...and here's his take, from The Hollywood Reporter:This was a year of some strangeness in Cannes, of one major auteur being kicked out of town, another proving invisible and yet another -- one not allowed to work or travel from his native country -- sneaking his illicit new creation into France hidden in a loaf of bread.
Even if there were a number of very fine films, the 2011 festival arguably did not yield any absolute knockouts. The more elaborate works from the heavyweights in the competition -- Terrence Malick, Lars von Trier, Pedro Almodovar, Paolo Sorrentino, Nuri Bilge Ceylan -- were among the more contentiously debated, provoking reactions across the full spectrum of critical opinion.
By contrast, it was often the simpler, more modestly scaled films, the films that did not insist at the outset upon their importance or greatness -- Michel Hazanavicius’s silent black-and-white comic melodrama The Artist, Nicolas Winding Refn’s stripped-down auto actioner Drive, the Dardenne brothers’ small, redemptive drama The Kid With a Bike, Aki Kaurismaki’s seriocomic thriller Le Havre -- that went over best; clear thinking and an assurance of how to place an economical style at the service of substance were most often what carried the day.
It seemed to vaguely disappoint his most ardent longtime admirers and is far from perfect, but Malick’s The Tree of Life remained the film that made the strongest impression on me throughout this 64th Cannes. Artistically risky and aesthetically beautiful, it made its points impressionistically through hundreds of visual and aural pin-pricks, and I’m quite keen to see it again. Brad Pitt is terrific in it, but it’s the framing material, with Sean Penn playing Pitt’s grown son who doesn’t get to say or think a thing, that doesn’t cut it. I’m willing to bet that, had a nonstar played the son, Malick -- who cut Adrian Brody out of The Thin Red Line -- might have eventually decided to eliminate this material entirely but could not without causing a contractual mess and ruining a relationship.
The high-art contingent seemed highest on Turkish virtuoso Ceylan’s metaphysical thriller Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, which I had to miss but many compared to a more abstracted Zodiac, while we all grooved on the prolific Danish genre enthusiast Refn’s Drive, a sort of thinking fan’s alternative to Fast Five. I learned here from Refn’s father, who is von Trier’s longtime editor and sometime assistant director, that his son spent a good part of his teenage years frequently the now-extinct grindhouses on 42nd Street in New York City, which explains a few things and makes him something of a spiritual brother to Quentin Tarantino.
