Michael Moore's scathing attack on the US president in "Fahrenheit 9/11" may be good cinema, but newspapers across the world said Sunday its triumph at the Cannes film festival was more due to politics than art.
"Moore's cinematographer pamphlet is clearly not a great film," said Der Tagesspiegel in Berlin. "But it had no plans to be this. It is a film for the moment. And the vote of the jury is a decision for the moment."
The documentary, which portrays George W. Bush as a dumb president hopelessly out of his depth, took the Palme D'Or top prize at Cannes on Saturday.
The festival's jury, led by US filmmaker Quentin Tarantino, said Sunday that it won on its cinematic merit rather than its politics.
But the press largely disagreed.
France's Le Parisien daily called it a "shock for George Bush," while Canada's Toronto Star saw the awards ceremony as "atypically politicised."
"With the Palme d'Or given to Fahrenheit 9/11, Cannes votes against Bush," said Publico in Lisbon, while Sweden's Dagens Nyheter agreed that the jury "let current affairs triumph over aesthetics and action."
"In another year, in another context, free of the war in Iraq and of troubles across the world, the jury would probably not have passed over the sweet-sour poetic peregrination of Wong Ka-wai in contemporary Hong Kong," the Swedish paper said.
Wong's sci-fi film "2046" came away without a major award despite being the toast of the festival.
Britain's Observer said that "Moore, the king-sized millionaire, walking testament to American consumption, is a master of making himself appear the little guy."
But it added: "It is hard to come away from it (the film) without concluding that George W. Bush is not fit to be president of a golf club let alone the world's most powerful nation.
"In the year of a (US) election that could well prove close, it's the kind of film that could make a historic difference," The Observer concluded.
Moore, known for his provocative left-wing documentaries and best-selling books, has made no secret of his hope that his movie will influence US presidential elections in November by turning voters away from Bush.
The New York Times noted that although the movie has yet to find a distributor in the United States - because of White House pressure, Moore alleges - it was generating intense interest there "as the election approaches and the debate over the conduct of the war in Iraq grows more intense."
"Fahrenheit 9/11" spans the period from Bush's 2000 election through the September 11, 2001 terror attacks in the United States and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
"Cannes: Moore 'defeats' Bush," read a headline in Lebanon's An Nahar newspaper.
The paper said Moore "won the Palme d'Or... in a cinematographer victory over US President George W. Bush and his administration in a movie that sharply criticised the Bush policy and thus was blocked from release in the United States."
"The American president has suffered an undeniable cultural and political defeat from faraway France, from the great power that cinema still has," said Italy's La Repubblica.
Another Italian newspaper, Corriere della Sera, saw great significance in the fact that the award had been delivered at a ceremony in France, which staunchly opposed the US-led war on Iraq.
"The victory of the American filmmaker will be seen as a new round in the rivalry between the two banks of the (Atlantic) ocean."
Moore has said he expected conservative US media to try to minimise the impact of the Cannes win by presenting it as a French statement - despite the fact that, of the nine festival jury members, only one was French and four were Americans.
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