The Cannes awarding sophisticated nothing

Once a friend of mine asked me, " What's the difference between Oscar winners and Palm d'Or winners within the same category?" I remarked that "America awards its inner problems performed in movies in such a big way as if they threaten the whole world. And it is a must for an American to solve the problem - gloom-and-doom stories don't win the Oscar. The Palm d'Or movies fea- ture the problems of third world countries, of authoritarian countries, of countries where cannibalism is still a problem, and the insolvability of these issues is idealized and aestheticized - The Cannes encourage them just for finding a filmmaker who has the guts to report on the higher-ups." In that conversation I forgot to mention another distinctive feature of the two film festivals: for America it is not important to be complicated, the main thing is: a) to win; b) to make others proud of you. Therefore Oscar winners always follow the only beaten path that will surely lead to success and to the sympathies or a human heart, and consists of three obligatory phases:

1. the obvious contrast of human qualities (mainly, a noble pauper versus a useless rich man),

2. a backbreaking ordeal beyond strength of a mortal being (out of American reality but exaggerated manyfold),

3. a moment when it seems it's over (when you run out of nails on your right hand and all in a fluster you start on your left one),

4. then during the last few minutes he, an ordinary American superhero in a checked non-tucked shirt, manages to do it all. (In time to catch a plane to say don't leave, to get money for a surgery, to cut a necessary wire in an explosive device, to appear on the most prestigious concert stage before the President, to say to the executioner with axe raised overhead that the condemned is not guilty).

As for Europe, she is an enigmatic woman. For her the un­healthy nuances of reality (a stubborn camera man won't budge until he captures all details of an abortion or gangrene death), and above all, the ambiguity of the plot are important. At that, the obscurity of the Cannes outcome is so vague that at times it seems that the jury decided not to risk it and to give no award to a film that proved to be beyond their cinematic grasp, -better to award the prize by the reasoning 'perhaps there was a deeper meaning but we didn't get it, and if we award a straight­forward movie we will be frowned upon, why on earth do you hold your posts, sirs film critics, if you probably ignored a new Tarkovsky being born?'

And I tell you, the film director in his turn is not quite aware of what a jungle he got himself into and what a viewer gained killing their two hours?

Here is the first proof of it. In his first post-festival interview, Api-chatpong Weerasethakul, 'Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives' film director, who took the 2010 Golden Palm, com­mented on the multilevel semantic loading of the movie:

"I didn't want to say anything with my movie. All the more so I don't really believe in reincarnation. However I wanted to convey the perception of the world I got in my homeland — Northern Thailand where the cult of animals is still very strong".

Guys, have you heard that?! HE DIDN'T WANT TO SAY ANYTHING with his movie!

I spent 114 fierce minutes in front of the screen and then as many again thoroughly analyzing the film reviews of Cinema Art gurus to take to pieces Uncle Boonmee feeling each piece for an implica­tion and then assembling them back to cast a new look to this old wholeness... But in fact the man just didn't want to say anything!

The even harder slap came at the end of his remark: «... All the more so I don't really believe in reincarnation".

Doctors don't put out fires, architects don't run bakeries, police­men are not expected to perform head-spinning ballet, are they? Why ever do you, Apichatpong, poke your nose in an element out of your reach?

Here is the movie's plot in a nutshell. Uncle Boonmee has the ability to recall his past lives when meditating. Now he is liv­ing out his last days dying from kidney disease. He has din­ner with his family, and the ghost of his wife and a long-lost son, who appeared in non-human form, join him. Boonmee contem­plates that the causes of his illness are attributed to his bad karma.

In fact the story is based on real life events. A man called Boon­mee really lived in Thailand. Once he came to a Buddhist abbot from his city and said that he recalled vividly his past lives. The abbot was so shaken by the stories that he wrote the novel titled "The Man who can Recall his Past Lives" (published in 1983).

By the time Apitchatpong read the book, Boonmee had died.

Anyway, the book inspired the film director to make a movie with a similar structure.

Now attention: the content was invented by Apitchtpong, enrich­ing it in the style of Thai comics where simple plots are done ab­solutely dispassionately.

"It resulted in a kind of floating world penetrated by picturesque tranquility and diluted with absurd humor", - commented one of the non-stupid cinema portals.

It was no other than an atheist's look on religion - I want to add. A deep void disguised as a multilayered structure, a tangled laby­rinth with no exit, a Soviet Encyclopaedia with three million spe­cific terms that make no semantic wholeness.

The subtle beautiful story of Boonmee who recalled his past lives fell into hands of a thin-lipped math teacher who tried to derive the quadratic formula out of it. All that is at the request of Europe, the enigmatic woman.