A 60th anniversary celebration

For its 60th anniversary, the Cannes festival commissioned 3-minute shorts from some of its favorite directors – Wim Wenders, Roman Polanski, Hou Hsiao Hsien, Youssef Chahine, Olivier Assayas (sadly, Lars von Trier) and many more; the shorts were screened on Sunday night.
While some directors recreated childhood memories of the movies, others paid tribute to influential figures (Abbas Kiarostami’s homage to a divinely, aged Nikoo Kheradmand) or to themselves (Claude Lelouch, for one).
Many went by the famous exhortation from ‘Singing in the Rain’:”Make’ em laugh, make ‘em laugh!”. Kitano’s deadpan humor, Nanni Moretti’s self-deprecatory wit and Elia Suleiman’s Buster Keaton-esque comedy were all big winners, as was the Coen brothers’ short, in which a nerdy theater employee enthusiastically recommends Renoir’s ‘The rule of the game’ to a skeptic, vaguely threatening cowboy in a hat, plaid shirt and jeans. “Is there any livestock in that movie?” asks the cowboy, who ends up seeing and loving the Turkish movie ‘Climates’.
Walter Salle’s mini-musical poked fun at the Cannes Festival; with its wit and Brazilian rhythms, it was definitely the best received short, but my own favorites were a sensuous little gem by Wong Kar Wai’s and Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu’s ‘Anna’, set to the haunting soundtrack of Godard’s ‘Le Mépris’. Iñarritu doesn’t so much tell us a story as he hints at it, leaving us speculating about the mysterious and intensely emotional characters; as for the images (their composition, the use of light…), they are just beautiful. With Iñarritu, film is art, no question about it.