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After Wenders' hot-air ramblings, it's refreshing to encounter an art movie that gives you a fizzy champagne high. Ma Vie En Rose (My Life in Pink), from Belgium, is the freshest gender bender in years, a delicately funny fable about a young boy (Georges du Fresne) who longs to be a girl, and the havoc wreaked upon his suburban family by his predilection for dolls and dresses. The film's deadpan tweaking of middle-class sexual mores recalls the '70s films of Bertrand Blier, but this one has its own bittersweet glow.

Among the festival's major disappointments was The Truce, an adaptation of Holocaust survivor Primo Levi's memoirs that, with John Turturro gawking into the camera, is so plodding and banal it's a challenge to survive the tedium. She's So Lovely, despite the star presences of Sean Penn and John Travolta, is a grunge love triangle awkwardly wedged between psychodrama and sentimentalized macho preening. Among the festival's small but seductive pleasures: Matthew Harrison's Kicked in the Head, a comedy of haplessness in which the charmingly quizzical Kevin Corrigan is beset by a series of New York catastrophes, and Bad Manners, a scabrously witty domestic thriller that features a delectable performance by Caroleen Feeney as a postfeminist femme fatale. That's Cannes for you, a place where delight can come from anywhere.

Originally posted May 30, 1997 Published in issue #381 May 30, 1997 Order article reprints

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