Sean Penn on Cannes Dont’s..

Every year (as I understand it) the Cannes Film Festival jury panel has a different President. This year it’s Sean Penn. Helping to clarify things, Penn has let it be known in advance that the panel will not consider any film for the Palm d’Or (basically their Best Picture award) if it lacks a hip, now political message.

According to UK’s Telegraph: “Penn said it was impossible to separate film from politics, and promised that the winning film would be a reflection of the current climate.”  [emphasis mine]

Of course, this has actually been true for a while now, so maybe we should just be glad that somebody sufficiently arrogant got in there to admit it.  One still remembers Quentin Tarantino’s less than credible assertion when the panel he chaired awarded to Palm d’Or ot Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, wherein he said that the film’s politics had absolutely nothing to do with it winning the award.

I leave it our your imagination whether Penn means only a political message he himself would agree with. I think even most democrats and liberals would admit that Penn is an outright, and often borderline insane, leftist.  (Which makes his bitching that he’s being “discouraged from smoking” following France’s recently implemented smoking ban, pretty damn hilarious. He did, however, chain smoke his way through the press conference wherein he made this complaint, apparently without being arrested.)

Ironically, Penn’s father was blacklisted back in the ’50s (although in his case, not entirely without cause). You’d think perhaps that this would make his son more fervently fight for the separation of art and politics.  On the other hand, his pop was a Stalinist, so I guess he really did learn at his father’s knee.  All Penn needs is to start outright calling for Social Realism in all Art, lest it be decadent and counter-revolutionary.

Guess not.

  • Ericb

    The problem with films that are pushing “hip and now” political messages is that the said messages will usually be “square and dated” by the time the films actually get released.

    I hate politics, but politics in art especially gets me ill.

  • I don’t have any problem with political films per se, but this goes a bit beyond that. And yes, the political films Hollywood churns out tend to be extremely clunky, myopic and quickly dated, largely because few in that town are never exposed to constrasting views. They thus have absolutely no idea how to write a realistic sounding conservative character, and tend to assign them with ludicrously cartoonish motives for their political beliefs.

    This also explains why portrayals of the military are so regularly inept, with our troops generally being either homicidal nutbag rapists or woeful, helpless victims of The Man. Compare such films today with military flicks from back in the ’50s and ’60s when many in Hollywood themselves had military experience, and you can see the vast difference we’re talking here. Films like The Best Years of Their Lives hardly made light of war, but yet manage to treat our veterans with the dignity and respect they deserve.

  • ericb

    I shouldn’t have made such a blanket statement. What I meant was blatant and simplistic politics in art. I love good satire (with an emphasis on “good”).

  • Harry Kumel (director of Daughters of Darkness and Malpertuis) stated that he thinks all that can ever win at Cannes are art films and/or anti American films.

  • Sandoz

    I’m still mad about Fahrenheit 9/11 beating Oldboy.

  • JoshG

    Hmmm…I wonder if “Kung Fu Panda” has a hidden political message.

  • Well, Pandas are Chinese. Maybe a “Free Tibet” message is in there.

  • niccollom

    Speaking of smoking: it appears the Mr Penn just doesn’t learn. When he was in Toronto a while back for the TO Film Festival he got fined for smoking inside a public building. You would think he would have learned his lesson by know.

  • Penn knows that laws are there to constrain the rubes who can’t afford to pay the fines. Not upstanding, right-thinking (well, left-thinking), millionaire folks and ar-tistes like himself.