The 2008 Cannes Film Festival came to a close in the holiday town on the Côte d'Azur, with the jury headed by Sean Penn handing out the prizes for the films in competition. Laurent Cantet's Entre le murs (The Class), an incisive look at a teacher and his class, took the Palme d'Or, the top prize, this year. Other European winners include the Belgian Dardenne brothers for their screenplay of Le Silence de Lorna (Lorna's Silence); Paolo Sorrentino's Il divo, which won the Jury Prize; Matteo Garrone's Gomorra (Gomorrah), which won the Grand Jury Prize (or runner-up) and actress Catherine Deneuve (Un conte de Noël / A Christmas Tale), who was awarded, as was director Clint Eastwood (The Exchange), a special "Prize of the 61st Festival de Cannes". 

The uncrowned king of post-war Italian politics, Giulio Andreotti, might be the subject of Paolo Sorrentino’s nominal biopic Il divo, but it is as an incisive portrait of Italian politics in general that it impresses. Unlike Stephen Frears’ The Queen, in which an icon of power became human through solid acting and a strong screenplay, Andreotti, a seven-time Prime Minister and senator for life, remains an impenetrable enigma in Sorrentino’s film, hiding, like he does in real life, behind a barrage of funnily ironic remarks and a smoke screen carefully orchestrated by himself and his kowtowing entourage.

 

The first 30 minutes of the film are pure filmmaking genius but the remaining 70 minutes might prove rather abstract for those unfamiliar with Italian politics, though as an allegory of how the Italian political machine works in general it is still as close to reality as any film is likely to get.

The Neapolitan mafia, known as the Camorra, gets the Syriana treatment in Matteo Garrone’s Gomorra (Gomorrah), one of the most incisive organised-crime films to emerge from any country since the 1970s. Bundling five storylines culled from Roberto Saviano’s sprawling non-fiction novel of the same title, Gomorra could be considered as the first Italian hyperlink film since that term was coined a few years ago. Garrone’s near-perfect alignment of the efforts of a team of six screenwriters (that includes the director and Saviano), editor Marco Spoletini and his own work as a director make the film one of the most complex yet clearly understandable Italian films of recent years. Like the bestselling novel that has been translated into 33 languages (including English), Gomorra the film should find success far and wide.

While eliminating quite a few parts of the original novel, there are still five story strands and over 20 major speaking parts in the film, assuring that the first 30 minutes are needed to simply gain an understanding of all the characters and the most important relationships between them. Gomorra’s plot isn’t something that is supposed to be followed; instead the audience is just surrounded by it, to paraphrase Roger Ebert on Syriana, another hyperlink movie in which there are too many connections to mention, not all of them immediately apparent.

Arriving at a festival that is already in full swing is like trying to hop on a merry go round that is already in motion. Thankfully it is not the first time I’m in Cannes, so at least I know my way around. Pick up the accreditation in the cellar of the bunker (as the Palais des festivals is often irreverently referred to). Try to see as many press agents as possible to fix the schedule of screenings and interviews. Try to catch up with friends randomly encountered on the Croisette, the boulevard that straddles the deserted Côte d’Azur beach – it’s pouring in Cannes at the moment – and connects all the important festival locations.

 

Umbrellas and chic raincoats are de rigeur outside (and designer sunglasses far from outlawed), but inside everyone is united in the democracy of the dark auditoria. Because it is for the movies that we are all here in the end.

German films are not the first thing that come to mind when thinking about the films that are presented at the Cannes Film Festival. In 2005, the German-Austrian film Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei (The Edukators) was part of the Competition after a long absence of German produce, and Fatih Akin’s Turkish-German co-production Auf der andere Seite (The Edge of Heaven) won the Best Screenplay award last year. But there was no German film in Competition in 2006 and neither is there one this year.

There are some new titles from the country on the other side of the Rhine on the Croisette presented in the various sidebars, however. The Critics’ Week selected the postpartum drama Das Fremde in Mir (The Stranger in Me), while the Un certain regard section has the geriatric love story Wolke 9 (Cloud 9) as part of this year’s offerings. Both are dramas that, at first sight, seem content to simply show aspects of everyday life rarely seen on cinema screens (baby blues, post-retirement sex) and find their raison d’être in the void they fill in the cinematic storytelling landscape. But both films are also much more subtle works about facing life head-on and the decisions that can lead to either happiness or disaster.