After a largely decent slate of films throughout the festival, the last two films to screen in competition finally gave audiences a chance of upholding Cannes' reputation of being the most hostile of all the world's film festivals – with both films being vehemently booed off the screen. While official screenings are pretty much always greeted with applause out of respect to the attending filmmakers and cast, press screenings have no such codes of etiquette.
Isabel Coixet’s tedious Map of the Sounds of Tokyo was heartily booed by the press, as it offered a turgid Hors d’Oeuvre of extensive sex sequences without the infrastructure of any real characters or storyline to support. With a premise that set in Tokyo, revolves around a hit-woman masquerading a fish market worker who targets a Spanish wine-shop owner, it's a surprise that the director ever got it green-lighted.
Worse was to come with Tsai Ming-liang’s Face, which might as well as been director by Jean Paul Gauiterre. Despite fleeting appearances from Jean Moreau and Fanny Argent, and a kooky musical number with model-turned-actress Laetitia Casta lip-syncing to a Chinese song while doing an improvised dance number, the confusing and apparently directionless visual explosion of camp had the echoing sound of seats springing up as patron's flooded out by the hundreds, not willing to bare the full two-hour-plus marathon of pretension.
The festival's closing film Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky (playing out of competition), which charted the fleeting relationship between the two 20th Century icons, while watchable, also proved a little underwhelming. While the prospect of deranged director Jan Kounen (Doberman and Blueberry) doing a lavish period piece offered intrigue, despite it's undoubted stylistic merits, it ultimately came up short by focusing on simply observing the characters rather than trying to comprehend them.
If we never get any real insight into the character of Coco Chanel, it doesn't stop Anna Mouglalis from physically providing a performance of pure poise with style to burn. A slave to his music and seemingly spending half the film behind a piano, Stravinsky allows Mads Mikkelsen (Casino Royle) even less opportunity to flesh out his character. Although the versatile Danish actor again upholds the style stakes and impressively speaks in both Russian and French for his role (the lines for which he learnt on spec).
Punctuated by tres passionate sex scenes the film fizzles to an inconsequential conclusion. Still, the film offers a ready-made sequel to the Audrey Tautou starring Coco Avant Chanel, which makes it to Australian screens in June, with the story picking up where that film ends.
The penultimate day of the festival ended with the announcement that the FIPRESCI jury (world film critic’s body) gave its best film award to Michael Haneke's finely crafted The White Ribbon.