By Siegfried Mortkowitz May 18, 2006, 14:15 GMT
Cannes - After opening Wednesday with the glitzy escapism of The Da Vinci Code, the 2006 Cannes International Film Festival was plunged headlong into gritty politics Thursday with the showing of Ken Loach's The Wind that Shakes the Barley and Lou Ye's Summer Palace.
Official 2006 Cannes International Film Festival poster courtesy of Festival press division
Loach is known - and some would say infamous - for his very personal and dramatic brand of left-wing social realism, and in his new film he and his longtime screenwriter Paul Laverty applied that vision to the Irish rebellion of the 1920s against British rule.
A complex, brilliantly written and directed work, 'The Wind that Shakes the Barley' dramatizes the perverse consequences the political occupation had on the Irish, creating a situation in which a young man is forced to kill a childhood friend and another man must execute his brother.
The situation of ordinary people being trapped in political events is neatly summed up in the film by its main character, Damien, when he declares, 'I didn't want to fight this war. But I did. Now I want to get out of it, and I can't.'
The 69-year-old Loach was quick to point up resemblances of the Irish situation of that day to the present, and therefore of the pertinence of his film to today's political events.
'There are always armies of occupation in the world being resisted by the people they are occupying,' he told journalists in Cannes on Thursday. 'Britain now has an illegal army of occupation causing death and destruction in Iraq.'
He suggested, however, that more than politics drew him to make a film about the Irish uprising.
'It's a cracking good story,' Loach said.
Because of his films' outspoken criticism of capitalism, they have always been more popular in continental Europe than in his native Britain and the United States. For example, 'The Wind that Shakes the Barley' still has not found a distributor for North America.
However, Loach's problems of distribution pale when compared to those of Lou Ye, whose 'Summer Palace' was in danger of not being shown at all because Chinese censors have not approved it.
On Thursday, Lou said he was prepared to change his film in any way to receive approval by the Film Bureau of the Chinese State Administration of Radio, Film and Television.
'I would agree to removing any scene they want,' Lou told journalists after a screening of 'Summer Palace,' the only Asian movie selected this year to compete for the Palme d'Or for best film.
Even as his film was being screened in Cannes, one of the producers of 'Summer Palace,' Nai An, told the trade publication Variety that the movie would have 'to give up the chance of competing for the Palme d'Or' because the Film Bureau refused to approve it.
The reason given by the Bureau, Nai said, was that the print had lighting and sound flaws.
However, most observers believe that the censors are objecting to the film's explicit sex scenes and its political background, the student rebellion of 1989 which culminated in the bloody repression by Chinese soldiers of a protest on Beijing's Tiananmen Square in June of that year.
Although Tiananmen is never mentioned in the movie, certain filmed and documentary scenes in 'Summer Palace' point directly at that event, in which several hundred protesters were killed, according to some estimates.
Perhaps to appease Chinese authorities, Lou tried to play down the political implications of his film, telling journalists that 'it is a love story' and that he had set the film in 1989 only 'because I was a student at university then and I was in love.'
Lou also took the blame for the film's problems with Chinese censors.
'When I am shooting, I forget all about censorship questions,' he said. 'I guess I will have to improve my method of working.'
This is not the first time the 40-year-old Shanghai-born director has had problems with the Film Bureau. He was previously banned from making films for two years for his 2000 movie 'Suzhou River,' which was produced without official approval.
If 'Summer Palace' is rejected by the Film Bureau he could be blacklisted again and the film would probably be denied legal exhibition in China.
More contemporary politics lie ahead at the Cannes festival with screenings of a 20-minute excerpt from Oliver Stone's 'World Trade Center;' Paul Greengrass' 'United 93,' about the fourth plane hijacked on September 11, 2001; and 'An Inconvenient Truth,' featuring former US presidential candidate Al Gore as a crusading environmentalist.
The Cannes festival ends on May 28.
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