The Banquet
Fathers & Sons
Letter From Cannes
By Melissa Anderson
New York Sun; May 23, 2005
CANNES, France - Simultaneously exhilarating and enervating, Seijun Suzuki's hallucinatory operetta "Princess Raccoon," screening out of competition, was the perfect film to end the festival. Although technically the penultimate press screening (Martha Fiennes's "Chromophobia" was the official closer), "Princess Raccoon" came as a jolt of sheer spectacle late Friday morning, immediately following Hou Hsiao-Hsien's hushed "Three Times." It made sense to end a festival that kicked off with furry rodents (Dominik Moll's "Lemming") with a syrupy, musical love story that has palace servants donning raccoon masks and junior sumos sporting bushy tails.
What's more, this loony fantasia even essayed one of the dominant themes of the films in competition this year: paternity blues. In Jim Jarmusch's "Broken Flowers" and Wim Wenders's "Don't Come Knocking," two middle-aged men discover they have male offspring; in the Dardenne brothers' Palme d'Or winner "The Child," a 20-year-old petty thief sells his own baby boy. But only the patriarch in "Princess Raccoon," a vain king who's losing his good looks, is wrathful about his progeny, Prince Amechiyo (Joe Odagiri): "I hate him because he is my son," the monarch bellows.
The royal pop turns murderous because the prince has surpassed him in beauty. "What does it matter as long as I am fairest of them all?" the king chants.
Playing the titular royalty, Chinese superstar Zhang Ziyi (who apparently studied Japanese for six months to prepare for Suzuki's film folly) dazzles as an otherworldly vision. When Ms. Zhang walked the red carpet on Sunday night during the festival's final marche to the Grand Theatre Lumiere, where she would present the award for best screenplay, I half-expected her to arrive via a fluffy white cloud, just as the princess does.
And yet in its surfeit of sound and image, "Princess Raccoon," also exhausts. This mad operetta includes a frosty crone who settles scores with a game of rock, paper, scissors set to hip-hop beats; a ninja being simmered for soup; enormous sumo bellies doubling as kettle drums; and enough rump-shaking to rival a Sir Mix-a-Lot video compilation. By the second reggae number, many of my colleagues were heading for the sortie.
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