Canada day at Cannes
The Toronto Star - May 20, 2002

CANNES - For the few thousand members of the press here at the world's most-watched movie premiere showcase, it is Maple Leaf Monday in Cannes.

For the first time in anyone's memory, two Canadian films - David Cronenberg's Spider and Atom Egoyan's Ararat - will be screened for the international press and industry in a single day.

Just how big a deal is this, anyway? In the grand scheme of things that seem to matter, or even perhaps in the somewhat less grand scheme of specifically Canadian things that seem to matter - like Olympic hockey gold, a winning season for the home teams, Canadians bombed in Afghanistan or softwood lumber tariffs - how significant can the presence of two Canadian movies at a festival somewhere in the south of France really be? I mean, really?

There are two answers, depending upon the perspective from which the question is posed. If you don't take movies seriously - and why would you be reading this if you don't? - the appearance of Ararat and Spider here doesn't matter much at all.

The fact is, even for all its prestige among the international cinerati, Cannes has none of the populist punch of a playoff clincher, none of the emotional sweep of a nation mourning, and none of the economic urgency of a key trade dispute.

Moreover, we're talking Canadian movies, which on the priority list of people who don't take movies seriously must rank somewhere between free verse and performance art.

Here however, movies are taken very seriously - seriously in the old-school, old-world, pre-megaplex, pre-global market and often downright nakedly anti-Hollywood sense. Sure there's a lot of money that hangs in the balance here, but that business takes place offside, in markets beneath or away from the mainstage activity of celebrating and promoting the resolutely unbusinesslike notion of movies as art. And so, to view the unveiling of Ararat and Spider through the frame of Cannes, is to see something quite serious indeed.

And these, in their equally distinctive and demanding ways, are serious movies, which is not to say that, also in their equally distinctive ways, they are not captivating, enjoyable and even strangely beautiful - they certainly are - only that the pleasures they provide are not the passive distractions of the popcorn variety. In the perfectly honourable tradition of the art cinema - which also, by the way, happens to be the most honourable tradition in Canadian movies - the rewards these films yield require a certain amount of digging.

Ararat, which is already controversial because its subject is one the Turkish government condemns, is Atom Egoyan's attempt to examine the facts of the 1915 massacre of thousands of Armenians in Turkey in a range of contexts: as both personal and political history, as fact becoming fiction (part of the film concerns the making of a film about the genocide), and as moral imperative and cultural legacy.

Using an obliquely non-linear narrative to draw the contextual parallels between these concepts - characters and situations are introduced gradually and elliptically, their connections to each other only being made apparent gradually - the movie broadens Egoyan's stylistic proclivities across his broadest and boldest canvas yet. If it is an epic, it is so both in the intellectual as well as narrative and historical senses.

Equally a film of ideas and emotions, of passion and intellect, and of art and persuasion, Ararat also belongs in the grand modernist tradition of moviemaking. It assumes that form and content are of equal and inextricable value, and that a new context for the framing of something as sensitive and disputed as the tragedy of 1915 demands a fresh way of addressing it.
If this is one reason Ararat deserves, and perhaps needs, to be seen here in Cannes, the other is that the reaction of the international press here will probably determine in a large part the aggressiveness with which the Turkish government will continue to denounce it.

Spider, David Cronenberg's impeccably clammy and exquisitely realized adaptation of Patrick McGrath's significantly different 1990 novel about a schizophrenic psychically adrift in London's industrial east end, may be Ararat's counterpoint in terms of technique, but it is its compatriot in terms of esthetic intent.

Where Egoyan's movie is elliptical, associative and panoramic, Cronenberg's is precise, unwavering and stringently distilled. Unfolding from the corroded viewpoint of Ralph Fiennes' unintelligibly muttering Spider, the movie - in truly and frightfully stark contrast to the schizo-inspirational A Beautiful Mind - never lets us escape a spider's web of perceptual distortions, so that we are forced to live in the same world of slippery subjectivity and close-quarter dread that the character does. Thus, while it may rank with Videodrome, Dead Ringers and Crash as one of Cronenberg's finest and most expertly disturbing works, it is unlikely to bag any large merchandizing deals. Like Ararat, it needs the framework of serious consideration that Cannes provides.

If Canada needs Cannes then, it's not because our neurotic national ego can only be salved by offshore affirmation. It's because, at our best, we make the kinds of movies that are most fully appreciated - and widely exposed - here. If the generations-old absence of Canadian movies from Canadian screens, and consequently from most of the Canadian imagination, has encouraged an art movie tradition to which Ararat and Spider proudly belong, there's no better place to be seen.

The Toronto Star