financing people here from the Emirates own smallish nations that sell oil.

During the daylight hours, Clint Eastwood appears at a news conference in the Palais, with just-about-to-pop Angelina Jolie by his side, here for the release of "The Exchange" or "Changeling" (they can't decide). His new film relates a true tale of a missing child, snatched from the mean streets of Los Angeles in 1928, when City Hall and the police force (surprise) were a sewer of wretched corruption. After months with no leads, a child is returned to Mother Jolie -- case solved! -- but you see it is not her real son. The police suggest she keep the kid on "a trial basis." So Jolie suffers. Jolie rallies. The police lock her up in the nuthouse.

Some critics are calling it the best performance of her career.

Clint squints into the bright lights of the cameras, and when Eastwood squints -- do you feel lucky, punk? -- thoughts turn to yesteryear. A reporter asks are the rumors true, will he return as Dirty Harry?

"That rumor is incorrect," Eastwood says.

Then Jolie says, "I am!"

Eastwood: "As Dirty Harriet."

(Everyone goes heheheheh. But on the dais you could almost sense producer Brian Grazer thinking: That could work.)

"Certain things you have to be realistic about," Eastwood continues. "Dirty Harry would not be on the police department at my age." Eastwood turns 78 next week.

Certain things you have to be realistic about. There you go. The Cannes Film Festival is looking back, sorting it all out, being realistic. This isn't about young, brash, new. This is the year of longing, of the nostalgia trip. Is it just us, or is everyone except Shia LaBeouf in the Indiana Jones movie pushing 70? The zeitgeist: memory lane.

For example, there's the well-liked "Waltz With Bashir" from Israeli director Ari Folman, an animated documentary about his service in the military during the massacres at the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon -- in 1982. Marina Zenovich is here with her HBO documentary about Roman Polanski and his statutory rape case. It's riveting. It also happened 30 years ago. The egomaniacal wildman and Bosnian director Emir Kusturica came to Cannes with his film about Argentine soccer god Diego Maradona, who was huge in the 1986 World Cup (and not dull in retirement, as the anti-globalist, Pepsi-promoting, cocaine-addicted talk show host and Hugo Ch¿vez pal).

A Cannes of third acts, no? James Toback brought Mike Tyson back in his documentary about "the baddest man on the planet." The former undisputed heavyweight champion and convicted felon has put on a couple of quarter pounders. At the premiere, he stood on the stage, a big man in a big bag of a suit, his fists by his sides, like idle hammers. He looked like a dangerous bowling ball.

Tyson, also executive producer, explains his participation in the doc. "I was on my way to a rehab meeting when Jimmy called and told me let's do the movie. I thought it would be a bootleg and probably I'd get a few dollars and I'd be satisfied with that." After the showing, there is a standing O. Tyson appears moved by the embrace. In a soft, lispy voice, he says: "I'm an athlete and not used to anything like this. Never had a response like this. I'm very humbled to be here. I can't believe Jim elicited all of this out of me."

What Toback got from Tyson is a sense of how fear and ferocity battle for Tyson's tormented soul. The fight footage shows a young Tyson destroying his opponents in explosive, fast, deadly accurate fury. On camera, Tyson chokes up about his homicidal rage. "I was shocked to the degree to which fear has played a central role in his life," says Toback later over a plate of buffet lunch. "It's clearly the motivating fact of his life."

Also here for Cannes (pronounced here with lowbrow vowels, like can of beer, not faux-fancy cahhn): Woody Allen, who got on an airplane, a rarity, to be here for his "Vicky Cristina Barcelona." Allen muse Scarlett Johansson, Pen¿lope Cruz and Javier Bardem star in Allen's fluffy puppy of a romantic comedy about this crazy thing called love and why sometimes it just makes sense to have a m¿nage ¿ trois with Pen¿lope Cruz. Asked at a news conference, was a Woody Allen sandwich not the object of the director's rich fantasy life, Allen says, "It is hard enough to get one person in bed."

Later, Allen comes by the Hotel Martinez to chat with a table of reporters on the veranda. He is dressed in his high-water pants and an antique belt, his gray hair askew, but he seems relatively calm. "I always find it very pretty and very hectic and sort of amusing in the rigidity of the ritual here."

He adds, "I started coming when I got married." To Soon-Yi in 1997. "Because my wife likes to travel. You could take her to anything. The volcano, the earthquake in China. She'll go anyplace. She loves to use any opportunity to travel." So he was happy to accept the Cannes invite, bring the children, keep the wife happy. "But I'm a firm believer that me sitting around saying how great the film is or how challenging it was working in Spain doesn't mean anything to anybody, and they don't come and see the film because of that. There's some inexplicable reason why they come or stay away. They make their own preconscious decision."

Well, it helps if the movies are good.

Back aboard the Ultima III, there's a low-key vibe among the invited guests, who tilt toward movie muscle -- producers, backers, buyers -- with a little pixie dust of celebrity, such as Goldie Hawn and Christian Slater, who is everywhere.

Host Perelman, formerly Mr. Ellen Barkin, comes by to check on us. So unlike the rest of Cannes, he's not looking for press. Just the opposite. "So the next time I get in trouble," he says, "you're the one I call to keep it out of the papers."