Flower power in Cannes

“By the time we got to Woodstock, we were half a million strong . . . ”

Joni Mitchell, who wrote those lyrics, wasn’t there. But you didn’t have to be there to be there. The Woodstock festival, which marks its 40th anniversary this summer, came to symbolize a sixties utopia of peace, love and LSD that came and went like a mirage. Arriving a month after the Apollo moon landing, it was the last blossom of an age of innocence when anything seemed possible, briefly. But even before the horde of half a million had turned the New York State Thruway into a parking lot, and a farmer’s field into a sea of mud, the bloom was already off the rose of flower power. The week before the three-day festival, which began on Aug. 15, 1969, the Charles Manson murders revealed psychedelia’s dark side. And in the spring of the same year, Easy Rider lit up the Cannes Film Festival with a drug-fuelled joyride that veered into the ultimate bad trip.

Last weekend, 40 years after Easy Rider, the mother of all rock festivals and the mother of all film festivals merged in an acid flashback on the French Riviera with the premiere of Taking Woodstock, an ode to hippie bliss by Ang Lee, the Oscar-winning director of Brokeback Mountain. Seeing hippydom feted amid the ritual opulence of Cannes seemed incongruous, to say the least.

After the premiere, a party for the film began on the beach at midnight. A rock band costumed like a touring company of Hair played dutiful covers of ’60s hits. Some of the more adventurous guests grooved modestly on the dance floor, balancing plastic flutes of champagne. Orange gerbera flowers, which looked like giant daisies, were strewn artfully around as party favours. Otherwise, hippie touches were minimal. No campfires on the beach, no billows of marijuana smoke, no brown acid. At the sole food station, a pair of servers in tall chef toques used tea-light candles to set marshmallows on fire before handing them, like perverse hors d’oeuvres, to puzzled folks in tuxedos and evening gowns. It was hard to say if it was a period touch or a nouveau recession joke.

One of 20 features in competition at the 62nd annual Cannes festival, Taking Woodstock premiered before a black-tie crowd of 2,300 who watched with reverence, curiosity and amusement. But they seemed to miss some of the jokes in a picture that Lee says is his first comedy in 14 years after a glut of tragedies. Not that he’s making fun of hippies. Far from it. This is a movie from a man who as a child of the Cold War in Taiwan watched Woodstock on the TV news, and now wishes he’d been there. “Woodstock planted a seed,” Lee told me. “All the good issues are an extension of what that generation was about.” In fact, Obama’s inauguration could be seen as a Woodstock moment. That day, Lee was surprised to get a call from his 18-year-old son, who skipped school to attend: “I said, ‘How did you get there?’ He said, ‘Me and my friends talked about it like going to Woodstock. It’s a historic moment. You have to participate.’ ”

As an aging boomer—who wasn’t actually at Woodstock but tried hard to make up for it—I’ve just begun to realize that Woodstock’s legacy is now a faded pop artifact for a generation that doesn’t remember when people said “far out” instead of “awesome.”

But the music of the ’60s has certainly persisted. And one reason Lee’s movie met with mixed reactions in Cannes is that it tries to carve an intimate drama out of an event that was so definitively enshrined by an epic documentary: Michael Wadleigh’s Woodstock (1970). With acts like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane and the Who—plus that muddy Eden of half a million extras—the three-hour film was a pop culture landmark. Due to be re-released as an expanded DVD for this summer’s anniversary, it pioneered a whole movement of verité filmmaking, along with Monterey Pop and Gimme Shelter. They weren’t just concert movies, but candid portraits of a generation discovering itself. Lee’s film (which opens Aug. 14) pays homage to Wadleigh’s doc with split-screen imagery and slices of 16-mm footage. But he can’t begin to compete with it.

“We cannot recreate half a million people,” the soft-spoken director told me early this week, as he held court with his long-time screenwriter/producer, James Schamus, in a penthouse suite of the Carlton hotel. “And I can’t put a woman in big hair and say, ‘That’s Janis Joplin.’ But what I can do is take a dramatic approach and see how it influenced a small part of the world.”

Lee’s movie looks at Woodstock through the other end of the telescope: like most people who were actually there, it gets nowhere near the stage. And the music stays in the background, as if drifting in from afar. Which is how most people actually heard it. Based on a 2007 memoir by Elliot Tiber, Taking Woodstock is the story of an interior designer based in Greenwich Village who ends up hosting the festival while trying to salvage the family business, a seedy Catskills motel owned by his Jewish immigrant parents—a sad-sack father (Henry Goodman) and a money-grubbing battle-axe of a mother (Imelda Staunton). Commandeering the chamber of commerce in White Lake, N.Y., Tiber offers a permit to Woodstock’s organizers after another community backs out. And he recruits dairy farmer Max Yasgur (Eugene Levy) to rent his land to the festival organizers.