Clint, Brits And Kids at Cannes

By RICHARD CORLISS

Clint Eastwood stood in front of the Hotel du Cap's Eden Roc restaurant and surveyed this fairy-tale domain. As Bird, his bebop bio-pic of Jazzman Charlie Parker, was unspooling a few miles down the Riviera at the 41st Cannes Film Festival, Eastwood reminisced about the small indignities that beset a larger- than-life movie hero. On a trip to Cannes in 1985, his sponsors had set him up in a portside yacht near the Palais des Festivals. But the yacht's ceilings were too low to accommodate his 6-ft. 4-in. frame, even when he stooped, and Hollywood's most statesmanlike hunk endured a week's worth of cricked neck. Such are the sacrifices that art exacts in a Cote d'Azur Disneyland.

Dirty Harry is no complainer. He is genial with strangers, patient with the press. And in a movie-mad country where the names of directors like Sydney Pollack and Carl Dreyer appear on the tiles of France's favorite TV game show, La Roue de la Fortune, Eastwood the auteur is an imposing ambassador for American star quality. It so happens that the film he brought to Cannes, which he directed but does not appear in, is no great shakes. It meanders like a 2- hr. 43-min. sax solo by one of Parker's lesser disciples, and it never quite explains how Parker enriched the language of sound. Still, the film was well received, and Bird was expected to win one of the top prizes. Instead, the Palme d'Or went to the Danish film Pelle the Conqueror, and Bird was given lesser awards for its sound track and its lead actor, Forest Whitaker. Eastwood dutifully mounted the Palais stage, and though he stood tall, his dignity was stooped. The ceiling of expectations for his film was too high, the reward for lending his easy magnetism to Cannes too low.

Dignity is a luxury during the Cannes fortnight. It rubs shoulders with outrage and excess, as film folk hawk their wares in the world's largest annual secular convocation. At the Palais, moviegoers must dress formally for the evening screenings; at the Whiskey-a-Go-Go, a porno star who is also a member of the Italian Parliament performs a sex act with a stuffed animal. The cafes percolate with erudite analyses of Marcel Ophuls's 4 1/2-hr. documentary / on Klaus Barbie, while back at the Eden Roc, Producer Edward Pressman discusses his new movie about Claus von Bulow, to star Klaus Maria Brandauer. You'll pay dearly for a Perrier at Cannes's Hotel Majestic bar, then more dearly still if you don't carry your wallet in a chastity belt. A plague of burglaries and purse snatchings stoked delicious horror stories. Did you hear? Patricia Hearst almost had her Rolex swiped right off her wrist!

The purloined heiress was in town to promote Paul Schrader's oneiric docudrama about one of the century's most notorious kidnapings. Like Bird, Patty Hearst fails to explain a controversial public life. Rather, it displays her ordeal in the stark, uninflected images of a catatonic's nightmare. Natasha Richardson is nifty as Hearst, who came to Cannes to praise Schrader for creating something more complex than a "sex-and-guns-and-rock-'n'-roll epic." But the film could have used more of all three. By denying Patty Hearst a point of view, Schrader has taken a mug shot instead of a moving picture.

Schrader is his own best publicist. He knows that in Hollywood movies may be the art of the deal, but in Cannes -- where thousands of journalists swarmed around Hearst, Robert Redford and Richard Gere -- movies are the art of the interview. So praise be to Director John Waters, whose catty ebullience suggests Oscar Wilde without the angst. And all hail to David Lean, emperor of the epic, who charmed with his bluff majesty and his tut-tutting about Britain's new "miniature" film industry.

Sir David was wrong; for in Cannes, the Brits were proving they have the world's most vital, varied cinema. Terence Davies' Distant Voices, Still Lives -- the best film at the festival and the winner of a critics' prize -- portrays, through popular songs, a Liverpool family trapped in economic poverty and emotional repression. Nicolas Roeg's Track 29, written by Dennis Potter, goes splendidly berserk satirizing American males, obsessed with their toys, and American females, driven to homicidal embrace. In Peter Greenaway's Drowning by Numbers, three women murder their husbands and enlist the help of a coroner, who is besotted, then drowned, by all three. Greenaway's pristine mannerism makes a fine beguilement of this dark, wet comedy.

European directors do not dare or care to compete with Hollywood in the splatter sweepstakes. When murder outs in a Continental art film, it is always with a twist. In Krzysztof Kieslowski's doom-dreary A Short Film About Killing , (winner of the third-place Jury Prize), a young man hails a cab and pointlessly murders the driver. Takes forever! Much jollier is Manoel de Oliveira's The Cannibals, an opera film about some Portuguese aristocrats. It proceeds at a gentle lull for an hour, then explodes in a delicious orgy of artificial limbs, charred torsos and a family feast of roast viscount. Like David Lean, Oliveira turns 80 this year. Like Luis Bunuel, he makes gaily macabre films -- an old master's last laugh at life and death.

If Cannes '88 presented a picture of world cinema as seen through a cynic's squint, three of the most acclaimed films gave a child's-eye view of the struggle for survival and identity. Mira Nair's Salaam Bombay! traces the odyssey of a ten-year-old boy abandoned in India's fetid slums. This artful heartbreaker (which won the Camera d'Or for best first feature) is made with passion and tact -- an expose that also, eloquently, reveals.

The British film A World Apart places another child, a 13-year-old white girl (Jodhi May), in another social war zone: South Africa, 1963. Shawn Slovo's semi-autobiographical script sketches a poignant dilemma: a crusading career woman (Barbara Hershey) whose cause takes precedence over motherhood. The film, though a bit of a plod, earned a thrilling reception at the festival. It took the Special Jury Prize (second place) and an award for three of its actresses, including Hershey, the first performer to win Cannes laurels in consecutive years.

The top prizewinner was also the best film in competition. Bille August's Pelle the Conqueror is the saga of a Swedish laborer (Max von Sydow, doing his sharpest work in ages) and his nine-year-old son (comely, gifted Pelle Hvenegaard) who cadge work on a Danish farm in the late 19th century. It's Masterpiece Cinema on the grand scale, with meticulously etched scenes and characters, and a narrative that sweeps the viewer through 2 1/2 hours of rural life with the authority of an old Hollywood epic. Clint may stop traffic and the British may be starting something big, but this year a child was the conqueror of Cannes.