East meets rest on the Riviera

Before Michael Moore started gobbling up international headlines -- on Saturday, the French newspaper Le Monde consecrated the filmmaker a "cineaste rebelle" on its front page -- the biggest news at Cannes was Asian film. This year, six of the 18 films in the competition are from Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Thailand, more than any other part of the world. Finalement, the most prestigious film festival in the world, has tacitly recognized what serious movie lovers have known for years: that Asia is where it's at, cinematically.

Hollywood still dominates the world's market and its cinematic consciousness, and great films continue to be made in Europe and, on occasion, in Africa. Since the mid-1980s, however, when so-called Fifth Generation films such as Chen Kaige's "Yellow Earth" began trickling out of the People's Republic of China, attentive filmgoers have increasingly looked to the East for aesthetically thrilling, politically venturesome cinema.

Once upon an art-house time, the names on every cinephile's lips were Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini and Francois Truffaut. Although too many aging boomer critics continue to think that foreign-language film begins and ends with these European titans, many of today's most important auteurs have names such as Hou Hsiao-hsien (Taiwan), Takeshi Kitano (Japan) and Wong Kar-wai (Hong Kong).

One of the most influential filmmakers in contemporary cinema, Wong returns to Cannes this year with his long-awaited, self-described "futuristic" film, "2046." In this country, Wong is perhaps best known as one of the directors Sofia Coppola thanked when she won an Academy Award for "Lost in Translation" earlier this year. She also thanked Michelangelo Antonioni and Jean-Luc Godard, both of whom have films at Cannes (inexplicably, she tossed in Bob Fosse as well).

These lions of European art cinema may indeed have played a part in her cinematic education -- just as they did for her father, Francis Ford Coppola. But the younger Coppola has clearly made a very close study of Wong's work, and it's to this visionary Asian auteur that she owes her film's shimmering look, wistful tone and even some crucial story elements.

This kind of veiled appreciation -- and appropriation -- is nothing new. Quentin Tarantino cheerfully admits the influence of Japanese and Chinese genre films on "Kill Bill," but the Asian influence often gets lost in translation.