Crazy Cannes

Gian Mattia D'Alberto / LaPresse / ZUMA /KEYSTONE

Take Juliette Binoche, whose photograph adorns the festival’s official poster. In Copie conforme (Certified Copy), Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami takes the star of The English Patient back to Tuscany, casting her opposite William Shimmel—an English opera singer with no acting experience—in an anti-romantic comedy that unfolds as a single marathon conversation about art, love and inauthenticity. How Iranian is that?

Or consider Valerie Plame. She was the CIA spy whose cover was blown after her diplomat husband refused to support the fiction of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Plame was in Cannes to promote two movies: Fair Game, in which she’s portrayed by Naomi Watts, and Countdown to Zero, in which she warns of a far more credible threat of mass destruction—terrorists packing plutonium. The documentary comes from the producers of An Inconvenient Truth, but it makes global warming look like a walk in the park.

Even the Wall Street sequel produced an odd match-up. Shia LaBeouf is cast as an ambitious young trader opposite Carey Mulligan, who plays his eco-correct girlfriend and Gekko’s estranged daughter. Talk about two careers on opposite trajectories. Despite her Oscar nomination for An Education, Mulligan, 24, “didn’t grow up wanting to be a Hollywood actress. I grew up wanting to be in a Broadway play and have light bulbs around my mirror and a fire escape outside my window.” She got all that in 2008, starring in The Seagull. And she was wary of Wall Street: “I don’t really like parts that are just accessories to the plot. That’s what I was nervous about, and I’m still nervous. I still can’t figure out what I feel about the film.”

LaBeouf, on the other hand, is the blockbuster wonder boy from the Transformers franchise. So he regards Money Never Sleeps as an entrée to high art. “I felt outclassed as an actor,” he says, brandishing a Coke at the Hotel du Cap. “The first meeting I had with Oliver, he looked me in the eye and said, ‘Don’t worry, Tom Cruise wasn’t an actor before he met me either.’ ’’ Describing the director as a mix of Orson Welles and the Easter Bunny, LaBeouf says Stone both terrorized and berated him. “I’ve never been so scared into submission. He frightened me to the depths of my being.”

The actor fought back with intensive research. As the kid from Transformers, he could open doors that were closed to Stone, the scary leftist, making fast friends at Goldman Sachs and Citibank. His homework paid off: LaBeouf became an astute trader, staking US$20,000 of his own money and turning it into US$600,000. He says co-star Josh Brolin, who plays a financier more ruthless than Gekko, went further, gambling millions.

In the Cannes casino, movie stars serve as official currency on the red carpet. But as the Olympics of world cinema, Cannes treats its auteurs as the real stars. Some of the stronger films in the competition—Another Year, a gentle masterpiece on the quiet desperation of loveless lives from Mike Leigh, and The Housemaid, a stunning sexual gothic drama from Korea—feature actors who wouldn’t register with Entertainment Tonight. And it’s the lure of the unknown that keeps bringing cinephiles back, pilgrims on a quest for the film that will change the face of cinema.

No living auteur is more legendary than Jean-Luc Godard. This year the trickster of the New Wave, now 79, presented a bold new feature called Film socialisme, a brilliantly incoherent essay that cuts between a cruise ship and a gas station. It shows Godard to be the original mash-up artist. His most diabolical conceit: English subtitles that reduce the French dialogue to mere fragments. Most exciting, however, was the prospect of a Godard press conference, the Cannes equivalent of an audience with Bob Dylan. We showed up only to learn the oracle had cancelled—true to the message that filled the final frame of his film: NO COMMENT.

The previous day, Quebec wunderkind Xavier Dolan had been giving interviews on the beach, flush with the success of his second feature, Les amoureux imaginaires (Heartbeats), which received a rhapsodic standing ovation. This tale of a love triangle is a retro ode to the old New Wave, plundering its fashions the way contemporary pop mines ’60s rock. So I had to ask: if Truffaut and Godard were the Beatles and the Stones of La nouvelle vague, which does he prefer? Long pause. Dolan refused to commit . . . until the moment the tape recorder was switched off: “Godard!”

In the Cannes casino, Jean-Luc may have left the table, but a young Québécois who is living the dream has just begun to pick up the game.