Cannes Journal: Provocateur Takes on Health Care

By MANOHLA DARGIS and A. O. SCOTT
The New York Times
May 21, 2007

CANNES, France, May 20 — Three years after conquering the Cannes Film Festival and winning the Palme d’Or for “Fahrenheit 9/11,” Michael Moore has returned the amour big time with “Sicko,” his most fluid provocation to date. A persuasive, insistently leftist indictment of the American health care system, as well as a funny valentine to all things French — and many things Canadian, British and Cuban — the film shows that while Mr. Moore remains a radical partisan, he has learned how to sell his argument with a softer touch. He’s still the P. T. Barnum of activist cinema, but he no longer runs the entire circus directly from the spotlight.

To that shrewd end almost an entire hour has lapsed before Mr. Moore lumbers in front of the camera in “Sicko,” his aw-shucks grin and baseball cap firmly in place. By that point he has introduced a wealth of evidence (photographs, news clips and archival footage) and a sprawling cast of characters (patients, health care workers and Washington politicians), each another piece in the evolving puzzle. How did we get here and why?, Mr. Moore asks in his faux-folksy, at times icky-sticky voice-over. Though of course there’s never any doubt that this director of “Bowling for Columbine,” a blistering attack on American gun culture, believes he knows who is to blame for the state of the nation’s health care and why.

Mr. Moore has always been a canny rhetorician: He’s a master of the obvious observation and the pseudo-naïve question. These can be effective ploys, but they sometimes come across as maddeningly condescending. Early in “Sicko” he says, “I always thought that the health insurance companies were here to help us,” a statement that the very existence of this film proves preposterous. It’s as if Mr. Moore’s didn’t want his Everyman persona to look or sound too smart, a tactic that results only in dumber movies. He’s on firmer ground when he lets other people do the talking and when he takes his entertaining show on the road to Canada, Britain and France, where in between nicely timed comic bits and man-on-the-street encounters, he explores the many pluses if none of the minuses of universal health care.

By contrast his widely publicized trip to Cuba with Americans in need of better health care, including a handful of Sept. 11 rescue workers, registers as ill conceived because it takes place in a political vacuum. It’s difficult to share his enthusiasm about that country’s apparently terrific health care given its history of human-rights abuses. Mr. Moore’s larger point is that there is something terribly wrong when one of the world’s poorer nations can care for its people while the richest, most powerful nation in the world lets its citizens literally rot on the street, as happens every day on Los Angeles’s skid row. In “Sicko” greed is the pathogen that has diseased a health care system in which all Americans, including those who think that the H.M.O. card in their wallet has them covered, are the terminally wronged patients. -- MANOHLA DARGIS

Scoundrel Time

“Terror’s Advocate,” Barbet Schroeder’s jaw-dropping new film, traces a tangled history of political militancy from the Algerian war in the 1950s through the Cambodian genocide of the 1970s up to the brink of our own time. There is plenty of violence and intrigue, but it seems likely that had Mr. Schroeder pitched the project to a Hollywood studio, the story would have been dismissed as crazily implausible. In any case it works brilliantly as a documentary, with a narrative that is all the more amazing for being true.

The subject of “Terror’s Advocate” is Jacques Vergès, notorious in France as a public gadfly and a lawyer with a client list that includes the Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie and the international terrorist known as Carlos the Jackal. A polite way to describe Mr. Vergès — the description he himself might offer — would be as a bold advocate for unpopular causes. But through wide-ranging interviews (including phone conversations with Carlos himself) and some impressive sleuthing, “Terror’s Advocate” paints a more complicated and ultimately far more damning portrait.

Mr. Vergès, an elegant, well-spoken, at times almost jolly figure, is given plenty of screen time to plead his case, which is to say enough rope to hang himself several times over. (A cautionary text at the beginning of “Terror’s Advocate” dryly notes that the film’s view of its protagonist may correspond with his own.) He presents himself as an idealist with a streak of adventurous romanticism whose principles were tested and forged in the struggles against fascism and French colonialism.

But after more than two hours his noble self-image is heavily tarnished as his vanity and opportunism are steadily revealed. He rose to prominence in Algeria, defending anti-French militants (one of whom he subsequently married), and later devoted himself to the violent left-wing radicals whose political infantilism plagued Europe in the ’70s and early ’80s. Mr. Schroeder’s rigor makes it hard to excuse Mr. Vergès as a misguided fighter on behalf of the oppressed. Nor, however, is he a demon on the order of Idi Amin, subject of an earlier (and in some ways methodologically similar) documentary by Mr. Schroeder. In spite of Mr. Vergès’s collaboration with evil — his friendship with Pol Pot, his entanglement with an unrepentant Nazi who financed Palestinian militants — he comes across as more of a scoundrel than a monster.

He is also one of the most fascinating characters on screen in Cannes this year, a figure out of Joseph Conrad, a man whose life and personality become lenses through which a shadowy, paradoxical stretch of the recent past is refracted. -- A .O. SCOTT

Up, Up and Away in Paris

Among the highlights of this year’s festival is “The Flight of the Red Balloon,” the latest from the Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-hsien, making his eighth appearance at Cannes. On paper Mr. Hou’s film sounds unfortunate at best: a tribute, set in Paris and starring Juliette Binoche, to Albert Lamorisse’s enchanting “Red Balloon,” which won the Palme for shorts in 1956 and has since inspired generations of children to look toward the sky. Mr. Hou’s “Red Balloon,” which is playing out of the main competition in a section called Un Certain Regard, was a late addition to Cannes, having been officially brought onboard last month. It’s rumored that the festival rejected several earlier cuts, which just goes to show that practice makes nearly perfect.

Ms. Binoche plays Suzanne, an overwhelmed single mother who, in her struggle to keep it together, hires a young Taiwanese film student, Song (Song Fang), to care for her 7-year-old son, Simon (Simon Iteanu). Through a series of quiet, seemingly offhand yet exquisitely conceived interludes, Mr. Hou introduces us to three fully inhabited people who embody the careless joys of childhood, the hopes of young adulthood and the burdens of older age. Mr. Hou arranges these bodies with his usual tender touch; his mastery of film space remains assured as ever, even many miles from home, as does his work with actors. His direction of Ms. Binoche is particularly notable because he doesn’t allow her to work her wiles with beauty or dribbling tears, as is too often her wont.

The film’s concluding section takes place at the Museé d’Orsay, with Simon seated with other children and some adults before “The Ball,” Félix Vallotton’s haunting fin-de-siècle painting of a child playing with a red ball. The child is in the sunlight, someone says of the painting, an observation that this unexpectedly moving film affirms with feeling and beauty and grace. Outside a window, not far from Simon, a red balloon bops in the Paris air. For some this balloon can only be a beacon of all that once was and all that was lost; for others and certainly for the man who made this lovely, lovely film, it seems to mean something more hopeful. The string hovers just out of grasp, yet hovers nonetheless, waiting for us to grab hold. -- MANOHLA DARGIS

Touch of Evil in West Texas

“A journalist just reminded me that we’ve been here in competition seven times,” said Joel Coen, sitting beside his brother, Ethan, in a beachside restaurant. The brothers, back in Cannes this year (their ninth visit overall) with “No Country for Old Men,” a brutal and meticulous adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel, have had an enviable track record with the local juries. Six prizes in six tries, most recently a jury award in 2004 for “The Ladykillers” and a directing award in 2001 for “The Man Who Wasn’t There,” to go with those given “Fargo” and “Barton Fink,” which also won an acting award. Oh yes, and the Palme d’Or.

Anyone involved in a Cannes office pool may want to take note of these data, but whatever its fate on closing night, “No Country for Old Men” has been well received by critics and the public. Faithful to both the mood and the language of Mr. McCarthy’s book, it is well made without being ostentatious in its virtuosity: stark, lean (in spite of a two-hour running time) and plenty mean. Javier Bardem plays Anton Chigurh, an emanation of pure metaphysical evil with a soft voice and peculiar haircut. Tommy Lee Jones plays Bell, a weary West Texas sheriff — a close kinsman to the character he played in his own Cannes prize winner, “The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada” — who pursues Chigurh through lonely motels and dusty outposts. Bell utters a line that, wrenched wildly out of context, might make a fitting motto for the weary cowboys of the Cannes festival: “If this ain’t the mess, it’ll do until the mess gets here.” -- A. O. SCOTT

An Ambassador of Film

There is perhaps no one who understands the chaos of Cannes better than Pierre Rissient, a man whose career in cinema is nearly impossible to summarize. He has been a critic, a distributor, a publicist, a producer, a filmmaker and an all-purpose ambassador for American, Asian and many other films. He is also the subject of a documentary, “Pierre Rissient, Man of Cinema,” that drew an affectionate and distinguished crowd at a special screening at the Salle Buñuel on Saturday afternoon. Both the festival’s current director, Thierry Frémaux, and his predecessor, Gilles Jacob, were on hand to pay tribute to Mr. Rissient. In his honor the dapper Mr. Frémaux wore a baseball cap, one of the signatures of Mr. Rissient’s easygoing sartorial style. (Legend has it that he is the only man admitted to black-tie screenings in a T-shirt.)

Directed by Todd McCarthy, chief film critic at Variety, “Man of Cinema” is both a loving portrait — with testimonials from filmmakers, critics and various Cannes eminences — and a valuable history lesson. Many of the people at the screening knew Mr. Rissient; nearly everyone who has been to Cannes has been aided by his advice, amused by his gossip or provoked by his strongly held, sharply argued opinions. But few of us knew just how instrumental he had been in shaping the world of film as we know it: by shepherding movies and their directors to Cannes, and also by shaping the terms of their critical and public appreciation. A bit of his wisdom has been printed on a T-shirt that should become an unofficial Cannes uniform: “It is not enough to like a film. You must like it for the right reasons.” -- A. O. SCOTT