The Brits are back at Cannes

10 April 2012

I have already received 14 invitations for parties at the Cannes film festival, which opens tomorrow. Probably, I shall be able to go to none of them. Cannes is still what I called it once: "Chaos tempered by periods of dissent." More than 45,000 people descend on a half-mile strip of waterfront (not all at once, thank God).

Between 450 and 500 films are screened for buyers and sellers in the market-place cinemas; the competitive festival runs to nearly two dozen movies; two non-competitive side-bar sections have half as many again. Screenings begin at 8.30am and stretch to midnight: the body clock sounds its alarms. People on their first trip to Cannes suffer mental stasis, so much is going on simultaneously. The only rule I've found that holds good is knowing where you need not be.

Does the festival serve any purpose, save filling tills on the Croisette, beds in the luxury hotels, and everyone's stomachs? Commerce has given Cannes financial muscle, but market-place values have gravely diminished art's one-time supremacy.

Yet still you see world cinema in 10 days or so of the festival. You see where the Next New Thing is happening: the French nouvelle vague in the late Fifties, the Czech spring in the 1960s, the Australian coming-of-age in the mid-Seventies, the Hollywood independents in the early 1980s and the Iranian and Chinese break-through, guarded because of reactionary forces still ruling their countries, but able to speak with a looser tongue abroad than would be permitted at home.

Cannes can be dangerous to high-concept Hollywood movies and blockbusters. If these are sent to the festival at all, they are usually the critic-proof type. But it can be kind to unknown talents. Danis Tanovic s No Man s Land, a savage cartoon of Balkan tragedy, was discovered at Cannes, and went on to win 2001 s Foreign Film Oscar. Steven Soderbergh s Sex, Lies and Videotape came out of nowhere in 1989: a director was born within hours of its screening.

The Brits have generally done well at Cannes. We had no British film ready last year. This year, completion dates have provided a surplus for Gilles Jacob, the festival president, and his artistic director, Thierry Fremaux, to pick from. It's true that they've honoured the obvious names, but Cannes is a conservative event and one that, to its credit, stays loyal to those whose talents have served it in past years.

Thus Mike Leigh, a former Palme d'Or winner, has his new movie, All or Nothing, in competition: a grimly funny view of a dozen or so council-estate denizens. Leigh may catch some stick from radical critics. His unsentimentalised view of the outer-city proletariat and empty lives on welfare and petty crime has dispassionate under-standing not far removed from cruel observation. But it contains Timothy Spall's finest performance; and Leigh's hard eye finally softens into sympathy when near-tragedy in Spall's family enables feelings to be "outed".

Ken Loach is competing, too, with Sweet Sixteen, a title we may suspect is ironic. His eighth Cannes selection is about a home-care boy from Greenock trying to acquire a caravan dwelling for when his mother comes out of jail. One suspects British social services are going to be given a working-over this year at Cannes.

Michael Winterbottom's 24 Hour Party People, already released in Britain, is a risky competition entry - one wonders how much appeal the brief history of Manchester's Factory Records will have for Cannes.

English regionalism is well represented, however: Shane Meadows's Once Upon a Time in the Midlands goes into a non-competitive Directors' Fortnight slot; likewise the long-awaited - about two years - follow-up from Lynne Ramsay of Ratcatcher distinction, though opinion about her new film, Morvern Callar, starring Samantha Morton, divided critics at London previews into those who applauded and those who filed out, silently appalled.

Of non-British entries vying for the Palme d'Or, the most eagerly awaited is Roman Polanski's The Pianist, based on a poignant memoir of the Warsaw ghetto, starring Adrien Brody. Polanski needs festival recognition as much as he needs a commercial hit. About Schmidt, directed by Alexander Payne, who made the sharpest-ever film, Election, about sexual politics in a US high school, stars Jack Nicholson as an out-of-temper widower attending his daughter's wedding. Perhaps this will give the Cannes jury a chance to redeem last year's acting-prize omission for Nicholson in Sean Penn's The Pledge.

Bowling for Columbine is a documentary - unusually for a competition entry at Cannes - by Michael Moore that takes a scathing look at American gun culture. Amos Gitai's Kedma tackles as incendiary an issue: Jewish immigration into Israel on the eve of the 1948 war of independence. David Cronenberg is back, with an entirely UK-financed and shot film, Spider, with Ralph Fiennes as a schizoid personality.

Oddest pairing of all, perhaps, is Paul Thomas Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love with Adam Sandler as a sex-phone proprietor who is himself set up for a date with Emily Watson. And Woody Allen is back at Cannes with Hollywood Ending; his recent films have usually gone to Venice. The French are loyal to those who return to the fold. Cannes proves that.

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