A Festival Buzz, Finally

CANNES, France —  After an opening week that inspired indifference more than passion, the Festival International du Film has finally gotten people talking. Creating excitement are a director reinvestigating his past, an actor disappearing inside a part and, as always, Lars von Trier.

Driving from Denmark in his vintage motor home, which he parks behind the Palais and in the lot of the luxurious Hotel du Cap, the flying-phobic Von Trier is the festival’s designated enfant terrible. His “Breaking the Waves” took the Grand Jury Prize here in 1997, “The Idiots” went unrewarded a year later, and now Von Trier is back in competition with “Dancer in the Dark,” perhaps the most morose musical ever made.

Greeted by equal parts angry boos and strong applause at its first screening, “Dancer” stars Bjork as a woebegone waif whose life goes from bad to worst. It’s a mark of the conflicting emotions this film arouses that though the Icelandic singer’s performance is the heart of its impact, she is still so angry with Von Trier at the way shooting went that she’s refusing all media requests, even boycotting the official press conference though she’s in town.

Director Ang Lee also sees his irresistible Asian action extravaganza, “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” as a kind of musical. “Martial-arts films have very little to do with martial arts and a lot to do with the art of choreography,” Lee says in his soft-spoken way. “In spirit this is about musical cinema rather than beating someone up.”

Though his last three films (“Sense and Sensibility,” “The Ice Storm,” “Ride With the Devil”) have been in English, Lee was born in Taiwan, and made his first trio of films in Mandarin. “It feels good to go back to my culture roots,” he says of his new film, inexplicably showing out of competition. “It’s good to taste the mother tongue again.”

While there were pressures to do “Crouching Tiger” in English, Lee felt the reasons not to were even stronger: “Otherwise it would be like watching John Wayne speak Chinese in a western,” he says.

The actors Lee chose, Chow Yun-Fat and Michelle Yeoh, are close to the Asian equivalents of Wayne, though Chow had never handled a sword before and Yeoh, hampered for a time by a broken knee, had to do one of her key dramatic scenes with her leg stretched out on an off-camera apple box. Rounding out the cast in a story that centers on two resourceful, indomitable female fighters is newcomer Zhang Ziyi, a 19-year-old drama student when she got the part.

Making a martial-arts film has been Lee’s objective ever since he grew up with the Hong Kong-based genre as a boy. “It’s a childhood dream fulfilled, I even designed all the weapons,” he says, still pleased. “These films are sophisticated in certain ways, the action choreography is pure cinema, way beyond what Hollywood does. Hundreds of these movies are made a year, and they always have to find something new or the audience would get bored.”

Working with the legendary fight choreographer Yuen Wo-Ping, whose career ranges from the early days of Jackie Chan and Jet Li to last year’s “The Matrix,” Lee and company have come up with a spectacular panoply of fight sequences and acrobatic action that make this the Asian martial-arts film the West, all unknowing, has been waiting for.

“Crouching Tiger’s” most eye-catching sequences (including Lee’s favorite, an electrifying battle along the tops of tall bamboo) are the flying-over-rooftops and climbing-up-walls stunts that are most characteristic of the genre. The technique is called wire work because it involves suspending the actors high in the air off of cables, a tricky and dangerous business. “Each actor can take up to 20 people to manipulate. There’s a lot of calculation and coordination involved,” Lee says. “When the shot is over, the guys fall on the ground, they are so tired. Sometimes they start to barf.”

The director of “Sense and Sensibility,” however, was not going to be satisfied with just action. Traditionally, the Hong Kong-based genre is short on characterization and emotional nuance. Lee, when he came to film the James Schamus-Wang Hui Ling-Tsai Kuo Jung script, based on a well-known Chinese novel, found out why “it’s almost against nature” to do the kind of film he envisioned.

“Shooting the action is traditionally a very time-consuming process, with lots and lots of shots and time to set up,” he explains. “On a 100-day shooting schedule, maybe 80 days would be spent on the martial-arts scenes, 20 days to do the rest, so they don’t have time to get into the script.”

More than that, “demands for dramatic reality and performance could be distracting for the actors. In martial-arts films, you have to focus on hitting the right beat so you don’t poke the other person in the eye. If you’re thinking about doing something genuine at the same time, it could be dangerous.”

Dafoe’s Performance the Talk of the Festival

While “Crouching Tiger’s” actors are undeniably exciting, the performance that’s the talk of Cannes is in E. Elias Merhige’s “Shadow of the Vampire,” screening in the Directors Fortnight and featuring Willem Dafoe as Max Schreck, the actor who starred in F.W. Murnau’s classic 1922 cinema of the undead, “Nosferatu.”

The conceit behind “Shadow” is that “Nosferatu” is more of a documentary than anyone knew, that the maniacal Murnau (played by John Malkovich) hired a real vampire to play Nosferatu. It’s a concept that Dafoe, who is eerily convincing in his Dracula-type role, simultaneously terrifying, comic and pitiful, calls “an excellent joke.”

It was a joke that was enormously time-consuming for Dafoe, who spent, “on a good day,” three hours getting his extensive makeup put on and another hour getting it taken off. In addition to a bald pate, prosthetic ears, a prosthetic nose, fake eyebrows, constricting shoes, a shoulder piece and a corset to artificially cinch in his waste, Dafoe also had to cope with his character’s 3- or 4-inch-long nails.

“Try going to the toilet with those,” the actor says, chuckling, “I needed an assistant.”

Paradoxical though it sounds, Dafoe found “mimicry a very interesting place to start, really a liberating process. Even in the most naturalistic parts, I’m always searching for a mask, because a mask is liberating, and this is a good example of restrictions being freeing. For an actor, giving over to something that feels outside of yourself is the purest kind of performing.” And, on a completely different “moronically simple” level, “the little boy in you, the pretender, says ‘Oh, cool, that would be fun.’ ”

The humor Dafoe found in his character is that of “a fish out of water. Here’s this perfectly lethal, scary creature who’s put into a film as an actor and doesn’t know what’s going on. It’s a very extreme character behaving like anybody doing their first movie, and that’s charming.”

“Did I stay in character? What choice did I have?” Dafoe recalls, laughing. “The key question for the actor is not whether he felt like the vampire but do I feel like myself? Hell no.”