An Asian accent
Cannes 2010 demonstrated yet again why India lags a fair distance behind the East Asian nations as a genuine force in world cinema, writes Saibal Chatterjee

Vikramaditya Motwane’s debut film, Udaan was the first official entry from India in seven years

It was long overdue. An Asian film, a resolutely offbeat one at that, won the Palme d’Or (Golden Palm) at the 63rd Cannes Film Festival. The last time the world’s largest and most populous continent bagged the big prize was in 1997, when Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry (Iran) and Shohei Imamura’s Unagi (The Eel) from Japan were declared joint winners.

Asia has been among the awards in Cannes over the past decade and a bit, but Thai avant-garde filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Palme d’Or triumph is a major breakthrough. The award, as the 39-year-old visual artist and film director pointed out, was an "important moment" in the history of the cinema of Thailand. But it was just as much a watershed for Asia as a whole. It is only the seventh time in history that an Asian film has won the top prize at Cannes.

Asia had a healthy presence in the main competition of the 63rd Cannes Film Festival. Five of the 19 feature films vying for the Palme d’Or were from Asia, while another was a European film directed by Iran’s most feted director.

Weerasethakul’s evocative and haunting exploration of love, loss and renewal, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives beat off the challenge posed by two past Cannes winners — Mike Leigh, whose Another Year was among the critical favourites, and Iranian great Abbas Kiarostami, whose Italian-French-Belgian co-production, Copie Conforme (Certified Copy), fetched leading lady Juliette Binoche the Best Actress prize.

The Asian impact in Cannes 2010 stemmed from the range and depth of the fare that the continent delivered. Jury president Tim Burton, a Hollywood filmmaker, known to push the boundaries of commercial cinema with a quirky mix of imagination and technical finesse, hailing the Cannes topper, said: "The world is getting smaller and films get more Hollywoodised, and this is a film for me that I felt I was watching from another country, from another perspective," he said.

Uncle Boonmee is indeed unlike anything that was on show in Cannes this year. It is about a terminally ill old man, who spends the last days of his life in the company of the ghost of his dead wife and the red-eyed, ape-like spirit of his long lost son, as he seeks to understand the reason for his own ailment.

The quest takes him back into his past lives. As uncle Boonmee undertakes a voyage across a mythical forest to a mysterious hilltop cave, his abode in his first life, the film, steeped in the culture of animism prevalent in the northeast of Thailand, where Weerasethakul grew up, throws up other characters drawn from the realms of fantasy — a talking catfish and a disfigured princess.

Weerasethakul’s surreal world is the perfect setting for his tale of reincarnation and transmigration of souls. The visually lush and conceptually intriguing film demands loads of patience from the audience, but the director has enough generosity of spirit not to present anything as an absolute truth. Every little element in Uncle Boonmee is open to multiple interpretations — a far cry from the pre-digested fare that commercial movie industries inundate us with every week.

Not everybody, who saw the film in Cannes, fell in love with it — they hurled the usual adjectives at it, dull, drab, boring, pretentious — but for those who were drawn into the film’s dreamlike universe, every second of its two-hour running time was a sheer delight. Weerasethakul’s stimulating brush-strokes spring primarily from a complex of Thai beliefs and traditions and are cloaked in a highly evolved aesthetic module.

Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami (right), whose Copie Conforme fetched leading lady Juliette Binoche (left) the Best Actress prize this year Photo: AFP

That is pretty much the manner in which Kiarostami’s Copie Conforme is structured. The film draws its appeal from surface simplicity wrapped in many enigmatic layers of meaning. Indeed, what Binoche said of Copie Conforme at the film’s official press conference in Cannes could well be valid for Uncle Boonmee as well.

The French diva explained: "When I read the screenplay of Copie Conforme, I felt the character was neurotic — she moved from one form of reality to another. Abbas simply asked me to play myself — all he was saying was that everything is true in life and fiction." Kiarostami may make a film set in Tuscany with a French actress and an English opera baritone (William Shimell), but his worldview remains rooted in the spirituality of his native country.

Yet another film that celebrates a different plane of consciousness, South Korean writer-director Lee Chang-dong’s Poetry, picked up the Best Screenplay prize in Cannes this year. It etches a deeply moving portrait of a sexagenarian woman coping with the onset of senility by seeking refuge in the joy of writing. As the ageing protagonist discovers the regenerative power of creativity, she gives vent to her inner feelings through verse.

In the running for the Palme d’Or this year was yet another film from South Korea — Im Sang-soo’s The Housemaid, a stylised and brilliantly acted update of a 1960 super hit of the same name. Another South Korean film, Hong Sangsoo’s Hahaha, added to the nation’s Cannes tally by winning the Best Film award in the sidebar Un Certain Regard section.

Asia’s representation was boosted further in Cannes this year by Takeshi Kitano’s Outrage (Japan) and Wang Xiaoshuai’s Chongqing Blues (China). While the former was a yakuza gangster film marked by much stylised violence, the latter was a genteel drama about a father, who returns home after a long hiatus and finds that his only son has been killed by the police during a shopping mall hold-up.

For India, too, the 63rd Cannes Film Festival was significant thanks to Vikramaditya Motwane’s debut film, Udaan, the first official entry from the country in seven years. But the solitary Indian representation was also a stark reminder of where the world’s most prolific film industry really stands in terms of quality cinema.

While filmmakers from other Asian nations have made rapid strides in the global arena in recent years by consistently breaking into the festival circuit and securing subsequent worldwide distribution for their work, Indian cinema has continued to focus solely on its large domestic market, supplemented by a huge expatriate population. That has led to a debilitating sense of complacency.

Nagesh Kukunoor, who was in Cannes this year to participate in panel discussions hosted by the India Pavilion, said: "The size of our domestic market is perhaps our undoing. It makes us overly insular as a movie industry. We are happy to mop up profits from the domestic market and move on. It stops us from being genuine global players."

Govind Nihalani echoed the same argument: "Our movie industry believes in playing safe. Nobody is willing to experiment and invest in new ideas and approaches to filmmaking. Our cinema is too star-driven for its own good."

East Asian cinema has carved a niche for itself, thanks to the work of a large number of directors, who have won awards and accolades at international film festivals and found worldwide audiences, both in the theatrical and home video circuits.

South Korea, which made such a huge mark at the 63rd Cannes Film Festival, and Japan, which, besides Kitano’s film in Competition, had Hideo Nakata’s Chatroom in the Un Certain Regard section this year, are in a situation similar to India’s.

Japan has a robust domestic market where local films enjoy a share of more than 50 per cent. The country produces 400 to 500 films a year, a vast majority of which are targeted primarily at local audiences. Yet, it has filmmakers like Kitano, Nakata and Hirokazu Kore-ada, who find ready takers in the West.

South Korea, too, produces its own domestic blockbusters, but many of its filmmakers — notably Park Chan-Wook, Kim Ki-Duk. Lee Chang-dong and Hong Sangsoo — have a worldwide following that enables them to swing deals regularly with international sales agents.

When India is up against filmmaking nations like China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, it simply does not have enough big names to be a force to reckon with. Says the much-applauded Mrinal Sen: "Indian films, especially those made in Mumbai and the South, are technically very good. But that isn’t enough. What our cinema lacks is substance."

Says the much younger Motwane: "Whether it’s China, South Korea, Hong Kong or Thailand, it is always a bunch of filmmakers from a nation, who together, make an impact and generate a worldwide demand for films from their respective countries. Stray breakthroughs can never be enough."