Yes We Cannes

By Steven Zeitchik

Yes, it's still March. It can turn cold and rainy at a moment's notice. You're worried about your NCAA bracket. Cannes seems far away; in fact, the resolution of the Obama-Clinton faceoff seems closer.

But the producers, directors, cineastes and everyone else who has a stake or say in Cannes are putting together the lineup, and from the sound of things it's going to continue and even double down on a trend of the past few years.

Of course there'll be the usual mix of auteurs (Michael Winterbottom, Steven Soderbergh, Charlie Kaufman), as well as the films undoubtedly representing their countries and their countries alone. And the event-movies will be well-represented; apparently you don't put together an international film festival anymore without an "Indiana Jones" or a "Sex and the City" or a big animated movie (last year it was "Bee Season;" this year get ready for another DreamWorks Animation moneymaker, "Kung Fu Panda.")

But more notable is how complicatedly international many of the films will likely be, turning it into a stew, a melting pot, other dubious food metaphors. The last few years have of course brought small glimpses of this. Two years ago it was the cast, setting and locations of "Babel" scattered across several continents. Last year it was "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" offering the quelle scandal moment: a Brooklyn-born director (named Schnabs, no less) directing a French-language, French-acted, French-feeling movie that was the talk of the fest.

Those were nice forays, but not entirely the norm. This year, however, intermingling internationalism could break out so heavily Kofi Annan may as well be heading the jury (no offense, Sean Penn).

As our story in Friday's paper notes, gone are the days when every country had a movie that was distinctly its own, replaced by a culture that deliberately and sometimes even bewilderingly cuts across backgrounds and borders (kind of like Obama himself, come to think of it).

You want American directors with foreign languages and locations? Steven Soderbergh (two Che movies) Woody Allen (one Spain movie) and Michael Winterbottom (an Italy adventure) have enough of that to go around.

You want non-Americans shooting in the U.S. with Hollywood stars? Vietnamese director Anh Hung Tran ("I Come with the Rain"), Brazillian Fernando Meirelles ("Blindness") and "Babel" scribe Guillermo Ariaga ("The Burning Plain") can give you what you're looking for (though we're hearing it's not certain that "Plain" will be ready in time).

The uncategorizable Wim Wenders, who always likes mixing countries and cultures in his movies as though they were a good mojito, has "The Palermo Shooting" -- the German helmer's pic is set in Italy and shot with Italian money, features German characters and stars U.S. actors. And that's not even getting into the cross-border productions -- an Israeli film like "Waltz with Bashir" (France, Germany and Israel) or the Danish thriller "Flame and Citron" (Denmark, Germany, Czech Republic).

We'll see what all this polyglot commingling will bring (we imagine artistry in some cases and an unholy mess in others). Still, there's something refreshing about the change. A specialty exec told us recently that Academy members should drop the native-country requirements for foreign movies at the Oscars because financing, talent and productions come from too many parts of the world for so narrow a set of criteria. Looks like the French are already ahead of them.