Tuesday morning, a newspaper headline described it as "la Moisson Americaine" ("the American harvest"). Supporters of pure French cinema called it a scandal, if not a crime. Nastassja Kinski seemed to think it was all Whoopi Goldberg's fault, while Joel and Ethan Coen, the perpetrators, were modestly ecstatic.
Their satiric comedy, "Barton Fink," which the brothers jointly wrote, produced and directed, had been given the 44th Cannes International Film Festival's three top prizes at the closing ceremonies on Monday night. This is a harvest reaped by no other film in recent memory. It takes at least five or six Oscars to constitute a sweep of the Academy Awards. In Cannes, where juries tend to split their votes among as many competing films as possible, three prizes are a landslide.
"Barton Fink" won not only the Palme d'Or as the festival's top film, but also the prizes for best direction (shared by the brothers) and for best actor, which went to John Turturro, who plays the film's title role. Equally astonishing and, to some, disturbing, is the fact that "Barton Fink" is the third American film in three years to win the Palme d'Or.
Supplementing the three "Barton Fink" awards is the special jury prize given to Samuel L. Jackson, the American actor, in acknowledgment for his performance as the festival's best supporting actor in Spike Lee's "Jungle Fever." This was the only prize to go to Mr. Lee's film, whose partisans were many and passionate.
Immediately after the ceremonies on the stage of the Palais du Festival, Miss Kinski, the actress, who was one of the night's presenters, was seen cornering Ms. Goldberg, the only black member of the jury of 10. Miss Kinski wanted to know how Ms. Goldberg could have possibly allowed any film other than "Jungle Fever" to win the Palme d'Or. She might have more profitably cornered her old friend Roman Polanski.
Mr. Polanski, who directed Miss Kinski in "Tess" in 1980, was the president of the festival jury. According to reliable reports on the jury's deliberations, Mr. Polanski's tastes (called Philistine by his detractors) dominated the jury, though "Jungle Fever" was not faulted for being too high-brow.
It is said further that Mr. Polanski, Ms. Goldberg and Alan Parker, the English director, formed the nucleus of a voting bloc that was far from sympathetic to the kind of cerebral, self-referential, often leisurely film that is favored by European critics, and that was much in evidence here this year.
"Boring, boring, boring," is the way Mr. Polanski is said to have characterized these movies.
Two other jury members, Vittorio Storaro, the cinematographer ("Apocolypse Now" and "Dick Tracy"), and Vangelis, the composer ("Chariots of Fire" and "Blade Runner"), were also said to lean toward Mr. Polanski's views. The principal opposition is assumed to have come from Jean-Paul Rappeneau, the director of last year's "Cyrano de Bergerac," and Margaret Menegoz, who has produced films by Jacques Rivette, Marguerite Duras and Eric Rohmer, among others.
If this is true, the swing votes would have been cast by Natalya Negoda, the Soviet actress, Ferid Boughedir, the Tunisian director, and Hans-Dieter Seidel, the German film critic.
This sort of infighting, genteel as it seems to have been, carries implications that reach far beyond Cannes. It represents what many film makers interpret as an important stand against the homogenization, or Americanization, of European cinema. The further economic integration of the European Community next year is expected to result in an increasing number of mass-market international movies and fewer films of personal, idiosyncratic character.
That the Cannes jury gave its Grand Prix, which is its runner-up prize to Mr. Rivette's "Belle Noiseuse" was seen as a compromise intended to squelch charges that the Polanski jury was hopelessly oriented toward fun, games and the marketplace.
The Rivette film runs four hours and contemplates a painter (Michel Piccoli) as he overcomes a 10-year painter's block. It would seem to exemplify the kind of cinema Mr. Polanski says he finds so boring. By thus acknowledging the Rivette film, the jury also appeared to be avoiding the issue of another French entry highly regarded by film aficionados.
This is "Van Gogh," Maurice Pialat's dryly witty, revisionist film that liberates the artist from his ear-slashing, mad-genius image. Mr. Pialat's van Gogh is played with cool, somber humor by Jacques Dutronc. He has occasional headaches, but he's a comparatively abstemious fellow. Kirk Douglas, who played the artist in "Lust for Life," wouldn't recognize him.
It now turns out Mr. Lee's "Jungle Fever" was apparently never a strong contender for the Palme d'Or, and that there were at least two jury members who worked actively against its serious consideration.
"Jungle Fever" does have its problems, but the overwhelming consideration among those of us who found it to be the festival's best film is that its problems are nothing compared to the brilliantly evident, steadily growing talent of the man who made it.
"Jungle Fever" takes as its starting point an interracial affair, casually embarked upon. The man is a successful Manhattan architect who is black, with roots in Harlem. She is an independent-minded young white woman, a temporary secretary, whose heritage is Brooklyn Italian-American with a vengeance.
They are the center of the movie, which, like "Do the Right Thing," becomes panoramic in scope, a kind of great urban mural that is wondrously alive in its accumulated detail. Mr. Lee has a vision that may be broader than even he realizes. His white and black characters are equally vivid. Further, he demonstrates a technical control of the medium that is light years ahead of his contemporaries.
Yet "Jungle Fever" has two significant problems that may have stumped the Cannes jury: the character of the architect, played by Wesley Snipes, and the buildup to the penultimate sequence, a fight between a father and a son that fails to carry the emotional punch that audiences have every right to expect. For whatever reason, the sequence never realizes its potential.
Mr. Snipes's architect is, as written, the least interesting character in the film. He's a function of the plot, both too pallid and too idealized to be true or interesting. He is a small hole in the movie.
It's possible to fault "Jungle Fever" on these two lapses, though they are insignificant compared to the film's manifold accomplishments.
"Barton Fink" was apparently something of a life-saver to the jury members. It was a film that they all could agree upon. It is genuinely funny, written with terrific verve and directed from beginning to end with strict attention to what serves the overall work. Nothing is superfluous or fancified, as has sometimes been the case in the earlier Coen collaborations, particularly "Miller's Crossing."
Further, the film is both very enjoyable in the manner favored by Mr. Polanski, and (to use a word favored here) ambiguous. Its final 15 minutes are going to cause a lot of puzzlement. "Barton Fink" could almost be called a crossover film.
A word about Mr. Turturro: The Cannes best-actor award does not automatically make the recipient a star, especially in the United States. Yet Mr. Turturro's performance in "Barton Fink" is of a caliber to suggest that he may one day show himself to be the equal of Dustin Hoffman. Mr. Turturro is no Kevin Costner. There's little chance he'll be dancing with wolves or playing Robin Hood very soon. But as he demonstrates in "Jungle Fever" as well as in "Barton Fink," he is a character actor with potential to play leading roles.
Possibly the most intrusive publicity maneuver at this festival was sponsored by Alexander and Ilya Salkind, the producers of one of the two movies now being planned about the life, times, epiphanies, romances and heartbreaks of Christopher Columbus.
Each day during the long lunch break, the Salkinds, the producers who gave us "Santa Claus: The Movie," hired 26 very noisy airplanes to go flying over the beach, trailing 26 banners carrying information about their film. The joke on the beach was that, with a couple of more planes, the Salkinds might have spelled out the entire Mario Puzo screenplay.
