Will India take flight in Cannes?

A small film by a first-time Mumbai director is set to compete with 
the best in the world’s premier film festival. Saibal Chatterjee gives a
sneak peak of the event which begins on May 12

AS the world’s premier film festival gears up to unveil its 63rd edition from May 12 to 23, the globe’s most prolific moviemaking nation, India, has at least one small reason to rejoice. For the first time in seven years, an Indian entry has made it to the Cannes Film Festival’s official selection.

But, of course, the mainstream Mumbai movie machinery can take no credit for the breakthrough. The film in question, debutant director Vikramaditya Motwane’s Udaan, is far removed in spirit and substance from contemporary Hindi cinema. For one, it has no Bollywood stars and is shorn of the glitz associated with big banner Hindi cinema.

Udaan is a film about a young boy who returns to his hometown after being away for eight years in a boarding school. It is a rare Hindi film that addresses the youth of the nation without having 44-year-old Aamir Khan in the role a college ‘kid’.

Motwane wrote the screenplay of Udaan in 2003 but found no takers. The predictable argument trotted out was that the film had no "mass appeal". So it wasn’t until Anurag Kashyap, with whom Motwane had worked for many years, offered to produce the film that it saw the light of day. In the years leading up to his maiden film, the 33-year-old assisted Sanjay Leela Bhansali during the making of Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam and Devdas and wrote the screenplays of Goal and Dev D.

Motwane’s film is one of 19 selected for Cannes’ sidebar Un Certain Regard section. It will play alongside the latest films of world cinema legend Jean-Luc Godard, Portuguese auteur Manoel de Oliveira, who at 102 is the oldest active filmmaker in the world, and 21-year-old French-Canadian filmmaker Xavier Dolan.

Godard, who turns 80 in December this year, is in the fray with his latest work, Film Socialisme, while de Oliveira will be back on the Croisette with The Strange Case of Angelica after being honoured with a special Cannes Film Festival prize two years ago to commemorate his centenary.

At the other end of the spectrum is Dolan with his second feature film, Les Amours Imaginaires. As a 20-year-old, he was in Cannes last year as well. I Killed My Mother, his debut, scooped up three awards in the Director’s Fortnight programme.

The films in Un Certain Regard, which literally means "a certain glance", compete for prizes in an event that runs parallel to Cannes’ showcase competition for the Palme d’Or. The main jury is headed by American director Tim Burton and includes India’s Shekhar Kapur and Puerto Rican actor Benicio Del Toro. French filmmaker Claire Denis will preside over the Un Certain Regard jury.

The last time India had a film in the section was in 2003, when Murali Nair’s Malayalam-language Arimpara, an adaptation of an O.V. Vijayan story, made the cut. The film did not exactly set the French Riviera on fire and India lost out in the long run.

The race for the Palme d’Or at the 63rd Cannes Film Festival is likely to be pretty intriguing because the 18-film line-up isn’t top-heavy. The competition has only two previous Palme d’Or winners — UK’s Mike Leigh and Iran’s Abbas Kiarostami, with the first film that he has ever made outside his native land. Leigh’s film, Another Year, is an ensemble drama, while Kiarostami’s Copie Conforme (Certified Copy) has a cast headed by French actress Juliette Binoche.

However, the competition does have international heavy-hitters like Japan’s Takeshi Kitano (Outrage), Mexico’s Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (Biutiful, starring Javier Bardem), French cinema veteran Bertrand Tavernier (The Princess of Montpensier) and Russia’s Nikita Mikhalkov (Burnt By the Sun 2: Exodus).

Although Cannes has fewer Competition films this year than it usually does — the line-up has a solitary American film, Doug Liman’s Fair Game — the Asian representation is pretty high, with as many as six films from the continent in the running for the Palme d’Or. These are Im Sangsoo’s Housemaid (Korea), Lee Chang-dong’s Poetry (Korea), Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall his Past Lives (Thailand) and Xiaoshuai Wang’s Chongqing Blues (China), besides the Kitano and Kiarostami films mentioned above.

The 18 films in Competition have been drawn from 14 nations. As Thierry Fremaux, general delegate of the Cannes Film Festival, put it while announcing the programme, cinema is a "planetary art form, not just an American-European dialogue".

Indeed, every major continent is represented with the small African nation Chad managing to get a film — Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s A Screaming Man — into the main Cannes competition. The host nation has three films in the running — besides Tavernier’s entry, Xavier Beauvois’s Of Gods and Men and three-time Cesar-winning French actor Mathieu Amalric’s Tournee.

The 63rd Cannes Film Festival kicks off on May 12 with an out-of-competition screening of Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood, starring the director’s long-time muse, Russell Crowe. The legendary character has been played in the past by the likes of Errol Flynn, Douglas Fairbanks Jr, Sean Connery and Kevin Costner. The temperamental Crowe’s interpretation of the figure, driven by the equally quirky Scott, could throw up a few surprises, pleasant and otherwise.

Cannes will premiere three other major films out of competition — Oliver Stone’s Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps, Stephen Frears’ Tamara Drewe and Woody Allen’s You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, starring Naomi Watts, Antonio Banderas, Josh Brolin, Anthony Hopkins and Freida Pinto.

Of particular interest to Indian observers will be the Cannes Classics section, where restored prints from around the world are showcased. Veteran Indian director Mrinal Sen is expected to fly down to Cannes for a special screening of his 1983 masterwork, Khandahar. Also in this section this year is the late Ritwik Ghatak’s Titash Ekti Nadir Naam, being presented by the Martin Scorsese-promoted World Cinema Foundation. It’s been a long time coming, but India will have its little corner in the Cannes sun this year.

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