Much was made in the run-up to Cannes 2009 of the fact that Isabelle Huppert was only the fourth woman to be appointed president of the jury in the festival’s 60-year history. Don’t get me wrong – I’m a confirmed Huppert cheerleader, but nevertheless I was disappointed that more of a fuss wasn’t made, by the same token, about the skew-whiff balance of the professions represented by the men and women jurors. Of her female predecessors, Huppert has in common with Liv Ullman and Jeanne Moreau her reputation as an actress, and as a muse to male directors. Writer Françoise Sagan, who led the jury in 1979, was the notable exception.
This hit home all the more when I got my paws on the official festival programme (adorned with the poster image of a mysterious femme fatale-type gazing, back to the viewer, out of an open window – yawn) and flicked through to find a rather odd pattern emerging… photos of sometimes dapper, often bespectacled, weathered-but-wise looking blokes alternated with über-glam (oddly, all sans spectacles) headshots of their female counterparts. A speedy headcount confirmed my suspicions: of the four official juries at Cannes – Competition, Cinefondation and Shorts, Un Certain Regard and Camera D’Or – while the gender balance was pretty even numbers-wise, there were eight male directors across the jurors’ board, to only one woman director, Sandrine Ray (or two, if you factor in Asia Argento, best-known as an actress, and whose attempts to follow in her fathers’ directing shoes are, to date, best left unmentioned).
Sadly, that ratio is almost generous by industry standards, as the stubborn statistic that women only make up 6% of directors persists. It’s against the odds, then, that some of the festival’s critical and popular hits came from women filmmakers; most notably Jane Campion’s Bright Star and Fish Tank, for which Andrea Arnold deservedly scooped the Jury Prize on Sunday. Despite Campion, famously the only woman ever to win the Palme D’Or, exhorting her female peers to toughen up, or ‘don their coats of armour’ – if Cannes 2009’s diverse selection is anything to go by, women filmmakers are certainly battle-ready, if not fighting fit.
Aside from Campion and Arnold’s films – the former of which I loved for its restraint and refinement and the latter for its lack of either – Isabelle Coixet’s Map of the Sounds of Tokyo (which wasn’t screening during my brief stint) made up the trio of women’s films up for the Palme D’Or. The market screening I attended of old hand Catherine Breillat’s latest film, Bluebeard, had a tiny, but engrossed audience. A reworking of the Bluebeard myth, interspersed with two pre-teen sisters’ contemporary reading of the Perrault classic, this is certain to please Breillat’s existing fan-base and is cinematic manna for anyone with a soft spot for Angela Carter or shoe-string medieval set design (I raise my awkward hand).
Some less familiar names deserve a mention though – among them, Mia Hansen-Love for her feature The Father of My Children, which screened as part of Un Certain Regard. Solid, stylish art house fare, Hansen-Love’s film pivots on an apparently happy family knocked for six by the father’s sudden suicide. For its gloomy subject matter it was mercifully understated and is already being tapped up by LFF, so expect to see it at a festival, if not cinema, near you before long. Ounie Lecompte’s semi-autobiographical Brand New Life featured, by all accounts, a devastatingly powerful central performance from Sae Ron Kim, playing a nine-year old who is dumped by her father in a Catholic orphanage in Seoul, and spends the film awaiting a shiny new family. Disappointing and downright bizarre was Marina de Van’s follow-up to her shocking debut Dans Ma Peau. Starring Monica Belluci and Sophie Marceau as two women whose identities appear to be merging, there was an intelligent psychological drama straining to get out but dodgy special effects nudged Don’t Look Back (not helped along by unfortunate echoes of its almost namesake, Roeg’s classic Don’t Look Now) into late-night Channel 5 horror farce. Not a great look.
The surprise hit of the festival for me, though, was Lynn Shelton’s ominously titled Humpday, screening in Directors’ Fortnight. The premise of two straight guys who decide to make a porn movie together did not recommend itself all that highly, and I was all ready to answer the film with my – now well-practised – huffy walk-out. As it turned out, I was laughing too much to consider budging from my seat, as Shelton’s hilarious (and much more low-key than the tagline hints) study of male friendship and marriage played out as the ultimate antidote to skin-deep bromances and reeled the ‘American indie’ tag from the brink of total redundancy. The hand-held, intimate camerawork played perfectly with the razor-sharp improv dialogue, which rescued itself every time it threatened to annoy, by knowingly gunning itself down – as when newlywed Ben punctures the infuriating condescension of his beardy long lost best friend Andrew with the line, “Look – you’re not as Kerouac as you think you are, and I’m not as a white picket fence as you think I am.” Owen Wilson, Judd Apatow et al would be advised to take note.
Sophie Ivan was covering Cannes for Birds Eye View, an organisation dedicated to celebrating women in film. They held a panel event in Cannes on the role of woman at the festival – a report on which can be found here.
