19/05/2002 - The Festival pays homage to the birthday of a master of Nouvelle vague: but perhaps it can´t make amends for what he suffered

For Alain Resnais´ eightieth birthday, the Cannes Festival has planned to pay him homage in order to make amends. It can´t be said, in fact, the that the Croisette has been overly hospitable toward him. At his debut with Hiroshima mon amour, it eliminated him in favor of the folkloristic Orfeu Negro by Marcel Camus (which went on to win the Golden Palm, but the jury was to blame for this error).
His second film, L´anno scorso a Marienbad, was not even considered. He went to Venice instead, where it won the Golden Lion. And in Venice, Resnais returned with his third and fourth films Muriel and La guerra è finita. The latter was refused by Cannes for political reasons: it was feared that the anti-French content could upset the positive relations that General De Gaulle maintained with his peer in Madrid. Perhaps in order to make up for this situation, Cannes invited his next film, Je t´aime, Je t´aime, that was, however, never screened. It was 1968, and in Paris there were barricades. The French authors wanted to adapt to the situation. Godard and Truffaut went to the festival to stop it. Resnais remained in Paris, opting to screen it at the Sorbonne. In the meantime, the Palais was the background for unforgettable moments. While French authors and actors, imagining having returned to the times of the Revolution («more power to imagination» was the common slogan), proclaimed the United States of Cinema, guests wandered around aimlessly, trying to make the best of a bad situation. Salvatore Samperi, who was then considered Bellocchio´s clone, was happy to have been invited to the Festival with his first work, Grazie zia,, and was unexpectedly forced to climb onto the stage to announce , that contrary to his wishes, the film was being withdrawn, just as Carlos Saura, who was sleeping in a camper with his companion Geraldine Chaplin, because they lacked the money needed to pay for a hotel room.
Saura´s film was entitled Peppermint frappé and was truly unfortunate, if we think that the year before it had been rejected by Venice. The last frame bore the caption «For Luis Buñuel», which had convinced Luigi Chiarini, who was the director of the show at the time, to send it back with a letter to the author saying that, in place of Saura´s film dedicated to Buñuel, he would have preferred a film by Buñuel dedicated to Saura. Chiarini, as director, could have certainly been more diplomatic. In spite of everything, even he would be a victim of controversy the following year. Returning to Resnais, this year´s homage in Cannes with the showing of Je t´aime, je t´aime, is a sort of belated innovation for the festival: thirty-four years late. At this point, perhaps it would be worthwhile to program a sort of retrospective all of the films that, together with Resnais´, were never shown. But in this case, it would no longer be a tribute to this eighty-year old director. Perhaps for this reason Cannes wanted to program the retrospective for another edition that never was: that which should have been the first, set to be held on September 1, 1939, but was never realized because on that day the Wehrmacht invaded Poland and the Second World War began.

(Translated from Italian)