If anything, The Eagle Path, announced as “un drame psychologique,” is a lunatic variation onThe Shanghai Gesture(1941), played out in full Eighties action trash mode (replete with peculiar postdubbing, further enhancing the Sternberg-artificiality of its underwater atmosphere), edited—by none other than the auteur—in a manner that evokes Alain Resnais on a really crazy binge, and culminating in a jaw-dropping montage that is some kind of inverted Bruce Conner explosion for YouTube times, while the auteur, also acting, furiously, in the part of—and we kid you not—Frenchy, emerges as some incomprehensible saviour-mixture of Jesus, Mary and Jean-Claude himself, sacrificing himself to save the world (sic). “I have a complicated mind,” the auteur announced helpully before the screening to prepare for the assault of this cri de coeur. We have to agree. The evidence is overwhelming. Since, unlike JCVD, this blunt confession will not carry any hip cachet with the so-called smart crowd, The Eagle Path may be doomed to a shadowy existence as a strange, spiritual exorcism-experience foisted at very unsuspecting viewers. But we still hope the eagle will sprout its wings and soar. After all, this was the most mind-blowing film shot in Thailand, or, for that matter, anywhere, to screen in Cannes this year.