Peter Bradshaw thinks it was not a very good year:
We have seen outstanding films from the Turkish film-maker Nuri Bilge Ceylan, from the Americans Gus Van Sant and Errol Morris and from the Spaniard Jaime Rosales. But the most sensationally awful film was the Italian offering, Pupi Avati's period Italian drama Il Cuore Altrove, or The Heart is Everywhere.
Here I must rend my garment in shame. A few weeks ago, I incautiously recycled an internet rumour that it might get the Palme d'Or. I now wish that, like Thomas Cranmer, I had put my hand in the fire rather than written that. Because this movie turns out to be the ghastliest film in Cannes's history: a sentimental dollop of codswallop that stinks up the screen like a year-old lump of dolcelatte. How had this been chosen for the festival? There are dark rumours that the Italian contingent had to be placated in order to secure the restored prints of Federico Fellini films for this year's Cannes tribute to that great Italian director.
Jean Roy and David Thomson debate Peter Greenaway, Roy in favour:
We French believe ourselves to be the most sophisticated people in the world, and in Greenaway we had found a brother, with whom we could discuss as equals the respective merits of British and French gardens or the grandeur of baroque music, or solve murder mysteries in the style of Agatha Christie or Gaston Leroux. The film was elegant, distinguished - in a word, aristocratic. We have never lost our taste for the aristocracy, even if we enjoy a little revolution from time to time.
And Thomson against:
To be very fair, Boorman saw things to admire in Greenaway: "prodigious skills". He thought that the director had high abilities in the musical, the visual and the architectural. But he was not cinematic. I feel very much the same way, and it's important to note that being spectacular and obsessed with movement is not necessarily "movie-like". Yet I'm bound to admit that when it comes to doing dirt on life, or being obsessed with odious people, the movies as a whole have rather come to Greenaway's aid.
I don't mind a bit of Greenaway myself, but you have to be in the right mood for it. That said, Prospero's Books is one of my favourite films of the 1990s, thanks to that "baroque excess" Roy talks about that made it less popular with the Cannes crowd.
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