CANNES, France - Both Korean films competing at the Cannes Film Festival, Park Chan-wook's "Old Boy" and Hong Sang-soo's "Yoja-nun Namja-ui Miraeda (Woman is the Future of Man)", met with mixed responses from international critics.
Park's film unsettled Western critics both for the controversial nature of the violence it depicts and for it being perceived as a genre movie unexpectedly admitted to the art-house kingdom of Cannes' competition. On the other hand, the frail subtlety of Hong's writing skills and elegant direction were overlooked both for the lack of acquaintance with his peculiar style and for the much more accessible approach of most of the other contenders.
This resulted in contradicting verdicts on the more highly regarded critics panels in festival dailies. According to Le Film Francais, which collects notes from fifteen French reviewers, "Old Boy" is unfortunately standing at the very lowest rank of all the competitors, while Hong's picture is featured among the best-welcomed entries. However, the international jury of Screen International, a panel consisting of eleven critics from all over the world, ranks "Woman is the Future of Man" as 11th out of the 11 pictures voted, while Park's film sits in decidedly more comfortable fourth spot.
Actually, "Old Boy" received a rapturous response at its official screening over the weekend and it seems that it might get a favorable boost from jury president Quentin Tarantino. In addition, Choi Min-sik's outstanding performance gained him unanimous applause and has firmly placed him as a frontrunner for best actor laurels.
Hong's film, on the contrary, really felt like a jar of clay among steel vases and looks to be a dark horse at awards time. However, critics generally agreed that the diverging qualities of the two films would undoubtedly result in mutual exclusion in the jury's preferences.
Among the other contenders, numerous titles drew positive responses from both critics and audiences. Among them is the widely overestimated film, "Comme une Image (Look at me)", by Agnes Jaoui. A quite conventional French bourgeois comedy, which has perhaps entertained viewers, but with all its formulaic sequences and cliched characters, really feels like reheated leftovers.
Decidedly more convincing were two captivating Asian films: Hirokazu Koreeda's "Nobody Knows" from Japan and Apichatpong Weerasethakul's "Tropical Malady" from Thailand. The former is a hauntingly beautiful tale of four children abandoned by their mother, who undergo a peculiar struggle to survive in careless Tokyo, told through the eye of an enchantingly precise and lyrical yet documentary-like camerawork. The latter is a mysterious and fascinating film divided into two neatly split halves. The first follows the blossoming of a gay romance between a soldier and a gentle village boy, while the second seems to reiterate the same story though a tale in which a soldier goes into the forest to hunt for a man-eating tiger.
Much controversy was raised by Michael Moore's effective anti-Bush documentary "Fahrenheit 9/11", which provocatively tracks down the economical connections between the Bush and the bin Laden families, and thus retells the string of events from September 11th that led to Afghanistan, and then to the war in Iraq. Conversely, Hollywood movies gave Cannes a dose of entertainment with "Shrek 2", which many critics found cleverer and funnier than the first, and the latest from Joel and Ethan Coen, who for the first time are credited as co-directors in their sarcastically sapid yet slightly slim remake of "The Ladykillers" starring Tom Hanks.
** Paolo Bertolin is a writer specializing in Asian films for Cineforum, an Italian film magazine.
English 
US$5 off (order min. US$5)
