By Dave McCoy
MSN Movies

May 27, 2007

I fully intended to use this final dispatch to discuss the 2007 Cannes Film Festival award ceremony. I was going to tell you who showed up on the red carpet, audience reactions to the award selections (the crowd is notoriously finicky and not afraid to voice their displeasure) and share some quotes from the speeches. But, alas, dear readers, something happened on the way to the award ceremony on Sunday night. At about 1 p.m., I bit into a harmless-looking ham-and-cheese baguette from a local street vendor (one I went to about six times this trip). It tasted fine. Two hours later, I was in the press office getting a coffee, and my world flipped. More specifically, my stomach flipped. Yep, I had good old-fashioned food poisoning. And it wasn't pretty.

Now, let me tell you, I still tried to cover the award ceremony. I made it there, took my seat in the back of the theater (the seat closest to the toilets), and watched celebs parade up steps on the big screen. This view is a very telling sign of what's to come: If you don't see, say, David Fincher enter the theater, you know that "Zodiac" won't be getting any awards that night (he didn't, it didn't). But if you see, say, Gus Van Sant enter, there is a fairly good chance he'll be taking home an award (he showed, and he won a special jury prize for "Paranoid Park"). So, anyway, I was sitting there, in hell ... I saw Jane Fonda and the cast and director of both "Secret Sunshine" and "The Mourning Forest" (the latter induced a very loud "Oh no!" from a prominent critic to my right). But I couldn't stay seated for long, if you know what I mean. When I finally came back a third time, and after the French dude next to me gave me a look that made me feel like an alien, I decided I couldn't stay. I should also mention at this point that I've been battling heat rash for the past eight days and it's finally spread to my face. So, I'm pretty sure the mixture of red bumps and green skin did make me look like a bit of a creature.

So, I found out about the 2007 Cannes winners the same way you did: on MSN Movies. And while I didn't see the awards given out live, I can surely react to them. My first thought was, "What about 'No Country for Old Men'?!" Along with the Palme d'Or winner, Romanian director Cristian Mungiu's "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days" (a very smart and justified winner; it was the second best film I saw here), the Coen brothers' "Old Men" was the only other film the critics agreed on during the last two weeks. And yet the jury, headed by Stephen Frears, snubbed it entirely. Now, I probably wouldn't have been as shocked by this had other strong contenders won instead. But I saw "The Mourning Forest," the film that took the second-place, Grand Prix prize, and I guess the jury and I saw different films. I love everything Japanese, but "The Mourning Forest," while gorgeously shot, falls flat on every emotionally conceivable level. Special jury prizes were given to two other films that vastly divided viewers: Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud's animated tale of Islamic revolution, "Persepolis" and Carlos Reygadas' "Silent Light." But nothing for the Coens. Again, I was too sick to attend the jury junket after the awards, but I hope someone asked something about this oversight. Here's an odd thing: Last year, my favorite film of the year was "Pan's Labyrinth." It played In Competetion at Cannes and also got nothing. This year, I doubt I'll see a better movie all year than "No Country for Old Men" and it too was shut out. Go figure...

The rest of the awards were fine. It was a rather weak year for strong, standout performances, so choosing the acting awards was probably fairly easy. Jeon Do-yeon was justly rewarded as Best Actress for her incredibly heart-wrenching performance in "Secret Sunshine," while Konstantin Lavronenko's difficult turn as a controlling husband in "The Banishment" was a fair win for Best Actor. Fatih Akin's follow-up to "Head On," titled "The Edge of Heaven," nabbed him the screenplay award (I had planned on seeing it today before the sandwich debacle). And American painter-director Julian Schnabel won Best Director for the French-language biopic, "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly." But outside of that and Van Sant's special recognition, it was a disappointing year for the Yanks. "Zodiac," "Death Proof" and "We Own the Night" joined "No Country for Old Men" in getting shut out. And the French? Well, the hometowners are now zero for their last 21 in trying to win a Palme d'Or. Where's Truffaut when you need him?

That's it from Cannes. I saw two-dozen films in the past couple of weeks. Only two were great, but most, while very, very heavy, long and emotionally grueling (it seems apropos that "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days" won the Palme d'Or in such an intense year), were damn good. Hell, for the very first time in my life I actually liked a Catherine Breillat film. Her French period piece "Une Vieille Maitresse," which stars Asia Argento, knocked me out. And because of that, I guess I'll still keep trying with Wong Kar-Wai.

And if you're taking away only one thing from these past nine dispatches, make it this: Avoid the ham-and-cheese baguettes and stick to the fish soup. I wish I had.

Until next year ...

Dave McCoy is lead editor for MSN Movies.

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