Whittling 428 films down to a final 54 would be enough for any man, but Festival délégué général Gilles Jacob was still in sparkling form as he announced the line-up for the 49th Festival International du Film, as Nick Roddick discovered.
The selectors had looked at 428 features - more than enough celluloid to stretch from Paris to Cannes - including 116 directorial debuts and 190 US films. At the end of the day, they had come up with a final shortlist of 54 feature films from 30 different countries. The final selection was, said Jacob, one of the strongest in recent years, with a remarkable number of major films available for screening in Cannes.
The exceptional quality this year, he suggested, was the reason why confirmations had been a little late coming through. It was also, he might have added, why the rumour mill (Moving Pictures excepted, of course) had been more than usually off-target this year.
"There are," noted Jacob, "years when Cannes is a festival of discovery, revealing the talents of directors such as Jane Campion and Quentin Tarantino." But 1996 was not one of them, since there was such a range of films to choose from by the "uncontested masters" of modern cinema: Robert Altman, André Téchiné, Stephen Frears, Chen Kaige, Mike Leigh, the Taviani brothers and Bernardo Bertolucci who, said Jacob, had "returned to his roots" in stunning form with Stealing Beauty.
Indeed, the wealth of opportunity facing the Cannes selectors had had one all-important side-effect: with directors of the stature of Alain Tanner, Peter Greenaway, Eric Rohmer and Krzysztof Zanussi all accepting The Festival's invitation to screen their new films in Un Certain Regard, any question as to the quality of that sidebar was definitively removed, claimed Jacob. If there was one thing that distinguished this year's line-up, the Cannes chief said, it was the fact that it was guided by a distinctly egalitarian principle. "We're all fed up with the distinction between the idea of a cinema based on directors (un cinéma d'auteur) and what tends to be referred to, rather dismissively, as 'popular cinema,'" he said. "We all know that the cinéma d'auteur can produce disappointing films, and that popular cinema can be of the highest quality. We want to show that these two tendencies are in no way contradictory."
Not that this necessarily means that Cannes 96 is jammed with studio films - a reproach Jacob has heard often enough in the past. In point of fact, there is only one out-and-out studio film in this year's line-up - Michael Cimino's Sunchaser - plus a handful of others, notably Stealing Beauty and The Van, in which the studios are closely involved. No, if the change of emphasis this year meant one thing in practice, said Jacob, it was that there were an unusually high number of comedies in the line-up, particularly among the French selection. "It has often been said in the past that the Festival turned away from comedies," he noted. "But this year, there is a whole range of them, all sharply intelligent, in a variety of different registers." These ranged from Patrice Leconte's heavily satirical opening movie, Ridicule, to David O Russell's Flirting With Disaster, which would close the festival on a note of "New York Jewish humour".
Jacob also noted the comeback of film melodrama - in Lars Von Trier's Breaking the Waves and Mike Leigh's Secrets and Lies. And, in an unusual emphasis on one film from the Competition line-up, he singled out Flora Gomes' Po di sangui, which he described as "magnificent, moving, almost biblical in tone". The filmmaker - who is a man, despite the name, and who hails from the tiny West African state of Guinea-Bissau - had been represented in the Festival before, said Jacob (his Udju azul di Yonta/The Blue Eyes of Yonta was in Un Certain Regard four years ago), with a film that was interesting without being truly remarkable. Po di sangui was something else.
All in all, Jacob summed up, the festival this year offered laughter, tears and strong emotions. "1996 is also unique in one other respect," he added. "Only three of this year's films are historical. All the rest deal with present-day problems, and with the upheaval currently being experienced by our planet."
There would also, he revealed, be a surprise film - a work in which a major director directed himself. And the Festival was repeating an experiment it carried out a decade ago, when a trio of short films by the then-unknown Jane Campion were shown in Un Certain Regard. This year's discovery, he said, was Laila Pakalnina from Latvia, two of whose short films - Pasts (The Ferry) and Pramis (The Post) - had been selected for the same sidebar.
Fielding the usual range of narrowly nationalistic questions at the Paris press conference on 22 April - Why no German films? Why so few British films? Where were the Italian movies? - Jacob was briefly stopped in his tracks by a barbed query about this year's concentration on comedy. Was this, a French journalist asked with heavily ironic naivety, because "Cannes had somehow failed to select Four Weddings and a Funeral"?
The room went quiet as Jacob momentarily froze. Often ill at ease with big press events, the délégué général had obviously been working on his performance. Slipping his spectacles further down his nose and beaming benignly at the questioner, Jacob threw the irony right back. "Absolutely!" he said. "You know, I never got over that. The entire selection this year was determined by the fact that I didn't pick Four Weddings and a Funeral."
The packed ballroom of the Grand Hotel erupted into applause.
