On the final day of the 54th Cannes Film Festival, the consensus is clear - this year has been a damp squib. On the final day of the 54th Cannes Film Festival, the consensus is clear this year has been a damp squib. There was next to no glamour on hand, even counting Nicole Kidman's appearance for the opening film Moulin Rouge. And the most spectacular launch party was for Lord of the Rings which has not even been completed yet. As for the competition, it looked appetising on paper, with films from a host of major directors, including Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Portuguese nonagenarian Manoel de Oliveira, and Shohei Imamura, a two-time winner.But it failed to excite critics or the buyers What was missing was a sense of discovery. Cannes used regularly to provide critical and commercial successes, but little stirred the passions this year.
The most conspicuous deal was Miramax's purchase of Tears of the Black Tiger, an extremely camp Thai Western tipped as the next Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The only commercially hot discovery in competition was the Bosnian black comedy No Man's Land, with a cameo by Simon Callow as a US general.Leslie Felperin, editor of the daily festival paper Moving Pictures, commented, "It was a very slow year a lot of distributors didn't buy anything. There was less action, less news, no hot stories."And Variety critic Todd McCarthy complained: "For all the artistic ambition of the films on view in Cannes, very few of them were fully achieved."All the same, there were some impressive films in contention for the Palme d'Or, to be announced tonight. The front runner appears to be Italian film La Stanza del Figlio (The Son's Room); director Nanni Moretti plays a psychoanalyst whose teenage son dies in an accident. The Best Actress prize seems sure to go to Isabelle Huppert for a devastating performance in Austrian director Michael Haneke's La Pianiste (The Piano Teacher).
The Best Actor is less certain: it could go to Jack Nicholson for Sean Penn's film The Pledge, or to Michel Piccoli in de Oliveira's I'm Going Home. Alternatively, the veterans could lose out to an unknown in Italian non-professional Stefano Cassetti, as a real-life murderer in the French film Roberto Succo.. The contestants on Survivor, battling it out on a tropical island in ITV's new "reality television" series, will not be the only people in a sweat this week. The contestants on Survivor, battling it out on a tropical island in ITV's new "reality television" series, will not be the only people in a sweat this week. ITV bosses are in a lather of anxiety over whether Britain's most expensive reality show will lift them out of their own ratings hell and restore the network's struggling finances after a drastic fall in advertising income.The network has spent around £7m on the project, and hopes that the sight of 16 contestants eating maggots and rats on the snake-infested island in the hope of winning £1m will attract audiences of up to 12 million.The programme will also pitch the network into a head-on battle with its main rival, BBC1, which it must be seen to beat by a wide margin in order to satisfy the advertisers.
