Quel surprise!

Well, this is a surprise. Dogville had been the talk of the town, at least among critics, and heaven knows, Lars and Nicole kicked up enough buzz. But not only has Gus Van Sant picked up the Best Director award at Cannes, his film, Elephant, of which Screen Daily's Allan Hunter wrote a few days ago, "might have seemed more at home in Un Certain Regard, than exposed to the full glare of Official Competition," has won the Palme d'Or.

At first glance, you'd think the Columbine tragedy seems to have resonated in France almost as much as it did in the States. Just last year, Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine, the first documentary to be selected for the Official Competition in decades, was greeted with a 13-minute-long standing ovation. Now that the jury has honored Elephant with its two top awards the very next year, you can't help but wonder in this age of freedom fries what sort of rhetoric we're going to be hearing sloshed around in the next few days. But the jury, of course, is an international lot: three French folk, one Italian, one Bosnian, an Indian, a Chinese actor - and two Americans.

Even so, I'm reminded of a line of thought running through the back of my mind while watching Training Day several months ago. There's a common misconception that American movies are, for everything else they are as well, advertisements for what might be called Americanism - the "way of life," which everyone else around the world is assumed to envy, and the one and only way to attain it: adopt US-style democratic institutions and, above all, "reform" all economies until free markets reign over the globe.

This construct was at its healthiest in the waning days of the Cold War. Germany, and even more microcosmically, Berlin was the lab in which this hypothesis was supposedly proven. East Germans marched through the streets of East Berlin, Leipzig and their other cities because they'd been seeing jeans and pickup trucks and tupperware on the West German television channels they'd been surreptitiously watching all those years. And they could no longer stand the deprivation. Never mind all the other sins of the Warsaw Pact governments - the spying, the corruption, the torture of political prisoners - their inability to give their citizens a house as big as Tom Cruise's in Risky Business or the cars high school kids drive in John Hughes movies was supposed to have been what did them in.

I wouldn't deny that there's a bit of truth in this. Hollywood producers are infamously naive when it comes to the actual standard of living in the US. And their assumption that wealth and luxury are generously strewn across the land from coast to coast does get passed on to foreign markets. But so, too, do alternative assumptions. Imagine a devout Muslim or businessman in spic-n-span Singapore, a fisherman in Greece or a farmer in Hungary catching Training Day. Imagine any parent anywhere taking in Bowling or Elephant. Is it any wonder that they often have very clear visions of what they don't want for their own countries?

These films may be extreme examples, but the slices of real life in the US they depict are not - and the people who live outside the US, whose movie theaters and TV and video and DVD stores and rental outlets are saturated with American product, people who also read the papers and watch the news, realize this. And appreciate the occasional dose of truth as much as they also enjoy taking a ride for a couple of hours in the dream machine.

Anyway. More on Elephant: Elvis Mitchell in the New York Times, Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian, and a Reuters interview with Gus Van Sant.



Posted by dwhudson at May 25, 2003 2:48 PM