Assault of The Movie Cannibals

By RICHARD CORLISS

At first it sounded like Pollyanna Day at the United Nations. An international parade of prizewinners gathered on the Grand Palais stage at the 40th Cannes Film Festival to pick up their scrolls and mouth the loftiest banalities. One young filmmaker from Soviet Georgia thanked "all the inhabitants of that big wonderful country called Cinema." A Japanese director announced, "I would like to work for peace." Wim Wenders, who picked up the director's prize for his daunting, sentimental fantasy The Wings of Desire, ) said, "If we can improve the images of the world, perhaps we can improve the world." Everyone was on his best behavior at this birthday party for the world's most prestigious movie do.

Then, as if cued by Stephen King, the wicked witch showed up in this fairy- tale resort on the Cote d'Azur. The creature arrived in the ursine form of Maurice Pialat, critically the most revered, personally the most reviled, of France's movie auteurs. A few days before, he had shown his new movie, Under the Sun of Satan, a stately adaptation of the Georges Bernanos novel about a self-torturing priest (Gerard Depardieu); its directorial style fell somewhere between rigor and rigor mortis. And now Yves Montand, president of this year's festival jury, was announcing the award of the Palme d'Or to Pialat's dour drama -- the first local product to grab the top prize since A Man and a Woman at the 20th fest, in 1966.

Montand might as well have said that Ripple had been designated the official French wine, for the Palais audience immediately erupted in derisive whistles and howls. Catherine Deneuve, who presented the award, pleaded futilely for the mob to give the director a chance to defend his honor. But the catcalls delighted Pialat. "If you don't like me," he proclaimed, "I can tell you, I don't like you either." He smiled and raised a defiant fist. More boos, more hoots. Somebody spat at him. PALME D'OR SCANDALE A CANNES, screamed the next day's papers.

Thank you, members of the jury. Merci, M. Pialat and all your enemies in the Grand Palais. You brought the last-minute thrill of spontaneous animosity to a festival that had nearly suffocated in gentility. Until then, this assembly of 30,000 producers, directors, stars, distributors, critics and other swains of the celluloid muse could find little to cheer and even less to condemn. Oh, sure, you could watch Michael Sarrazin strangle a nude hermaphrodite in the Belgian thriller Mascara. You could cruise the low-rent Film Market and see ads for such films as Assault of the Killer Bimbos, Space Sluts in the Slammer and Surf Nazis Must Die. You could catch Jean-Luc Godard in a typically impish auto-da-fe. This year the Peter Pan of enfants terribles presented a captious, grating version of King Lear, starring both Norman Mailer and Burgess Meredith as Lear and Molly Ringwald as Cordelia. Godard, who later boasted that he had never read the play, seemed determined to accomplish what the banks and an indifferent movie public have not quite yet achieved: to bankrupt the Cannon Group, his sponsoring studio.

At least these were incendiary devices; elsewhere one found soporifics. Here was the spectacle of an art form looking back in envy on its younger, more beautiful self. Sometimes the retrospective mood was seductive, as in Paul Newman's sensitive filming of The Glass Menagerie, with top turns by Joanne Woodward, Karen Allen and James Naughton. Faye Dunaway rekindled her old incandescence as a dipso sexpot vamping Mickey Rourke in the scuzzy, enjoyable Barfly, based on the life of Poet-Derelict Charles Bukowski. The festival's one unqualified hit was yet another cheeky evocation of teens in the 1950s, David Leland's Wish You Were Here. Because the British writer- director has a tart, original voice -- and because Emily Lloyd, 16, was perfection as the tart -- the film earned cheers and smiles every time it played.

Usually, though, the movie theaters were mortuaries. Paolo and Vittorio Taviani's Good Morning Babylon records, in the brothers' patented super- realist style, the making of D.W. Griffith's epic Intolerance. The film provided Cannes with its handsomest white elephant. Lillian Gish, who rocked the cradle in Intolerance, showed up 71 years later to co-star with Bette Davis in Lindsay Anderson's wan The Whales of August, a kind of On Gilded Pond about two aged sisters reliving old rivalries in a Maine summer home. Gish is lovely brushing Davis' long white hair; Davis, reduced by a stroke to giving inane line readings, is cruelly used in a movie that exploits memories of two great stars.

Intervista, Federico Fellini's 8 1/2th remake of his own life in art, continues the trend of filmmakers' feeding off their early successes. The director offers the familiar manic tap dance -- wistful guys and gargoyle gals and the ache of nostalgia -- all to the calliope crank of old Nino Rota tunes. Then Marcello Mastroianni drops by with an Amazonian Anita Ekberg. He waves a wand, a movie screen appears, and from out of the past flash images of a young Marcello and a gorgeous Anita in the fountain scene from La Dolce Vita. This, at least, is cannibalism with affection; everyone, stars and viewers included, joins in the self-mocking fun.

Mastroianni put himself to fuller use in Dark Eyes, based on three Chekhov stories; it should snare the actor an Oscar nomination next year. The film -- pushy in its eagerness to charm, yet irresistible -- is the work of Soviet Director Nikita Mikhalkov, whose brother Andrei Konchalovsky was represented at Cannes with an American melodrama called Shy People. In the spirit of the cultural thaw in East-West relations, each of the brothers' films snared an acting prize: Mastroianni for best actor, Shy People's Barbara Hershey for best actress. And with Tengiz Abuladze's long suppressed Soviet satire Repentance winning Cannes' runner-up jury prize, the festival resembled one big glasnost menagerie.

It was emblematic of this never-never year that the movies were upstaged not by stars like the newly slender Robert De Niro, the long-haired Mel Gibson or the wasp-waisted (and pathologically tardy) Elizabeth Taylor, but by that Ruritanian dazzler Princess Diana (called "Lay-dee Dee" by the French), escorted by her Prince. Yet even the royals could not dodge the toxic waft of melancholy. On the day of their visit, French TV announced the death of Rita Hayworth, whose signature film Gilda had played at Cannes' first postwar festival, in 1946. The news was a poignant reminder that the only immortality is on the screen, and that a cinema that lives in the past faces a bleak future.