bodyType

customContents

entityId

entityUuid

articlePageQuery

filter

article

articleBaseAdvertisingInfoArticle

articleListArticle

articleSeoArticle

hooksArticleAcknowledgementGateOverlayArticle

hooksTrackPageViewArticle

hooksContentInterestArticle

articleLinkingDataContent

hooksAmpRedirectArticle

articleSchemaContent

liveArticle

advertZone

sentiment

contentLock

topics

types

sections

paywallTypes

createdDate

publishedDate

sponsorType

urlAlias

moreOnThisArticles

commentCount

authorLocations

authors

corrections

displaySlideShow

multimediaEmbed

printHeadline

seriesContainer

articleSpeeches

socialHeadline

headline

images

flag

firstTopic

glossary

flattenTypeIds

image

relatedLinks

relatedNewsletters

__typename

sponsor

pdfFiles

seriesReverseOrder

series

disableOffPlatformContent

published

updatedDate

summary

subHeadline

body

keywords

readingTime

customTimezone

liveContents

SCMP Reporter

Though luck had little to do with Wong Kar-wai's success at the 50th Cannes Film Festival, he realises time was on his side - this time.

 In winning the Best Director prize on Sunday night for Happy Together, Wong acknowledges that had his movie been released a year from now, he might not be nursing his golden statuette.

 'This award has special meaning to us in 1997; I hope we can work in the same way in the future and make the kind of films we want to make,' he said. 'I hope somehow it means Hong Kong people can work happily together in the future.

 'If you really believe in something and you want to do it, make the film - legally or illegally.'  Wong's words had some resonance: the poster for the movie, which tells the story of a gay relationship - between Tony Leung Chiu-fai and Leslie Cheung Kwok-wing - gone adrift during a holiday in Buenos Aires, has been banned from public places in Hong Kong.

 Winnie Tsang of Golden Harvest, the distributor of Happy Together, said the poster would be removed before the movie opens this weekend.

 Although the two men depicted are fully clothed, she explained, the sticking point was the intertwining of their legs.

 Another gay-themed movie, East Palace West Palace, directed by banned mainland film-maker Zhang Yuan, was the subject of a protest in Cannes - the Chinese authorities confiscated Zhang's passport, preventing his attendance, and pressured the producers of the Zhang Yimou movie Keep Cool into withdrawing it from main competition.

 Wong's win was a magical moment - a double delight of first prize from a premiere showing of a Hong Kong film in main competition at Cannes in a year that is a turning point for the territory.

 Wong, wearing his trademark sunglasses, strode to the stage of the Palais des Festivals to receive his prize.

 'I'm happy to be here, thank you,' he told the 2,000-seater auditorium, packed with famous faces including John Travolta, Sean Penn, Catherine Deneuve and his rival in the main competition, Taiwanese director Ang Lee, who took Best Screenplay for his film The Ice Storm.

 Wong, who has attained cult status in Europe and the United States with films such as Chungking Express, Days of Being Wild, and Fallen Angels, attended Cannes with his first movie eight years ago - but As Tears Go By was shown out of competition. 'Time flies,' he laughed, adding that he only removed his sunglasses in bed.

 Elsewhere, Ang Lee, whose movie The Ice Storm starring Sigourney Weaver and Kevin Kline has garnered rave reviews, accepted the Best Screenplay award on behalf of James Schamus, his collaborator on movies such as The Wedding Banquet and Eat Drink Man Woman. 'James is sick in New York,' the director told the auditorium, but 'if he was here he'd like to thank moi for making the movie'.

 It was disappointing that Ice Storm did not pick up a more significant prize - Ang Lee, despite his obvious talent, failed to be nominated at the Oscars for Best Director in a year when his movie Sense And Sensibility took five nominations, and with two nods for Best Foreign Film Academy Awards he has so far failed to take home a statuette.

 But it was an Asian sweep at Cannes, with a Japanese film sharing the Palme d'Or - The Eel, directed by Shohei Imamura, marks the second Palme d'Or for the 71-year-old Tokyo-born director, after The Ballad of Narayama won in 1983. He shared the top prize with The Taste of Cherries, directed by the Iranian Abbas Kiarostami - a seemingly politically motivated vote for a meandering, decidedly uncommercial movie which had earlier been withdrawn from competition by Iran but mysteriously reappeared.

 The Grand Prix went to Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter, with a special 50th Cannes award going to Youssef Chahine for his life's work. British actress Kathy Burke took the Best Actress prize for her gritty role in Gary Oldman's moving directorial debut, Nil By Mouth, while actor Sean Penn took Best Actor for his work in She's So Lovely, directed by Nick Cassavetes from a script by his late father, John Cassavetes.

 The jury, headed by Isabelle Adjani and featuring Gong Li, Mira Sorvino and novelist Michael Ondaatje, voted for the art-house, reinforcing Cannes' tradition as a star-studded event which nonetheless awards the anonymous and uncommercial.

 Sunday night's awards ceremony marked the close of a Cannes more glittering and glamorous than ever before; the 50th anniversary celebrations saw this small south of France town over-run by stars and starlets. John Travolta flew in to support She's So Lovely, followed closely by Nicolas Cage at Nice airport with his action-fest Con-Air, joining Robin Williams, Clint Eastwood and Kim Basinger in the closing days of the May 17-18 festival.

 While the competition for the Palme d'Or was wide open until the last moment - with many critics bemoaning the quality of the films on offer - Hollywood partied hearty on the Croisette, and the Hong Kong contingent, happy together and happy to be there, also cut the rug on Saturday night.

 Tony Leung flew to Cannes for the first time to support the film, and was seen practising the tango on the beachfront into the early hours - an upbeat ending to a movie which started out awkwardly. Happy Together begins with an explicit sex scene between Leung and Cheung, before moving away from 'gay' issues into the realms of general relationship blues.

 Leung explained: 'I've worked with Kar-wai on three movies before and I'm always keen to work with him again, but he tricked me - he gave me a fake script where my part was of a son searching Buenos Aires for his gay father. But my character wasn't gay.'  Leung had to shoot the difficult scene on the first day in Buenos Aires. 'It took me three days to get over it,' he said. 'But I'm glad I did it. I had certain prejudices - understandable because when I was a child I was followed and bothered by an older man. But they were wrong.'  Cannes is nothing but pressure for a director with a movie in competition; the Croisette is filled with rumours in the hours preceding the final ceremony. Ang Lee, in particular, was not relishing it. 'So many times I've been up for awards but come away with nothing,' he explained. 'It's tough. I don't really feel bad myself, but for Taiwan and my industry, my colleagues, I feel bad. I wonder what's gone wrong. It's such a tense situation.'  Lee, who next shoots a civil war epic for 20th Century Fox - a drama set on the Kansas-Missouri border - revealed he would go back to Taiwan after that, to film a samurai romance for his producer on the trilogy of movies Pushing Hands, The Wedding Banquet and Eat Drink Man Woman.

 The biggest movie to come away empty-handed from Cannes, however, was the Warner Brothers picture LA Confidential, directed by Curtis Hanson and starring Kim Basinger, Danny DeVito and Australian actor Russell Crowe. Hailed as a modern film noir, it was just too commercial for Cannes to take away a prize.

 Few people, however, could have been more nervous on Sunday night than first-time director Oldman. His movie, Nil By Mouth, was a devastating autobiographical exposure of a South London household racked by spousal abuse.

 'I was the child in that movie,' said Oldman, whose film garnered raves and a Best Actress award for Kathy Burke - best known for her role as Patsy's (Joanne Lumley) editor on the television series Absolutely Fabulous.

 'It's all down to Gary and the power of this picture - his story - is frightening,' she said.

 Outside the main festival, a publicity stunt went somewhat awry for Cannes director Gilles Jacob - who had lined up a photo opportunity with '20 of Britain's finest young acting talent'.

 Stars and almost-stars such as Kate Winslet, Emily Watson, Joely Richardson, Anna Friel and Lena Headey were flown by special jet to the south of France to the delight of the paparazzi and the dismay of Oscar nominee for Secrets and Lies Marianne Jean-Baptiste. Someone had 'forgotten' to ask the star, who later revealed that although she has had offers from Hollywood since her Secrets and Lies success, she has not received a single British script. Red faces all round the Croisette, and rightly so.

 Director Martin Scorsese provoked controversy by defiantly going ahead with his plans to release the Dalai Lama biopic Kundun internationally over vociferous protests from China.

 One of the stars of a rival Dalai Lama picture called Seven Years in Tibet was also in town. David Thewlis, who co-stars in the Jean Jacques Annaud-directed picture opposite Hollywood hearthrob Brad Pitt, revealed the existence of an actor's blacklist on the mainland.

 'I've been told that myself, Brad Pitt, Martin Scorsese and Jean-Jacques are banned from China,' he said. 'One of our cameramen flew incognito into China to shoot B-roll and was arrested; he told us that if we ever try to go to China, we'll be turned away.'  In the year that Hong Kong captivated Cannes, the 50th festival was also the year of Asia. So perhaps it is appropriate that the last word should go to the terminally cool, Shanghai-born Wong Kar-wai. His next project, again starring Leung, is called Beijing Summer, where he hopes to catch the moment of the handover.

 'There are new rules in China now where you have to submit a script and it has to be identical to the completed film,' he said. 'As everybody knows, I never have a script. So maybe summer in Beijing can take place in Macau, in a restaurant called Beijing. It could be fun. But I'm not afraid.

 'If Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou can still make films, why can't I?' 



Wong and Cannes, happy together