A nation spanked: If...
With two British films screening in competition at this year's Cannes Film Festival, yesterday's announcement of the Cannes shortlist has been greeted as a minor national triumph. After a fallow year in festival terms, shortlist nominations for Ken Loach's The Wind that Shakes the Barley and Andrea Arnold's Red Road have been greeted by ebullient-sounding statements from, among others, the creative industries minister James Purnell.
The Palme d'Or, the festival's prestigious first prize, has been awarded to some 45 films, including several joint winners, over the years. Only one of them has been British: Secrets and Lies, arguably the finest of Mike Leigh's examinations of the awfulness of English life, won it in 1996.
Golden palm leaves aside, there have been several moments of British glory in the history of Cannes. At the first ever festival in 1946, Brief Encounter, David Lean's Rachmaninov-rinsed Noel Coward adaptation, was one of 11 films to win the Grand Prix, the top prize at the time. Three years later, Carol Reed's Third Man became the first sole winner of the top award, taking the Grand Prix in 1949.
A quick glance down the list, however, suggests a curious trend, almost as if British film's success at Cannes came purposefully at the expense of Great Britain herself. Lindsay Anderson's tale of a public schoolboy revolution on prize day took the Grand Prix in 1969 (again the top award for that year), following, with a nice regard for irony, the year in which no prizes were awarded, the festival having been abandoned after the spread of the student-inspired uprisings of 1968. Establishment Britain took an equally amusing kick in Monty Python's Meaning of Life, which received a distinguished Grand Prix Special du Jury in 1983, and a considerably well-aimed one with current-nominee Loach's Hidden Agenda, which won a Prix du Jury in 1990.
Nor is the impression alleviated by some of the seemingly less controversial British prizewinners. Both Howard's End, which won the equivalent of the runner-up prize in 1992, and the The Go Between, which took a slightly more modest Grand Prix International in 1971, are predicated on the misery and hypocrisy of the British class system.
So perhaps the current shortlist - on the basis of rather sketchy information available about the films in competition - is based less on the rude health of British film than on the somewhat anti-establishment pedigree of the two films. Arnold's Red Road is something of an unknown quantity, though its focus on a CCTV operator suggests we can expect a less than rose-tinted view on Britain.
We can be more confident about Ken Loach's The Wind that Shakes the Barley: if his 1990 success dealt with the dark side of British governmental handling of the Irish question in the 1980s, the less closeted tactics of its 1920s equivalent can hardly be expected to come off any better in his new film, which is set during the Irish struggle for independence.
Without wanting to trouble the subtitled world of the entente cordiale, might one suggest that acclaim at Cannes is not necessarily the occasion for patriotic self-congratulation?
