Jane Campion’s film? It’s “The Piano without sex”. The violence in Mendoza’s Kinatay? “Good luck for those who intend to have barbecue later”. As for the Asian films on vampires, they are “total freak products, but with style”. And the great amount of political content makes Cannes the “UN of cinema”.

In our office, we get new newspapers and magazines every day. As the profession demands, we sometimes have to give up screenings to focus on writing; and the only opinions we have for many titles are the ones mentioned above. Our amusement is definitely guaranteed, but one could wonder what image of the film the public gets from such reviews.

Criticizing the critics is a tempting exercise. We can say they didn’t have enough time to reflect on what they’ve seen, we can call them traditionalists, we can say they’ll probably defend films from their own countries, or the ideology of the medias they work for. And why should their opinion count more than the public’s, anyway?

Maybe the tons of pages on the festival written by journalists and critics are meant neither to provide us with a different point of view on the films nor make us want to rush to the movies later. Maybe reviews are a genre in themselves; a kind of writing that bases itself on cinema only to better take a distance from it. It’s like a joyful exercise in rhetoric, just like the caricatures in newspapers: an artistic piece of its own, limited in ambition and influence. And who can blame funny drawings for not providing a deep analysis on society or politics?

When you read one the many magazines distributed in Cannes, just keep this in mind: reviews on films never talk about cinema; they talk, above all, about themselves.

Enjoy them.

Bruno Carmelo