Making the Scene to See, Be Seen

CANNES, France — The International Film Festival has made a name for itself in this venerable resort town through its ability to contain multitudes as well as attract them. While glamorous stars in evening dress dominate the event’s image, the reality is that provocative and serious filmmakers of every stripe risk looking incongruous amid all the froufrou because they know that Cannes is where they need to be.

So Todd Solondz, whose “Welcome to the Dollhouse” was a Grand Prize winner at Sundance, has brought “Happiness,” his pitch-black, genially twisted comedy of misery to the Directors Fortnight. “I don’t want to sound jaded,” he says with upfront honesty, “but being here is a job. The picture doesn’t sell itself, I have to sell it, especially since I don’t exactly have a ‘big opening weekend’ kind of cast.”

Equally unexpected, perhaps, is the sight of Ken Loach, a legend to his British peers for the skillful passion of the socially conscious films he’s made over a 30-year career, donning formal wear for the red-carpet premiere of his in-competition “My Name Is Joe.” But, as this director knows better than anyone, “there are bigger things to be rebellious about than black tie.”

Focused on a charming yet painful romance set in one of Glasgow’s poorest neighborhoods, “My Name Is Joe” is vintage Loach. It characteristically mixes the director’s strong political commitment with his gift for humanity, a rare ability to make the most natural and empathetic connection with working-class types.

A gentle and quietly forceful man of 61, Loach smiles warmly when his feeling for his characters is brought up. “The politics is something you can’t avoid, but the fun of it is the people, the ability to smile at them and with them,” he says. “That’s what makes you get up in the morning and make films.”

Loach came of age in the 1960s, when “politics was in the air, when the mood of the times had very much to do with class.” He started with the BBC (his 1966 “Cathy Come Home” is a landmark) and his second theatrical feature, 1970’s “Kes,” inspired, among many others, Robert Duvall in his work on “The Apostle.”

Then, partly because of a change in political climate, Loach spent almost 20 years having to direct almost exclusively for television. “The ‘80s were a hostile decade,” he remembers. “But fortunately, the people you look to share political thoughts with were not in film, they were in the sharp end of politics, working on the docks or with the homeless. You can’t get away with individual depression when there were people who were actually putting up a fight.”

During all those years, Loach was also working on his storytelling skills, “trying to refine, pare down, get to the core, reduce things to the absolute bone,” all the time understanding that “what I wanted to do was the opposite of current conventional wisdom in the movies, which stresses style over content.” And he never lost his belief in filmmaking as a “team job.”

“I hate the egocentricity of that absurd ‘a so-and-so film’ credit; it implies that it’s one person who did it,” he says with some heat.

Starting roughly with 1991’s “Riff-Raff” and including “Raining Stones” (a Jury Prize winner at Cannes in 1993) and the current “My Name Is Joe,” Loach’s films have increasingly found room for the most appealing yet realistic of romantic situations.

“I’m getting sentimental in my old age,” the director wryly admits. “When you’re younger, you’re harder on yourself; you feel you’ve got to carve out your own space. Also, its partly a legacy of the left of the 1960s and ‘70s and its misreading of Brecht that feelings tended to get squeezed out and the sense of a person as a rounded human being got lost. Now I know I can allow that, it won’t undercut my points.”

What hasn’t changed is Loach’s insistence on authenticity, which extends in this film to Scottish accents so thick that Americans will wish for subtitles. “There’s so much humor and richness in the rhythms of the way people talk, their whole history is in their language,” Loach explains. And he refuses to make any concessions, not even for lighting, that would compromise how he sees things. “The light falls democratically on everyone; it doesn’t look at one person in isolation,” the director says. “Warmth is phony if it doesn’t extend to other characters as well.”

While it’s almost a given that Loach doesn’t have any use for focus groups (“the film should have its own integrity, its own imperatives”), it is something of a surprise to find as iconoclastic a filmmaker as Solondz embracing them. “It’s like when you tell the doctor you have a terrible pain in your knee and he starts examining your hip,” the director explains. “The doctor understands its the hip that’s causing the problem. So testing can show that if a joke isn’t getting laughter, something in the context may be the reason.”

Of course testing a film like “Happiness,” which finds humor lurking in situations that include suicide, severed penises and child molestation, is not without its risks. “One guy swore he would personally see to it that this film never saw the light of day,” Solondz, who began using an unlisted phone number after finishing the project, remembers with edgy bemusement. “You’re in such a susceptible state, I started to imagine people circling around and attacking me like the Peter Lorre character in ‘M.’ ”

Solondz of course knows that, with his bizarre comic roundelay of longing and misplaced need, he’s “pushing the envelope” in terms of what we can laugh at, a situation he acknowledges by opening the interview with an unsolicited mock mea culpa: “I decided after ‘Dollhouse’ to really go commercial, to sell out with a picture that’s going to open in 6,000 theaters. I’m only human, I have my weaknesses like everyone else.”

Being human, of course, is what “Happiness” (to be distributed in fall by October) is all about, filtered through Solondz’s particular sensibility. “What I find so sad is connected to what I find funny,” he says. “With ‘Dollhouse,’ half of the audience would be laughing and the other half would be angry at them for doing that. The disturbing part of my films is that what they show is a little funny.

“As a filmmaker,” he goes on, “I’m not interested if the story is just about victims and villains. I want to get inside the mind of someone who’s not entirely sympathetic. . . . I hope audiences look at the characters not as freaks but as people we can make a connection to, that reveal something about the world we live in.”

Since well before “Dollhouse,” Solondz had been ambivalent about filmmaking as a profession. “It’s what I wrote on my tax form and on my visa application, and as long as I have ideas, I’ll keep doing it,” is as far as he’ll go. “I spoke in Washington, D.C., after a ‘Dollhouse’ screening and said I’d always been bitter about being rejected by the Peace Corps, and afterward a guy in the audience gave me his card and told me to call him if I still wanted to join. That was awhile ago, but I still keep that card.”