A right royal pairing

THE spluttering main competition at the 50th Cannes Film Festival, which concludes on Sunday night, was kick started at the midway point by two riveting US entries and by a provocative Austrian production contemplating the theme of screen violence.

Set in New Canaan, Connecticut over Thanksgiving weekend in November 1973, The lee Storm is a thoughtful and sensitive exploration of disillusionment dawning on post 1960s suburban liberals at the time of the Watergate crisis. Based on a recent novel by Rick Moody which receives an articulate adaptation by writer producer James Schamus, this subtle and illuminating movie marks yet another leap forward for the gifted Taiwanese director, Ang Lee, after The Wedding Banquet, Eat Drink Man Woman and Sense And Sensibility.

The ice storm of the title does not happen until the movie's multilayered, cathartic final sequences but the film features recurring ice capped images, from the opening credits which thaw away and serve as an apt symbolism for the glacial characters who populate the picture.

The film centres on the definitely dysfunctional Hood family. Whatever love once existed between the husband and wife, played by Kevin Kline and Joan Allen, has long evaporated; while she simmers with sexual frustration, he is involved in an adulterous affair with a hedonistic married neighbour (Sigourney Weaver). The narrative links their relationships with the sexually curious behaviour of their children.

The lee Storm is so replete with cultural references to Watergate, Deep Throat, spouse swapping, vinyl pop music and cringe inducingly accurate recreations of the ghastly fashions of the period - that it conceivedly could pass for of the more incisive movies of benefits of hindsight and reflection and it is consummately played by a fine cast - Kline and Weaver seizing upon the potential of their best roles in years; the excellent Joan Allen, quietly brilliant again, as she was in Nixon and The Crucible; and a quartet of exemplary young actors in Christina Ricci, Elijah Wood, Adam Hann Byrd and Tobey Maguire.

Set two decades earlier, over four months beginning at Christmas 1952, Curtis Hanson's L.A. Confidential is a complex, intelligent and dynamic thriller which evokes Chinatown in its well delineated background of Los Angeles emerging as a city through a pall of corruption; The Usual Suspects in its teasingly elaborate and skilful plotting; and.the work of Sam Peckinpahin its depiction of a tough, male dominated milieu and in its dazzling climactic shoot out.

As adapted by Brian Helgeland and Curtis Hanson from the novel of the same name by James Ellioy, L.A. Confidential is a Jigsaw of a movie that defies short synopsis beyond stating that it concerns the Los Angeles Police Department from its most virtuous to its most venal members in a taut saga of dedication duplicity, criminal ambitions and multiple murders. Labyrinthine as its plotline is, it is a singular pleasure to work with it and chart its unravelling.

It is directed with vibrant panache by its co writer, Curtis Hanson, an undervalued filmmaker previously responsible for such solidly efficient thrillers as The Bedroom Window and The Hand That Rocks The Cradle. His evocation of the period is as authentic as his casting is highly imaginative, with the thoroughly reliable Kevin Spacey joined by last rising Australian actors, Russell Crowe, in the Bruce Willis role with an edge that Willis barely could imagine, and the charismatic Guy Pearce, a survivor of the soap, Neighbours.

The first Austrian film to compete at Cannes in more than 30 years, Michael Haneke's Funny Games is as chilling and as subversive as could be expected by anyone who admired Benny's Video - the only Haneke movie to be released in Ireland. Given that its compelling narrative relies so much on the element of surprise - and Haneke delivers some truly radical surprises - it would be unfair to reveal too much about it, other than stating that it involves a wealthy couple and their young son being held captive in their lakeside summer home by a steely, determined young man and his introverted lackey.

What's mare important than what happens on screen is the recurring point in Haneke's work as a film maker the relationship between the viewer and on screen violence, which was so arrestingly examined in Benny's Video and is taken to certain extreme cinematic devices in Funny Games.

As it challenges the position at the spectator as one of conspirator - the oscillation between the disconcerting feeling of participating in an actual event and the emotional security of seeing only the depiction of an artificially created violent reality it is as disturbing as it is provocative and eerily involving.

Outside the main competition, the Cannes sidebar section, UnCertain Regard, yielded a gem in Mrs Brown, a moving, beautifully acted British film of the close bond formed between the widowed Queen Victoria and her late husband's devoted Scottish servant, John Brown. As the film opens, it is 1864 and the queen remains disconsolate in her third year of official mourning.

Nobody - none of her nine children, loyal staff and admiring public - can lift her depression until John Brown is summoned to her estate on the isle of Wight where his brother, Archie, is a member of the household staff. "I speak as I find," John declares bluntly, to which Archie replies: "Not dawn south you don't." But he does, and John's directness extends to the queen, who seems to surprise herself when his gregarious - and at the same time, genuinely caring - approach thaws her out and wins her over.

The benign influence John Brown gradually exerts over Victoria eventually causes resentment in official quarters, leading to personal and physical attacks on him and to her being described privately by the prime minister, Disraeli, as "Mrs Brown". What follows is a fascinating depiction of a story that was unfamiliar to me, at least, and a warm and touching picture of an unlikely friendship.

Working respectfully from an eloquent original screenplay by Jeremy Brock, director John Madden, a veteran of television and the theatre, elicits luminous performances from the potentially unlikely pairing of his film's leading actors - a radiant and subtle Judi Dench in, incredibly, her first major film role, as Victoria, and the Comedian, Billy Connolly, in a revelatory performance as John Brown.

SHOWING out of competition in the official selection at Cannes, The Blackout is a considerable disappointment from Abel Ferrara after his recent return to form with The Funeral. His new film features Matthew Modine as Matty, a permanently stoned Hollywood movie star who gets deeper into drink and drugs when his girlfriend (Beatrice Dalle) has an abortion and leaves him.

When the film moves forward 18 months in time, Matty is clean and sober, attending AA meetings and involved with another woman (Claudia Schiffer). However, he remains truly haunted by nightmares that he may have murdered his former lover during a particularly heavy binge. Modine's gritty performance is the sole feature which sustains interest in this laborious and often uninvolving movie.