Cannes a dull trial for jury

Director Richard Kelly (left) poses with cast members Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson and Sarah Michelle Gellar. Picture / Reuters

It's generally expected that critics return from Cannes with at least one story headlined: Riviera Row Over Shock Sensation, or Croissants fly in Croisette Fury.

Disappointment on the Cote d'Azur doesn't have the same ring. But this year you wonder how it could have gone wrong. With a competition line-up including Richard Linklater, Sofia Coppola, Nanni Moretti and Donnie Darko whizkid Richard Kelly, at least it couldn't be dull.

But it was - there were pleasures, letdowns, some duds. There was very little to get either upset or ecstatic about. Even the worst were simply turgid and you would have given anything for the euphoric dreadfulness of Vincent Gallo's instantly notorious The Brown Bunny.

You want the bad news first? Kelly's eagerly awaited Southland Tales featured a futuristic airship called the Megazeppelin, and a Megazeppelin was just what the film was - one made of lead, at that. When Donnie Darko became a cult sensation, too many people whispered in Kelly's ear that he was a genius.

Unfortunately, some of them had their chequebooks to hand. His follow-up is a laborious bloated folly - a sci-fi farrago about the apocalypse, with Sarah Michelle Gellar as a porn star, Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson as an amnesiac actor, and a cast of dwarves, anarcho-hippies and Justin Timberlake. It's long, incoherent and appallingly acted.

The competition's one real controversy was Marie-Antoinette, admired by many but so vociferously booed at its press show that you feared Sofia Coppola would be the first auteur beheaded on the Palais steps. The film is a conceit that generally pays off to heady effect: make something that looks like a traditional frocks-and-porcelain drama, but lace it with 80s pop from the likes of Gang of Four and Bow Wow Wow (I Want Candy over panoramas of petits fours). Kirsten Dunst is affecting, if predictably dizzy, as the ingenue who falls into the star role at Versailles - a metaphor for contemporary stardom, or for la Coppola's own position as pampered Hollywood royalty? But as an essay on the dangers of conspicuous expenditure, the film was something of an own goal.

For something more economical, measured and adult, there was nothing to equal Climates. Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan daringly casts himself and his wife, Ebru Ceylan, as an Istanbul couple who split up while on holiday, then meet again in snowbound Anatolia. Ceylan uses high-definition video, with all its precision and clarity, to get under his characters' skin with an acuity comparable to Ingmar Bergman, but he also creates some breathtakingly stark landscape shots. It's intensely personal, and confirms Ceylan as one of today's real auteurs - one of those film-makers who, as they say in Cannes, has a signature.

The competition's one absolute left-field revelation was The Family Friend, by Paolo Sorrentino, Neapolitan director of surprise arthouse hit The Consequences of Love. This film is a fragmented, Fellini-esque parable about a loathsome yet oddly sympathetic moneylender - Giacomo Rizzi scuttles around a surreal provincial landscape as the ancient, goblin-like protagonist, while Sorrentino orchestrates a sometimes baffling narrative of corruption, exploitation and sexual betrayal.

The smart money for Palme d'Or winner had been on Volver, the latest from Pedro Almodovar. It's a pleasure, if hardly a revelation, but it shows the man of La Mancha simplifying his game after the confused Bad Education. Penelope Cruz plays a Madrid housewife with her kitchen gloves laden with trouble - murdered husband, mother returned from the grave, lunch to cook for 30.

Cruz is dazzling in the grand old-school mode of Sophia Loren.

The other critics' favourite for Palme d'Or was Babel, from Mexican director-writer duo Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and Guillermo Arriaga. This multi-strander - starring Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett and Gael Garcia Bernal - sees the team shove their characters into harrowing, predictably interlinked crises and the result feels manipulative and forced.

One French critic complained that the film summed up the current parlous state of world cinema.

Other big names produced disappointment after disappointment. Nanni Moretti's The Caiman is an 8 1/2-style satire about Silvio Berlusconi - strident, messy and coarse.

United States indie stalwart Richard Linklater offered Fast Food Nation, a fictional treatment of Eric Schlosser's book on the US meat racket. Linklater might have done better with a documentary, for the film was contrived and shapeless.

My own personal sorrow was that lovable old Finnish gloomster Aki Kaurismaki, in Lights in the Dusk, came up with something less than business-as-usual, a hard-times story unleavened by his usual sardonic wit. Even his dog actor didn't have the charisma of his previous mutt thesps. Maybe it's time for the hard-living maestro to change his brand of vodka.

- INDEPENDENT