Life begins at 60. At the 60th Cannes Film Festival there was something almost shocking - yet heroic - about the way a venerable culture event lifted its skirts, revealed its frilly knickers and cannes-cannes'd all the way to this year's biggest surprise of all. The Golden Palm went to a film that actually deserved it.
Believe me, this doesn't happen often, even with a film like Romania's Four Months, Three Weeks, Two Days which had been a critical favourite from day one. As an up-close-and- harrowing drama about illegal abortion, its strongest scenes make Vera Drake seem like Mary Poppins. As a portrait of the Ceausescu era it is art as social history. As a calling card from a new filmmaker, Cristian Mungiu, it bespeaks a brilliant realist. Mungiu's fly-on-wall observation style sees human beings as exactly that: flies on the wall. In a just society, we walk around on the ground on two legs, thinking, feeling and choosing. In an unjust one we are insects scattering to the corners, seeking any place where there may be cracks in the regime.
