Cannes festival

CANNES, France - Being an American moviegoer at Cannes - at any international film festival, but especially Cannes - is like staggering out of Plato's cave into the sun. So this is how the rest of the world sees movies.
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The Palm D'Or for the festival's best film will be awarded today, but perhaps the most weirdly instructive day was last Sunday. At midday came the worldwide premiere of "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull," the event toward which the glam-obsessed side of this famously conflicted festival had been heading at full steam for five days. In attendance was the cream of cinema royalty, men with names like Spielberg, Lucas, Ford, and LaBoeuf. The paparazzi and the fans lining the red-carpeted steps of the Palais de Festi vals screamed themselves hoarse. The movie? It was pretty good.
Earlier in the morning of the same day, an Italian film called "Gomorra" screened as part of the main competition (Hollywood extravaganzas like "Indiana Jones" and "Kung Fu Panda" are quarantined in the "Out of Competition" category so they won't contaminate the art). Based on a runaway nonfiction bestseller in its native country, the film is a sprawling yet taut multi-character drama exposing the dominance of organized crime in every aspect of life in Naples. A glib way to describe it would be "The Godfather" as made by Robert Altman.
Directed by Matteo Garrone, "Gomorra" was instantly recognized as one of the finds of Cannes 2008, and what makes it special is that it doesn't resort to the standard crime-movie tricks. It feels newly observed, with characters at lower levels of Mafia enterprise - an aging bagman (Gianfelice Imparato), a tailor (Salvatore Cantalupo), a 10-year-old kid (Salvatore Abruzzese), the naive assistant (Carmine Paternoster) to a toxic waste disposal contractor - making the moral decisions that will define them. "Gomorra" isn't "entertainment" as most American moviegoers define it, and yet it's absurdly entertaining. It makes "The Sopranos" look like a cable show.
This is what Cannes is for, among other things: to remind the entertainment press that there are other stories to be told and other ways of telling them. (Our job is then to remind you.) These can be playful: Arnaud Desplechin's "A Christmas Tale" is a family-holiday-hell tale given eccentricity and heft by a cast that includes Catherine Deneuve, her daughter Chiara Mastroianni, and "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" star Mathieu Amalric; it unfolds like a novel and bleeds real blood.