COLUMNISTS 
The proverb must have been invented for the Cannes Film Festival: “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” Beneath the annual glitter – beaches, champagne, stars – consider the annual endurance challenge: films, films, films, as far as the eye can see. Beyond the ecstasy, ponder the agony; the diary of an average film critic might read like this:
Day one: Got up, saw five films (including sense-bombarding Disney opener viewed through 10-tonne 3D specs), went to bed. Day two: Got up, saw two incomprehensible films in diverse languages and lost will to live; then one good one and regained it. Day three: Saw four films, postponed fifth to attend midnight party, started to lose distinction between illusion and reality. Day four: Woke to write piece for newspaper, found brain was mass of delirious images.
Ah Cannes. It is a workout and a wonder for all, especially in years when no unity of theme or style is apparent. In 2009 even the picture in the festival poster is a puzzler. Is that mystery blonde peering from a doorway into a Mediterranean sunlit terrace Monica Vitti in L’Avventura (1960)? If so, why? Memorable though it was, that Cannes succès de scandale, when an entire populace rose up against obscurity and ravaged the Croisette (shortly before the film became a consensus classic), will not turn 50 until next year.
Perhaps it is a coded way of saying: “Ars brevis, Cannes longa.” Or: this festival sees further than annual movie-punters who think they see all. It sees further, perhaps, even than those sages who insisted that this was the year in which top directors would turn to genre cinema. A war film from Tarantino (Inglourious Basterds). A football comedy-fantasy from Ken Loach (Looking for Eric). Horror films from Lars von Trier and Park Chan-wook.
But art doesn’t go away that easily. Already too many exceptions challenge the proposed rule. Who will call Jane Campion’s Bright Star a genre film, since its tale of Keats and Fanny Brawne wriggles free of all constraints of its chosen form, the literary biopic? Who will call Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet a thriller, since no jail drama, especially from a high-style French existentialist (The Beat My Heart Skipped), can merely thrill for 2½ hours, but must add extra notes of politics, philosophy or tragic crisis?
More on those two competition front-runners shortly. But the best rebuke to “year of the genre” prognosticators – and possibly the best film, though shown out of competition – is Romania’s Police, Adjective. From the country that brought us the 2007 Golden Palm winner, 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days, comes another masterwork. Writer-director Corneliu Porumboiu plays inspired games with his police-procedural format, as long early scenes of real-time realism – the cop hero (Dragos Bucur) stalking and staking out a teenage drug gang – give way to a hypnotically droll climactic dialogue scene in the police chief’s office, where dictionary definitions are unpacked and meanings dissected of “conscience”, “moral”, “law” and “police”.
If Jacques Derrida had scripted a cop movie, this would be it. The whole film is really about signs and semantics. The early stake-out rituals are a silent signifier in the vocabulary of law and order (on screen and in life), just as the words loaded with emotiveness such as “law” and “police” are overdue for parsing and deconstructing, not least by those who practise the activities.
Bright Star is hardly less magisterial in freshening a familiar form. Those fearing Campion’s career had vanished down a cul-de-sac with In the Cut, a US murder thriller “redeemed” only by pretension, can gasp at her surprise reappearance on the sunny side of genre-reworking. This love story about the bard of nightingales and Grecian urns might have been a stilted exercise in “Eng Lit” biography. But Campion’s script is fluent, witty, moving and credible, aided by superb performances from Ben Whishaw as the poet-dreamer, at once prettily tousled and wryly self-possessed, and Abbie Cornish (pictured above), who plays Fanny as an entire weather system of self-willed womanhood in the early days of gender enfranchisement. A strong supporting turn by Paul Schneider as Keats’s best pal Charles Brown provides the story with a “third eye”, providing scepticism, sage humour and enlarged dramatic resonance.
A Prophet (pictured right) is the home team’s best shot, so far, at the Golden Palm. French director Audiard is becoming a dazzler with film noir. Experience the sparks that fly from this dark, electric tale of a French Muslim prisoner (Tahar Rahim) seeking to survive by playing two “gangs” against each other – Corsicans and brother Muslims – in a jail so intricately factionalised it makes Rome under the Borgias seem like Toytown under Police Constable Plod.
The eloquently pared photography – some shots seem lit merely by a struck match that flares its epiphanies into view – throws our attention on to the faces and figures of these humans in torment in a man-made inferno. The plot winds mazily for two and half hours, with not a single longueur, until justice is served and damnation is delivered in this world to those not skilful enough (like the hero) to delay it to the next.
Damnation has already been delivered by some critics to some Cannes movies. Park Chan-wook’s Thirst is a madcap vampire film combining visual inventiveness with dramatic inanity. Brillante Mendoza’s Kinatay (Butchered) is an overwrought, overlong Filipino policier. Von Trier’s Antichrist begins powerfully, depicting the grief of a couple (Willem Dafoe, Charlotte Gainsbourg) who have lost their child, but breaks its gearbox trying to shift up into the gothic-metaphysical. There are mutilation, near-murder and woodland animals endowed with spectral presence and vatic speech.
These are the films that test our souls. But what is Cannes without its nightmares? They are the flipside of the screen dreams that make a movie-lover’s life worthwhile. Put a bet each on Bright Star and A Prophet and watch this space. Still to step into the Cannes arena: Almodóvar, Loach, Haneke, Resnais, Tarantino.
