Winding up, winding down

AS the 49th Cannes Film Festival goes into its closing weekend, the general consensus among the many critics and film industry people who wind down by night at the convivial Le Petit Majestic bar is that, the quality of the official programme has rescued a festival low on star power and high on rainfall. But while almost everyone agrees that the overall standard is higher than in recent years, many of the films in competition have drawn sharply divided reactions.

With four days to go, Mike Leigh's Secrets And Lies (covered here last Friday) appears to be the universal favourite for the Palme d'Or at Monday night's awards ceremony, but we have yet to see such keenly fancied entries as David Cronenberg's Crash, Andre Techine's Les Voleurs, Bernardo Bertolucci's Stealing Beauty, Jaco Van Dormael's The Eighth Day and Julio Medem's Earth.

Meanwhile, Jacques Audiard's Un Heros Tres Discret could win the best actor award for Mathieu Kassovitz, who won best director last year for La Haine. And then there is Lars Von Trier's Breaking The Waves, which has some very staunch supporters, particularly for the performance of newcomer Emily Watson.

Of all the competition films shown to date, none has divided critical reaction quite as much as Temptress Moon, the new film by Chen Kaige, whose previous film, Farewell My Concubine, shared the Palme d'Or with The Piano in 1993. Chen's new film reunites him with two of that earlier film's stars, Gong Li and Leslie Cheung, for a lush romantic period drama. It is set in a country town near Shanghai in the 1920s, 10 years after the abdication of the six year old emperor, Pu Yi, and the advent of the republic. To avoid another Chinese censorship problem, Chen set the film in the past, but with the intention of mirroring the changes in his country today. Nevertheless, the film has been banned in China.

While the early scenes of Temptress Moon summarise the political changes in China at the time, suggesting the broad historical sweep of Farewell My Concubine, the new film is a much more intimate drama. It is centred on the young, opium smoking Ruyi (Gong Li) who is charged with managing the affairs of the estate when her father dies. She incurs the wrath of the household elder when her first decision is to say farewell to her father's concubines, sacking all of them.

Leslie Cheung plays Zhongliang, the brother of Ruy is sister in law. Embittered by being treated like a servant in the household, he leaves and is recruited into crime in Shanghai, making a lucrative living as a gigolo who blackmails the married women who fall for him. When he returns on a visit, Ruyi falls hopelessly in love with him - but, still bitter, he spurns her even though he secretly loves her.

Although not as substantial as Farewell My Concubine in terms of content, Temptress Moon is a langorously developed classical melodrama with Leslie Cheug and Gong Li oozing star quality in the central roles. The production values are as meticulous and opulent as we have come to expect from Chen Kaige - the art direction, the costume design, the music and in particular, the fluid, striking work by the cinematographer Christopher Doyle.

The brothers Joel, and Ethan Coen achieved a unique Cannes hat trick five years ago when their Barton Fink took the Palme d'Or and the awards for best actor (John Turturro) and best director. The Coens are back in competition this year with their finest film since Miller's Crossing - the gloriously droll thriller, Fargo, which brings them back to their roots, being set in their home state of Minnesota and in form and content recalling their auspicious 1984 debut feature, Blood Simple.

Inspired by a real life crime, Fargo features William H. Macy as Jerry, a debt ridden car salesman who concocts an elaborate scheme to squeeze money out of his wealthy, tight fisted father in law (Harve Presnell). He hires a pair of low life thugs (Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare) to kidnap his wife and offers them a portion of the ransom money.

One misguided move leads to another and the body count rises in the snowballing confusion as Jerry and the kidnappers get swallowed in a whirlpool of desperation. The local police chief (Frances McDormand) has little experience of dealing with serious crime, but undeterred by either that or the fact that she is seven months pregnant, she immerses herself in the case with all the sharpness of her wits.

The consequences, which involve characteristically freewheeling detours by the Coens, are thoroughly unpredictable in this teasing, intriguing and very witty movie which employs a much less flashy style than the more recent Coen pictures and is all the better for that. And the cast, led by Frances McDormand on her best form since her Oscar nominated performance in Mississippi Burning, is uniformly strong.

The official festival sidebar section, UnCertain Regard, opened with the assured first feature film directed by the English former critic and documentary maker Mary Harron, I Shot Andy Warhol. It is set in the late 1960s heyday of Warhol's famous Factory in New York and it deals with one of Warhol's hungry protege's, the man hating lesbian feminist and would be playwright, Valerie Solanas, who was the founder and sole member of SCUM (the Society for Cutting Up Men). In 1968 she shot and seriously wounded Andy Warhol.

Crowned by a riveting performance by Lili Taylor as Solanas, Harron's film digs deep into the life and psyche of Solanas and explores the cultural background against which she scraped her existence. Its picture of life, at the Factory - a world of wild self indulgence, narcissism and opportunism - seems even more seriously weird in retrospect as it is evoked here. Mary Harron's challenging and fascinating film features a fine supporting cast, especially Jared Harris as Warhol, Lothaire Blutheau as publisher Maurice Girodias and a barely recognisable Stephen Dorff as the transvestite, Candy Darling.

The other most impressive new director to emerge at Cannes so far this year is the 23 year old French actor, Gael Morel, who makes his feature, debut behind the camera with A Toute Vitesse (Full Speed), which features thematic resonances in a contemporary setting of Les Roseau Sauvages in which Morel starred with Stephane Rideau and Elodie Bouchez, both of whom he cast in A Toute Vitesse.

Set in a small town near Lyon, Morel's movie centres on four interconnected characters: Quentin (Pascal Cervo), who draws on his friends experiences for his first novel, published when he is 19; Julie (Elodie Bouchez), his college student lover; Jimmy (Stephane Rideau), his closest friend who later becomes Julie's lover; and Samir (Meziane Bardadi), a young gay Arab whose passion for Quentin is unrequited. The ambitiously busy narrative unfolds skilfully through those four well judged central performances and Morel's lively visual style.

Another story of teenage gay attraction is at the heart of English theatre director Hettie Macdonald's first film, Beautiful Thing, based on a recent play by the prolific and rising writer, Jonathan Harvey. Set during, a heatwave in London, it deals with the relationship between two teenage boys (well played by Scott, Neal and Glen Berry) who are neighbours in a suburban working class estate around the time that the love that dare not speak its name no longer becomes unspoken for both of them. Clearly made on a very low budget with some consequent narrative lapses, Beautiful Thing remains a sensitive, engaging and upbeat fable.

The ubiquitous actor, Steve Buscemi, makes an equally modest directing debut with Trees Lounge, a slight but likeable serious comedy of working class suburban New York life set around the eponymous bar which is a hang out for the story's many hard drinking characters. The central one, played by Buscemi himself, is an mechanic who has lost his job because of theft and his girlfriend (Elizabeth Bracco) who is now pregnant and living with his former boss and former best friend (Anthony La Paglia).

IN complete contrast to the spare simplicity of Buscemi's film is the Cannes entry most demanding of the festival audience, Peter Greenaway's The Pillow Book which, among many other things, is unique for having a principal credit for calligraphy in its opening titles. It deals with a young Japanese woman (Vivian Wu) introduced to calligraphy by her writer father; leaving Kyoto and an unhappy arranged marriage, she moves to a cacophonous Hong Kong where she meets a bisexual English translator.

Played by the remarkably adventurous Ewan McGregor from Trainspotting, he persuades her that his naked body should be the paper for her pen and that he will carry her writing on his body to a publisher; when he becomes sexually involved with the publisher, who is gay, a vicious battle of jealousy rages between the translator's two lovers.

The Pillow Book seems wilfully obscure in its early stages and there is the additional initial distraction of Greenaway's propensity for regularly switching the ratios of the images and superimposing additional imagery in frames within frames, many of them steps ahead of each other chronologically. That said, the film eventually exerts a hypnotic hold on the patient viewer and it grows consistently more and more deeply intriguing. Much of the imagery is astonishing and the film is laced with mordant dry humour.