Entertainment

Minor Role For Brits At Cannes

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

May 16, 2001 / 10:10 AM EDT / CBS

British movies, conspicuous by their absence from France's Cannes Film Festival, may have fallen victim to their own success.

Long seen as high on artistic integrity but low on box office clout, British filmmakers have begun to turn that equation on its head.

The price, some pundits say, is that they are overlooked for the top Palme d'Or prize in the glamorous French Riviera resort for the first time in recent memory.

So while Cannes is wowed by Australian beauty Nicole Kidman and her new spectacular “Moulin Rouge,” British commentators covering the festival are indulging in a bit of soul searching.

“Many in the industry will explain this (British) absence as just a blip, but I am not sure that it is,” Adam Minns, UK film editor for Screen International, said from Cannes.

“There has been a shift toward commercially driven films in Britain and the pace of that shift has picked up in the last couple of years.”

Don't Ape U.S., Directors Told

British director Ken Loach has lambasted his compatriot filmmakers, saying they are selling their souls to Hollywood.

“The climate generally in Britain is to make films that look across the Atlantic and I think that's disastrous,” Loach told BBC radio from Cannes.

Loach's comments coincided with the unusual absence of British flicks from the competition for the Cannes film festival's top prize, the Palme D'Or award.

“I think it's time British filmmakers stopped allowing themselves to be colonised so ruthlessly by U.S. ideas and stopped looking so slavishly to the United States,” thundered the left-wing director, who was in Cannes for a special screening of his 1969 movie “Kes.”

“It demeans filmmaking when they do that,” he said. “It means our own culture gets devalued and it's as though there has to be an American in everything.”

Besides “Kes,” Loach is famous for such films as “Land and Freedom” and “Raining Stones.”

Ironically, his Cannes entry last year, “Bread and Roses,” was made in Los Angeles. But Loach said it was a very anti-Hollywood film, which told the story of underpaid, overworked office janitors. -Reuters

He said that in the last year an unusually high number – five - British films topped $10 million in domestic box-office eturns. They included Guy Ritchie's “Snatch” and smash hit “Billy Elliot.”

Now the quirky romantic comedy “Bridget Jones's Diary” is taking the world's cinemas by storm, grossing $45 million in North America in just 24 days.

“British film talent - paraded through Cannes last year in 'Billy Elliot' and Ken Loach's 'Bread and Roses' - was an obscurity,” Britain's Independent newspaper reported.

One reason could be that contenders like Lynne Ramsay's feature “Morvern Callar” were not ready in time.

It may be simply coincidence.

“Cannes is like the soccer World Cup. What we have here is the best of the moment,” said the festival's new artistic director Thierry Fremaux.

Britain's Film Council, a government-funded body, said that the country's movie industry was well represented at the film fest even if it was not in line for any major honors.

“The point of the festival is not just the competition but to promote British film on the global market,” a spokesman said.

He added that the shift toward a more commercial cinema need not be a backward step for an industry traditionally long on artistic merit but short on Hollywood-scale profits.

“We are not trying to ape the United States, but film is a business as well as an art.”

But perhaps U.S. director Terry Gilliam came closest to the truth with his alternative explanation for the absence of British films at Cannes.

“Maybe they're crap,” he joked at a media briefing by judges who will decide the winner of the Golden Palm.

Written By Mike Collett-White © MMI Viacom Internet Services Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Reuters Limited contributed to this report