Best Actor winner Christoph Waltz — who graciously accepted his prize in three languages — plays brilliant Nazi colonel Hans Landa, a/k/a "the Jew hunter." The 52-year-old Austrian has been acting, mostly on German-language television, for 30 years. As he did for John Travolta 15 years ago, Tarantino has put a taken-for-granted actor in the spotlight.
Is Basterds a Jewish revenge fantasy? "That wouldn't be the section of the video store I'd put it in," Tarantino said, while acknowledging that the description has a great deal of truth to it.
Eli Roth, the Hostel writer/director who plays the hulking so-called Bear Jew, has that video-store shelf in his head: "Being Jewish, for me this is like kosher porn. I've dreamed of something like this since I was a little kid. I performed a sex scene when I beat that guy to death."
Many, many other actors this year performed in sex scenes not involving baseball bats but incorporating everything from standard appendages to, oh, rusty farm tools.
Best Actress winner Charlotte Gainsbourg, mourning opposite Willem Dafoe over the loss of their unnamed characters' only child, skips the Prozac and borrows a few techniques from the Spanish Inquisition in an extreme effort to subdue recalcitrant grief in Lars von Trier's Antichrist. The squirm-inducing scenes have been trumpeted out of context; Trier has fashioned a magnificently shot portrait of a loving relationship made untenable by insurmountable sorrow.
Gaspar Noe, who worked wonders on the topic of damaged coupledom in 2002's Irreversible, delivers gobs of groovy camerawork and rice-paper-thin content in Enter the Void, the semi-psychedelic tale of a wandering soul whose corporeal shell didn't get to finish reading The Tibetan Book of the Dead before being prematurely dispatched in a Tokyo restroom. Thanks to Noe, women wondering what their cervixes see when a penis comes to call need no longer figure out how to light their vaginas from within.
If, as a Bostonian, you've ever wondered, "What do I have to do to get arrested in this town?" the press kit for the unambiguously titled closing-night film, Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky, reminds us that Stravinsky was once carted away by the Boston police for tampering with the National Anthem.
As the immortal Dorothy Parker might have put it, I saw Best Director winner Brillante Mendoza's Kinatay at a disadvantage: the projector was running.
Grand Prix winner Jacques Audiard's A Prophet is the rock-solid tale of an illiterate 19 year old who evolves from nebulous petty thief to criminal mastermind during his six years in a French prison.
Michael Haneke won the Palme d'Or with The White Ribbon, a rigorously told black-and-white tale of unsettling developments in a small German village in the year before WWI broke out. In his awards-night opening monologue, master of ceremonies and surreal humorist Édouard Baer described how various directors might treat that old narrative stand-by "Pass the salt." Audiard's thugs: "Pass the salt or I'll smash your face in." And Haneke's characters? "They might calmly say 'Pass the salt' — but they don't really want the salt, they want something else."
As tidy a piece of film analysis as I've heard all month.
Chosen from two dozen contestants, the Camera d'Or rewards the best first film in any section of the festival. Warwick Thornton of Australia won for Samson and Delilah, a touching romance between two Aboriginal teens. Asked whether he had contacted the cast with the good news, Thornton replied, "It's four in the morning in central Australia, and neither actor has a phone. So somebody will have to drive out there in the morning, knock on their doors, and say, 'We won!' "
