On location in the French Riviera, GAUTAMAN BHASKARAN reports from the 60th Festival de Cannes.

The second half of the Cannes Film Festival threw up some more motivating cinema. Faith Akin’s Turkish movie, The Edge of Heaven had an interesting story to tell us, though I did find the narrative style a little longwinded, even somewhat circuitous. In what often appeared like coincidences, the film places four Turks and two Germans on the screen and shows us how their lives crisscross with tragic results. The most poignant part of the The Edge of Heave is when it underlines the relationship, not quite platonic though, between a German girl and a Turkish illegal immigrant she befriends. The Turk, also a young girl, Ayten (played with great panache by Nurgul Yesilcay), is a political activist on the run from Istanbul, and the movie, divided into three chapters (a style that I first saw in the works of the Danish director, Lars von Trier), paints the horror of a tragedy brought about by Ayten’s relationship with Lotte, the German girl. Akin’s work looks impressive without being overtly glossy, and he travels from Turkey to German with consummate ease.

However, I must say, despite the fear of displeasing some, it is Hollywood which has mastered the craft to near perfect levels. And one notices this every time one watches American cinema from the big studios. Michael Winterbottom’s A Mighty Heart relates the intense hunt for a Wall Street Journal reporter, Daniel Pearl, kidnapped by Islamic terrorists in 2002. Based on a book by his widow, Mariane, A Mighty Heart created curiosity and commotion during its shoot in the western Indian city of Pune, where Angelina Jolie (portraying Mariane) and her boyfriend, Brad Pitt, landed with their children. The film begins with Jolie’s voiceover that sets the tone of Daniel’s story as he is tricked into a trap in Karachi, kidnapped and ultimately beheaded. Mariane, pregnant with Daniel’s child, enlists the help of just about everybody she knows, and they include senior people from the Journal, U.S. diplomatic security specialist Randall Bennett and her friend, writer Asra. The investigation is led by the chief of Pakistani counter-terrorism unit, known as Captain, admirably played by the Indian actor, Irfan Khan. While the rest of the cast performs well enough, it is Khan who is near brilliant in a role he underplays to the hilt. Passionately believing that if Daniel were to be killed, it would bring a bad name to Pakistan, Khan begins a desperate search, which eventually goes in vain. But I was quite disappointed with Jolie’s work. She simply does not convey a woman in extreme distress. Rather, she appears like an investigator herself, making notes of the developments and jotting down the contact details of the suspects and others. I hardly saw a woman, six months into her pregnancy, wracked by fear or pain.

The French entry in Competition, The Diving Bell and The Butterfly by Julian Schnabel, is the tragic tale of Dominique Bauby, the editor-in-chief of Elle magazine, who suffers a stroke and finds his entire body, except his left eye, paralysed. His doctors and physiotherapists envisage an elaborate plan for him to use his eye to blink/convey the letters of the Alphabet. He writes his memoirs, and has it published three days before he dies in 1997 aged 45. The work loses its balance somewhere, and we get around seeing too much of the hospital and the blinks. While Bauby’s monumental and painstaking effort cannot be ignored, what I would like to have seen is more of his life when he was up and about. There is far too less of this in Schnabel’s work.


A Spy arrived quietly as the 60th edition of the Cannes Film Festival was ready to draw its curtain down and lock up its projectors until next year. Director, Andrei Nekrasov’s Rebellion: The Litvinenko Case, a powerful documentary on the murder of a former Russian spy in London last November, was screened on May 26 in what was an unscheduled addition to the Festival’s official sections.

Litvinenko was poisoned by radioactive polonium. He was given tea laced with this deadly venom, and the former spy died a very painful death.

The day British law officials formally charged a key suspect in the murder case, Andrei Lugovoy, Cannes announced the inclusion of this documentary.

Litvinenko died three weeks after he was poisoned in London, where he had been living in exile since escaping from Russia. He had accused the state security services of bombing apartment blocks in Moscow. These led to the Chechnya crisis.

And, when the former spy accused – as he lay dying in hospital – Russian President Vladimir Putin of ordering his assassination, it created a diplomatic rift between Britain and Russia. Their relationship is yet to improve.

Nekrasov said he wanted the people to see the way Litvinenko died as a martyr for his strong beliefs. “I want people to say enough is enough”.

The director told the Press at Cannes that in his darker moments he was afraid he would also be killed.

I hope that Cannes’ bold move to screen this bolder documentary would not only let the world know what political systems are capable of, but also help keep men like Nekrasov safe so that they can continue telling the truth to a world that is dangerously close to caring less and less about human life.