By Steve Zeitchik
CANNES (Hollywood Reporter) - For anyone numbed by the
endless stream of political films in recent years, the past two
weeks in Cannes have offered a response. The trend is over. And
it's not.
The films screened on the Croisette ranged widely in
quality, tone and theme. But except for "Adoration," Canadian
filmmaker Atom Egoyan's drama with a suicide-bomber subplot
(one of the film's few weak points), the festival's biggest
selections were free of forced topicality.
Instead, a new type of political film emerged -- one that's
more ambitious, subtle and, potentially, more commercial. Best
of all, this new class addresses the rickety and charged state
of the world without appearing to do so.
From "Che" to "Changeling," in movies as disparate as Ari
Folman's animated Israeli documentary "Waltz With Bashir" and
the visceral IRA docudrama "Hunger," these new films follow a
pattern: the maverick or crusader revolted by a system who in
turn revolts against it.
"Changeling's" Christine Collins (Angelina Jolie) suffers
the trauma of a missing child only to turn her rage into a
one-woman crusade against corrupt Los Angeles authorities.
Argentinean Che Guevara (Benicio Del Toro) succeeds in an armed
communist revolt in Cuba, while in Bolivia he hopes "our
failure will inspire others." In "Bashir," Folman tries to
change the present by understanding his past, setting out to
recover memories he'd blacked out as an Israeli solder in the
Israel-Lebanon war of 1982. Jailed IRA icon Bobby Sands in
Steve McQueen's "Hunger," brutally beaten by jailhouse guards,
acts through inaction; he embarks on a hunger strike that
amounts to a slow-burn suicide to ignite the next generation of
rebels.
None of these films mentions Iraq or the modern political
world explicitly. They don't need to. By examining such
subjects as military unrest, totalitarianism and power's
tendency to corrupt, the parallels are everywhere. These are
the same themes, after all, inherent in such movies as
"Rendition," "Stop-Loss," "No End in Sight" and countless other
contemporary takes: Characters inhabit a world in which they
are frustrated by the decisions of their leaders and their own
inability to do anything about it.
But in this new crop, characters do a lot less despairing
and a lot more mobilizing, often to great effect (if also at
great personal cost). You don't have to agree with all the
ideologies or causes to feel moved by the stuff.
Crusader pictures are nothing new, of course. Elia Kazan
was making them a half-century ago, and since then movies from
"Gandhi" to "Erin Brockovich" -- along with filmmakers like Ken
Loach -- have portrayed the underdog's struggle against the
status quo.
