Tough Sells and Transported Cinephiles  In the Cannes  It was a
cinephile's wet dream and a distributor's nightmare. Never has
the gap between art and commerce seemed more vivid—and
perverse—than at the 53rd Cannes Film Festival, where critics
and festival programmers raced teary-eyed and choked up with
pleasure from one screening to another while American
distributors whined night and day that there was nothing to buy.
Nothing, in other words, that would guarantee them big bucks.
And certainly, the great films of the festival—Béla Tarr's
Werckmeister Harmonies, Shinji Aoyama's Eureka, Wong Kar-wai's
In the Mood for Love, and Chantal Akerman's La Captive—are not
standard Angelika fare, although USA Films, which bought the
Dardenne brothers' Rosetta at last year's festival even before
it won the Palme d'Or, followed up this prestigious venture by
acquiring In the Mood for Love on the basis of a 10-minute clip
and the director's superhip art-house reputation. The most
delicate and erotic of Wong Kar-wai's film