The Independent, 20 May 2001

What we need around here is a good turkey

Yes, says Jonathan Romney, there have been plenty of impressive movies at this year's Cannes Festival, but nothing brilliant ­ and, worse still, nothing dreadful

By Jonathan Romney

The Cannes Film Festival is a parallel universe that for twelve days a year operates entirely independent of the normal laws of cinema. In the outside world, Jean-Luc Godard can't get arrested ­ here, his latest film was such a hot ticket that the police were called in after scuffles broke out in the queue for the press screening. And notwithstanding the inclusion of DreamWorks' jolly digital fairytale Shrek, the crowd-pleasing feelgood hits of the Competition so far have been by those austere old masters Jacques Rivette and Manoel de Oliveira.

The appearance of New Wave veterans Godard and Rivette is just one sign of how French cinema's past still haunts the Festival. In the Un Certain Regard section, there's a Japanese remake of Alain Resnais' Hiroshima Mon Amour, while Roman Coppola's CQ is a jovial comedy about an earnest young film-maker in Sixties Paris trying to make a Godardian statement film and ending up directing a Barbarella-style superspy romp. Meanwhile, star of Truffaut's Les Quatre Cents Coups and New Wave icon Jean-Pierre Léaud appears in two films, including Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang's What Time Is It There, itself a homage to Les Quatre Cents Coups.

As for French films' current state, it's sad to report that Claire Denis, director of last year's superb Beau Travail, has bombed dramatically with her new film Trouble Every Day. The most-awaited film of the 54th festival and, finally, the most derided, it's an incoherent, ill-judged mess about flesh-eating maniacs in Paris. Also much-awaited was Storytelling by US indie-geek supreme Todd Solondz, whose Happiness, with its child-abuse storyline, set Cannes alight three years ago. His new film, comprising two separate short stories, seemed like an afterthought and left people lukewarm despite tackling every taboo subject imaginable: sex, race, disability, the Holocaust, the Colombine school massacre, not to mention American Beauty. Even as a half-measure, it's still fascinating ­ an Eminem-style open letter to Solondz's critics who accused Happiness of being exploitative sneering.

The Competition's big surprise was that Jean-Luc Godard is having some sort of renaissance. He confounded the press by agreeing only to talk to two journalists, from Russia and Argentina (as well as French sports paper L'Equipe!); in the event Eloge de l'Amour (In Praise of Love) turned out to be far more lucid and accessible than any big-screen project he's made in years. Shot in two parts, on black-and-white film and colour video, it's partly about a man trying to organise a project (film, book, opera ­ it's hard to say) on love, partly about an old couple who have sold their wartime resistance story to Steven Spielberg. Godard's films may get increasingly like music in their non-linear abstraction, but this one, as well as intensely poetic, is also very funny: there's a priceless gag about a petition to have The Matrix dubbed into Breton.

It's hard to say yet what the front runner is for the Palme d'Or (the award winners will be announced this evening). People have been enthusiastic about Rivette's uncharacteristically light-hearted theatrical comedy Va Savoir (Who Knows?); though a public and critical favourite at time of writing seems to be Nanni Moretti's La Stanza del Figlio (The Son's Room). Moretti is best known as a political farceur who usually plays himself. But in this tragi-comic intimate drama, he's a psychoanalyst who finds he can no longer deal with his patients after his teenage son dies. It's deceptively simple, totally economical, and at times verging on glibness: and yet it's the most emotionally satisfying film to play in competition so far.

Another strong contender is Michael Haneke's The Piano Teacher ­ if it doesn't win the Palme, Isabelle Huppert is certainly a shoo-in for Best Actress. She gives a devastating performance in this adaptation of Elfriede Jelinek's novel, and harrowing is not the word. Haneke's films are never an easy ride, but this one left critics blanched and even in tears. Its story of sexual repression and sado-masochism in Viennese conservatoire circles starts out like a poised high-cultural drama, then takes you further than you'd perhaps like to go into an abyss of psychosexual damage. Haneke may be accused once again of being an emotional terrorist; for all that, The Piano Teacher was one of the few Competition films that have dared go the full nine yards, and then some.

There have been other impressive films ­ Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf's Kandahar was a narratively awkward but dramatically powerful road movie about Afghanistan under Taliban rule. Whether or not it always works as narrative, it's nevertheless a commanding humanitarian statement, and a possible Palme d'Or, given that UNICEF stalwart Liv Ullmann is heading the jury. Another much-rated film was Roberto Succo, by young French director Cédric Kahn (L'Ennui) ­ a compelling, coolly objective piece of real-life police procedural about a killer who terrorised the South of France in the Eighties. Its gimlet-eyed lead, newcomer Stefano Casseti, could be Best Actor, unless it goes to Billy Bob Thornton's sublimely blank anti-performance in the Coen brothers' atypically lyrical film noir pastiche The Man Who Wasn't There. Or perhaps the Actor prize will go to Jack Nicholson, who for a change gives his money's worth as a tormented cop in Sean Penn's moody existential thriller The Pledge.

Otherwise, there's been a degree of disappointment and routine from some of the big names ­ one buyer complained about the lack of fresh names and the preponderance of "old men's experiments". It's hard to say whether that applies to David Lynch's Mulholland Drive. I probably enjoyed it as much as anything else here, yet ultimately it's another routinely dark exercise in a Twin Peaks mode ­ a rejected pilot for a TV series that Lynch has expanded into a stand-alone nightmare involving an ingénue heroine, cackling homunculi, a mysterious blue key, full-on lesbian sex, even the return of those ominous red curtains from Twin Peaks. It's a dazzling magic trick ­ ultimately, though, c'est du David Lynch, as they say here.

A British distributor complained that this was the most boring Cannes in 15 years. Maybe the problem is that there have been too many quite good films, several dull duds, but not enough out-and-out ludicrous turkeys. The low points have been simply boring rather than joyously wretched, as you expect at least once per festival. Ermanno Olmi's epic about Renaissance warfare, The Mastery of Arms, was sublimely handsome and entirely tedious, and Alexander Sokurov's Taurus, about Lenin's dying days, was like a cataleptic wade through thick Russian cabbage soup.

It probably says everything that there's only one film that everyone was uniformly enthusiastic about - the new version of Francis Coppola's 1979 Palme d'Or winner Apocalypse Now, featuring an extra 50-odd minutes that amplify the mythic status of the quest upriver for Colonel Kurtz. The film's new title, Apocalypse Now Redux, also launched a new verb, "to redux" ­ which is used for film-makers pulling their familiar tricks one time too many, or for journalists recycling their old Cannes stories.