From AwardAnnals
Results of the Festival de Cannes in the year 1991. For a ranked list of films, try the honor roll.
Barton Fink
Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
A darkly comic ride, this intense and original 1991 offering from the Coen brothers (
Fargo,
Blood Simple) gleefully attacks the Hollywood system and those who seek to sell out to it, portraying the writer’s suffering as a loony vision of hell. John Turturro (
Miller’s Crossing,
Jungle Fever) plays the title character, a pretentious left-wing writer from New York City who is brought to 1930s Hollywood to write a script for a wrestling movie for palooka actor Wallace Beery. Fink thinks the job is beneath him, but his desire for acceptance…
La Belle Noiseuse: (The Beautiful Troublemaker)
Jacques Rivette
La Belle Noiseuse is a thrilling and unconventional drama about the responsibility of an artist to his vision and the conflicts that arise when such responsibility is perceived as a threat to others. Michel Piccoli (
Le Doulos) delivers one of his finest, most lived-in performances as Edouard Frenhofer, a famous painter living with his artist wife Liz (Jane Birkin) on a spacious estate in the French countryside. Frenhofer has lacked inspiration for a decade and has given up on painting. The idea behind his unfinished masterpiece, …
Zentropa: (Europa)
Lars von Trier
An American of German descent arrives in post-war Germany 1945. His uncle gets him a job on the Zentropa train line as a sleeping car conductor. The American’s wish is to be neutral to the ongoing purges of loyalists by the Allied forces and do what he can to help a hurting country, but he finds himself being used by both the Americans and the influential family that owns the railroad. After falling in love with the railroad magnate’s daughter, he finds that he can’t remain neutral and must make some difficult choices.
