Surprise! Films Shine at Cannes

By RICHARD CORLISS/CANNES

Arnold came. Liz and Sly dropped by, and so did the British royals, Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson. The Cannes Film Festival boasted the usual honor guard of cinema illuminati. But there was a difference this year. At many recent Cannes convocations, the stars were the show. This time, though, the 23 films competing for the Palme d'Or included many of high quality -- the best batch in recent memory. Since each Cannes festival marks the beginning of the movies' liturgical year, audiences around the world can rest assured that good films are coming soon.

In three of the past four years, Cannes awarded its top prize to a U.S. picture, while the rest of world cinema looked on in impotent envy. This year the Americans played supporting roles. It was not so much that a Jurassic Park-size blockbuster was withheld from the festival as that Hollywood is in a profound artistic funk. Vitality, confidence and storytelling swank have evaporated; the industry seems to be working on automatic pilot.

Thus two foreign entries were the critics' darlings and front runners for the Palme d'Or. Jane Campion's The Piano, from Australia, and Chen Kaige's Farewell to My Concubine, a co-production of China and Hong Kong, are very different types of films -- the first an intimate romance, the second a sprawling panorama -- but both are prime exemplars of the qualities Hollywood once monopolized: glamour and intensity, powerful star performances, the pleasures of narrative. Campion and Chen, imagemakers of voluptuous intelligence, have found stories to suit those images.

In the mid-1800s, Ada McGrath (Holly Hunter), a mute Scottish woman, lands on the isolated New Zealand shore with her chatty young daughter (Anna Paquin) and her precious piano; the crated instrument perches on the bleak beach like an exotic bird, or like a coffin holding the happy life Ada left behind. Her mail-order husband (Sam Neill) trades the piano for land with the "town freak," George Baines (Harvey Keitel), and in another plaintive transaction Baines agrees to sell the piano back to Ada, one key at a time, for increasingly audacious amorous favors. This uncorseted Brontean plot runs the gauntlet through variations -- some familiar, a few astonishing -- on the theme of possessive passion, and Campion ornaments her fable with film effects that are at once surreal and true to the characters and their time. If The Piano is not quite the culmination of a century of cinema art that its most fervent Cannes admirers suggest, it is surely a delicate, rending achievement.

Farewell to My Concubine spans more than a half-century of Chinese history, from the Warlord Era through the Japanese occupation up to and past the egregious humiliations of the Cultural Revolution. Because the main characters who reflect and endure these tumultuous times are performing artists -- two stars of the Peking Opera, stalwart Xiaolou (Zhang Fengyi) and comely Dieyi (Leslie Cheung) -- the movie conjures up dozens of American movies, like Singin' in the Rain and For the Boys, in which popular entertainers put aside their differences before they put on the greasepaint. There is, of course, a pretty woman to fight over, Xiaolou's girlfriend (Gong Li). There is the elegance of stage art compromised by the humility of life beyond the footlights. There is comradeship, and betrayal, and comradeship again.

Concubine throbs with the seductive power art has over life. And because this is a movie about the glory and competitiveness of performance, it is appropriate that Cheung, as the tormented homosexual, and Gong, as his bitter rival, should duke it out for the title of most beautiful star on the Asian screen. Cheung wins, because this is his story, and he is equal to the doomed sensitivity of the role. Thanks in no small part to his presence, and performance, Concubine has the sweep and pang of a novel that keeps you reading till dawn, then lives in your dreams.

At any festival, one excellent film is a fluke, two are a faint promise. Cannes '93 has showcased a dozen or so delights, including Mike Leigh's comic scorcher Naked, from Britain, and Alain Cavalier's potent French film Libera Me, a deadpan document, in wordless closeup, of political prisoners and their torturers in an unnamed country -- any country, alas. Wim Wenders' Faraway, So Close!, a sequel of sorts to his great Wings of Desire, is a monumentally quirky film essay that gradually, and satisfyingly, surrenders to the conventions of the thriller genre. The festival had two out-of-nowhere finds, both set in the '50s and '60s: Tian Zhuangzhuang's The Blue Kite, from China, and The Odor of Green Papaya, a lovely Vietnamese film made in France by writer-director Tran Anh Hung, 30, and a cast of refugees; both tell bold stories of a child's coming of age. And Abel Ferrara's Hollywood horror movie Body Snatchers, saved from the slag heap of Warner Bros. rejects, revives the old parable of the Pod People with a frame-by-frame savvy that used to be unique to the U.S.

Now, when Hollywood filmmakers have all but forgotten how to put a story on- screen, directors from around the world -- and especially on the Pacific continents -- have watched and remembered. Let Hollywood send its top stars to Cannes, Chen and Campion and Wenders might be saying. We'll send the best movies.