Shock treatment rules at Cannes '09, even without Gaspar Noe's rampaging Enter the Void

CANNES, France—Memorable for its in-your-face sensationalism, the 62nd Cannes Film Festival opened with the 3-D computer animation Up, saving the "Yours" for the final minutes of the competition's penultimate movie, Gaspar Noé's "psychedelic melodrama" Enter the Void.

The sad, tawdry, monstrously inflated tale of two traumatized club kids adrift in the neon wilderness of downtown Tokyo, Enter the Void climaxed, so to speak, with a widescreen, simulated vagi-cam mega-close-up of a Brobdingnagian penis, thrustin' atcha. Perhaps it was the simple expression of the filmmaker's megalomaniacal desire to fuck the audience. Having bitch-slapped viewers for the past two and a half hours, however, with drug visions, strobe attacks, febrile sexual encounters, a graphic abortion complete with bloody fetus, a fatal shooting in a feces-smeared toilet stall (repeated three times) and a subjective view of a head-on car crash (four times)—everything but the latter shown from an overhead perspective with a nausea-inducing jittery camera—Noé's final gesture seemed more like his desperate last attempt to provoke a response...any response.

Were we jaded? The competition had already offered up Park Chan-wook's feverishly baroque vampire gore-fest Thirst, Brillante Mendoza's harrowing Kinatay—in which a young prostitute is abducted, beaten, tortured, raped, sodomized, murdered and matter-of-factly dismembered in a 45-minute more-or-less real-time sequence—and, of course, Lars von Trier's Antichrist, with its three indelible money shots: crushed testicles, ejaculated blood and clitoral circumcision self-performed in tight close-up. Even the competition's most ostensibly academic movie (and eventual winner), Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon, subscribed to the cinema of cruelty, enlivened by tame images of mutilated children and crucified songbirds.

Von Trier had told journalists that Antichrist arose out of his severe depression. Was he simply characterizing his own mental state or was he responding to a malaise affecting all of cinema? While Antichrist et al offered shock therapy, more benign films like Pedro Almodóvar's Broken Embraces and Tsai Ming-liang's Visage prescribed a nostalgic course of treatment—each celebrating the process of moviemaking. (There was also a gentler expression of cinephilia in the outpouring of critical love for 87-year-old Alain Resnais's inane Wild Grass—the cinematic equivalent of Willem DeKooning's last paintings.)

Leave it to Quentin Tarantino to fuse cine-narcissism with desperation and take movie magic literally. In Inglourious Basterds' fantastic revision of World War II, all aspects of the motion picture apparatus (projectionists, exhibitors, film critics, exploitation directors, movie stars) band together to destroy fascism, and as the director might have enthused, really fuckin' rewrite history! But if the most characteristic films selected for competition at Cannes were put under psychoanalysis, a fundamental, ontological anxiety might be revealed: Do movies still move us? Does cinema still have the power to thrill? What does it take to provide a visceral experience? Not for nothing did Noé describe Enter the Void as a ghost story. Is the medium itself even alive?

The short answer is yes, of course. Just beyond the competition's klieg light, signs of life: There was Francis Ford Coppola's struggle to reinvent himself as a personal film artist in Tetro and Malian director Souleymane Cissé's first movie in 15 years, the sardonic soap opera Min ye... (half a season of Desperate Housewives in two hours). Haim Tabakman successfully transposed Brokeback Mountain to the back alleys of ultra-orthodox Jerusalem in Eyes Wide Open; Portuguese director João Pedro Rodrigues presented an unclassifiably sad and funny drag queen fado musical, To Die Like a Man; and Romanian filmmaker Corneliu Porumboiu produced a small masterpiece on the nature of vérité, Police, Adjective. A 20-year-old French-Canadian director, Xavier Dolan, won three awards in the Directors' Fortnight with his sardonic family drama I Killed My Mother, while 24-year-old Philippine filmmaker Raya Martin recast his country's national struggle as an imaginary primitive talkie called Independencia. Martin's special effects include tinted black-and-white film stock, occasional superimposition, and almost synchronous sound. Pure cinema—no sex, little violence, not even 3-D!

Handed a surprisingly violent but generally lackluster slate, the Cannes jury decided to share the wealth by recognizing nine of the 20 films in competition. The Palme d'Or went to one of the most substantial movies vying, Haneke's The White Ribbon. Jury president Isabelle Huppert appeared delighted to bestow the award on the Austrian filmmaker who had directed her own prize-winning performance in The Piano Teacher, Cannes' grand scandale of 2001.

Incredulous gasps and boos greeted Huppert's announcement that Mendoza had been named best director for Kinatay, which proved to be the jury's most outré choice. The third place Jury Prize was split between Thirst and British filmmaker Andrea Arnold's underwhelming miserablist youth drama Fish Tank. However, the award to Arnold may have been a concession to jury member, the British writer Hanif Kureishi.

Cannes jurors invariably describe their experience as a sort of life-changing love-in. But notably unsmiling, Kureishi used the occasion of the traditional post-ceremony press conference to characterize the films under consideration as generally long and often "weird." He then volunteered the information that he would never wish to sit through Kinatay again.

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