International

The beatific and the brutal

By Gautaman Bhaskaran

CANNES MAY 18 . Some of the movies screened till now at the Cannes International Film Festival, into its fourth day here today, deal with issues that have been troubling the world of late. Religion is one.

Marco Bellocchio's Italian drama, "The Religion Hour: My Mother's Smile'', highlights the pressures of the church on an artist, who finds that he is being forced to participate in the beatification of his mother. His dilemma is entirely understandable: how can he think of her as anything else but a mother, whose beguiling smile haunts him in these moments of conflict and agony. However, midway through the film, he realises that his mother had sought refuge in religion to manipulate and move the world around her, and a transformation comes over him. He begins to feel less guilty. Michael Moore's "Bowling For Columbine'', is a documentary competing for the first time in 46 years at Cannes. It details the gun violence in America, and takes up as a case in point the Columbine High School tragedy, where two boys killed and wounded many students. The picture asks: Are Americans historically prone to violence, and we see a Charlton Heston ("Ben Hur'' and "Ten Commandments''), as the chief of the National Rifles Association, arrogantly turning down the plea for a weapons-free U.S. But Moore himself is not against the gun. He argues that Canada despite having a very large number of weapons is a relatively crime-free society.

One begins to buy this till the images from Fernando Meirelles' "City of God'' begins to disturb. The movie presents the devilishly ugly side of juvenile crime. It shows teens in Rio armed to their teeth and indulging in murder and mayhem of horrifying proportions. It is hard to say how much of it is fact, but guns cannot be roses and are best confined to only those out to maintain order.

If these works moved and provoked us into a debate, Mike Leigh took us, once again, back to his working class suburb in England, where a dysfunctional family on the brink of separating from one another is brought together by the son's severe illness. The film is gripping, and has the classic Leigh touch: wonderful acting and great direction. But Leigh seems to have gone on too long with the same subject. Even his main actors — Timothy Spall and Lesley Manville — keep coming back in just about every Leigh work. And this can take the novelty off.

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• The beatific and the brutal

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