Cannes 2008: the Well-Made Film (Festivals‪)‬

The film that won at Cannes this year, Laurent Cantet's Entre les tours, offered a flesh semi-documentary look at French adolescents in a classroom. The director had created a real class of teenagers in the 20th arrondissement of Paris and filmed them for a year. The script, loosely based on a book by teacher Francois Begaudeau, consisted simply of a list of ideas (such as "now there is a disciplinary problem") that the students then "acted out" in a workshop setting. The result: a lively portrait of what it means to struggle through adolescence (both for the students and the teacher) in France, replete with slang, hormonal jolts, and classroom debates. It says a lot about contemporary film taste that this film, which is well-made and enjoyable, took the grand prize. Although the story was innovative and lively, it had no "soul," no cinematic magic or unnamable inwardness, such as that of a Bergman or Fellini or Kieslowski film in days past. Many of the films in the Competition this year were similarly well-made, and some (although none of the prize-winners) had a special spark. Foremost was Israeli director Ari Folman's Waltz with Bashir, an animated film about the horrors of the 1982 occupation of Lebanon. The first scene is spectacular: in eerie blue monochrome, a man urgently tells a friend about a repetitive nightmare where he is chased by 26 snarling dogs, black curs who leap to the screen in a hallucinatory flashback. The listening friend is director Ari Folman himself, who nods with a befuddled gaze. Perhaps he too, he reflects, has inner demons creeping into his unconscious from a past he and his friend shared as soldiers stationed in Lebanon during the Sabra and Shantila massacres. The film becomes an exploration of this past, a form of therapy for the director. What makes the film remarkable is its unusual aesthetics for such a loaded subject. "I always conceived of this as an animated film," Folman explained. "If you look at the fragments of memory, you have war, lost love, nightmares. How do you do this in a plain documentary unless you do something extreme? I wanted to make it a journey like Alice in Wonderland. I wanted to take a trip."