Your faithful correspondent returned to New York just a few hours ago, readers, and she is somewhat baffled by the awards announced earlier today. The Palme d’Or did not go to Che, as most critics I spoke with had predicted (and as I had secretly hoped), but to Laurent Cantet’s Entre les murs (right), a solid, engaging work about a Parisian junior-high-school teacher and his charges that nonetheless plays like the French To Sir, with Love (minus Lulu). Steven Soderbergh’s epic about the Argentine revolutionary wasn’t completely shut out, though; at least Benicio Del Toro was recognized for his outstanding turn (thankfully, Things We Lost in the Fire didn’t completely derail his career).

Steve McQueen rightly won the Caméra d’Or  (given for the best first film) for Hunger. Did Sergey Dvortsevoy’s Kazakh-steppe–set Tulpan take home the Un Certain Regard award because it features both cute, yurt-dwelling small children and the birth of a lamb? Kelly Reichardt’s superb Wendy and Lucy (left), also in the running for the UCR prize, boasts no toddlers but an astounding Michelle Williams (in her best performance yet) and a canine who hits her marks even more than she did in Old Joy. Reichardt’s film won no awards at Cannes, but hopefully it will pick up something even more significant: U.S. distribution.

Wandering through the basement of the Palais in search of yet another meal consisting of refined white flour (those on Atkins are advised to plan ahead), I passed the “Beauty & Well Being” kiosk “by Le Spa des Stars.” Aestheticians all in white were ministering to someone; I believe L’Oréal products were involved. Well-being is slowly being restored in Cannes, as many festival attendees have headed home. Even directors presenting work here look relaxed. On my way to an interview earlier this afternoon, I passed Lucrecia Martel (whose La Mujer Sin Cabeza continues to linger in my mind after my initial frustration) gamboling along the Croisette. Half an hour later, I spotted Abel Ferrara—here with his out-of-competition doc Chelsea on the Rocks (right)—laughing with his handlers. At least ten more movies still need to unspool as of this writing (plus the opportunity to catch up with all the Competition titles one may have missed), including Kim Jee-won’s The Good, The Bad, The Weird—which just may be the best way to describe Cannes in toto. Or maybe the title of the closing-night film, Barry Levinson’s What Just Happened?, conveys the experience more accurately

I stepped in a pile of it outside my Cannes lodgings three days ago and endured a double dose of it this morning: poop. How is it possible that Philippe Garrel, whose Regular Lovers made my top-ten list last year and whose recently revived I Can No Longer Hear the Guitar also stunned me, made the inept romantic hooey La Frontière de l’aube (right)? Press members clapped when the screen went black in between scenes; others simply nodded out. When the ghost of a dead woman played by Laura Smet started spooking Louis Garrel, most of us just chuckled. A Toronto-based critic with whom I stood in the Che line for 90 minutes yesterday was absolutely confident that his countryman Atom Egoyan’s Adoration would win the Palme d’Or this year. Clearly, Maple Leaf pride has clouded his judgment; Egoyan’s latest banality (he hasn’t made a good film since 1997’s The Sweet Hereafter) takes on its topics—terrorism, religious intolerance, cyberspace, victimhoood—ten years too late. But passing through the Market level of the Palais this morning, I saw a poster for something called Sunshine Barry and the Disco Worms (left)—sold to more than 25 territories! When art cinema is this bad, there’s always hope for Danish 3-D animated family features.

Readers, never did your loyal correspondent imagine that she would begin and end her day with Julia Ormond. She’s no Asia Argento—but heck, since there are no other contenders (well, maybe Terence Davies) for the throne, I declare Ormond Queen of Cannes ’08. In Jennifer Lynch’s Surveillance (the director’s second film, after 1993’s Boxing Helena), Ormond and Bill Pullman (pictured) play FBI agents summoned to question the witnesses of a gruesome crime. The influence of Jennifer’s pop, David, is evident, with Twin Peaks and Lost Highway the most obvious references. But the younger Lynch cooks up her own batch of bizarreness, distinct, if less successful, than Dad’s. In the second Ormond vehicle, Che (I’ll have more to say on the film in the magazine next week), the actor’s role, as a journalist who interviews the revolutionary, is so small (her face is usually blurred in her scenes with Benicio Del Toro, who plays Guevara) that it’s all but forgotten in this four-and-a-half-hour rumble in the jungle. What lingers in the memory: varieties of facial hair as wild as the surrounding vegetation.

The café where I usually grab a sandwich in between screenings is now selling Red Bull at 2.50 euros a can; Nespresso has been dispensing millions of free tiny cups of “the ultimate coffee experience” (the company’s words, not mine) since the festival began. With everyone cracked out on caffeine, no wonder I wasn’t surprised when a colleague told me she kneed someone in the groin—in response to his pushing and elbowing—during last night’s wilding for the Two Lovers screening. Read more »

A French friend recently explained the difference between cinéphile and cinéphage. The former term, as we know, refers to a lover of movies; the latter to one who consumes them voraciously and indiscriminately (or, to quote Oscar Wilde, someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing). The highly discerning Terence Davies recalls such an appetite in queeny, orotund voiceover in Of Time and the City, his exquisite documentary about his hometown of Liverpool: “At age seven, I saw Gene Kelly in Singing in the Rain. I discovered movies and swallowed them whole.” On Day Six of Cannes, it feels as if the cinema is devouring me. Read more »

“I MUST SEE INDY!” read the sad little hand-made sign held high by a bespectacled young man outside the Salle Debussy this morning. Not to be outdone, three teens in tuxedos, also desperate for tickets, held an even bigger placard—consisting of an Indiana Jones poster and what looked like a drawing of a firecracker about to ignite—and “sang” John Williams’s Indy theme. A bajillion French photographers screamed “HARREESSON!” Outside the Wifi Café, a reporter genuflected before Steven Spielberg’s image on a TV screen, and a near riot broke out among journos trying to push their way into the press conference. An international incident was averted—but will psychotic breaks? Read more »

A mysterious invitation arrived in my press box this afternoon from an “international therapist” who believes that “cell memory—stressful or conflicting events that are stored in the mind and carried down from generation to generation—and emotions are in large part at fault for many afflictions.” The good doctor’s clients include “Sting and Prude [sic]” and “Madonana [sic].” Curiously, Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale also has cell memory at its center: A family, sundered by sibling hatred, cancer and madness, finds tenuous resolution at yuletide. Yet quick resolve was on display at the press conference that immediately followed the screening. Read more »

“Blind is the new chic,” a friend and colleague joked at the opening-night party for Blindness, held on the beach across from the Carlton Hotel, a pier extending out into the Mediterranean to hold another table of tiny skewered vegetables, éclairs and meringues. The entrance to the fete—once you got past the butch gendarmes and various besuited security—was meant to evoke the white, milklike light that the characters in the film “see” before losing their vision. If one were charitable, one might liken it to David Bowie’s “Heroes” video. Or one could just call it tacky.

My peepers were sufficiently restored to take in four films today, with a couple more to go. Two—one fiction, one fact—take vastly different approaches to life behind bars (a third, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Three Monkeys, finds its patriarch in prison, but the details of his time in stir never figure into the narrative).

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Bonjour, mesdames et messieurs. We’re halfway through the first day of the 61st Cannes Film Festival, which will require the full use of thousands of eyeballs. Curiously, the opening film concerns the very loss of those orbs: Fernando Meireilles’s Blindness, an adaptation that’s looser and lighter than its source material, José Saramago’s 1995 Nobel Prize–winning novel, a somber, starchy allegory on historical horrors. In Blindness, several people in an unnamed city lose their vision and are confined to a mental ward, ravaged by the easy fraying of a makeshift society. Will the same happen to the “community” of journalists and film-industry professionals gathered at this beautiful seaside town? And is this year’s festival aiming for its own allegory? The official poster for this year’s festival, designed from a David Lynch photo, features a woman whose sight is obscured by a black bar. Read more »

The lineup for the 61st Cannes Film Festival was announced today, and there’s plenty to lose your head over. I’m atwitter for the new titles (all playing in Competition) by Arnaud Desplechin, Philippe Garrel and Lucrecia Martel. But I really plotzed when I saw that Wendy and Lucy, the latest from Kelly Reichardt—whose Old Joy topped my 2006 best-of list—has a slot in Un Certain Regard. Check back three weeks from now for my dispatches from the Riviera.