Cannes do spirit

After last year's dismaying selection of films, the French festival has pulled out the stops to make amends, writes Michael Dwyer

After the unprecedented critical backlash that greeted last year's official selection, which mostly ranged from the lacklustre to the grossly self-indulgent, this year's Cannes film festival, the 57th, which opened on Wednesday, appears to be trying to be all things to all cinema-goers.

More than ever the line-up consciously straddles the extremes of art and commerce, from the $200 million epic Troy, with Brad Pitt leading the cast up the red carpet, to the US independent production Tarnation, made with Apple's iMovie software for $218.32 (excluding music-clearance fees). Bizarrely, tenue de soirée, or evening dress, remains strictly de rigueur for Palais premières of films that often deal with cruelty, poverty and deprivation.

The born-again hipster Quentin Tarantino, critically and commercially revitalised after his twin Kill Bill pictures, chairs this year's typically eclectic jury, which also includes the actresses Kathleen Turner, Emmanuelle Béart and Tilda Swinton, the Belgian actor and screenwriter Benoît Poelvoorde, the Hong Kong director Hark Tsui and the veteran US film-maker Jerry Schatzberg.

Schatzberg and Tarantino rank among the coterie of US directors who first found fame at Cannes, the former with his second feature, The Panic In Needle Park, before he won the Palme d'Or for Scarecrow, back in 1973; the latter with his first feature, Reservoir Dogs, before he took the top award for Pulp Fiction.

Joining Schatzberg and Tarantino in Cannes' old-boy network are Joel and Ethan Coen, Spike Lee, Jim Jarmusch, Emir Kusturica, Ken Loach, Mike Leigh, Peter Greenaway, Michael Haneke, Wong Kar Wai, Lars Von Trier, Abbas Kiarostami and Theo Angelopoulos.

For years it seemed that all any of them had to do was to make a film, regardless of quality, and it was a shoo-in for competition. This year, as a response to the predictability of their inclusion - which in many cases was no bad thing - the old order has given way to new or newish directors.

Wong, Kusturica and the Coens are back in competition, but Loach and Greenaway opted to launch their new films at Berlin in February, and Cannes turned down Leigh's new picture, Vera Drake. Even the number of French films chosen for competition is down to a lowly three from the average of four or five.

Tarantino's jury somehow has to choose between entries that span the genres from animation in the sequels Ghost In The Shell 2: Innocence and Shrek 2 to documentary in Michael Moore's politically pointed Fahrenheit 9/11, black comedy in the Coens' transposition of The Ladykillers, the 1955 Ealing comedy, to present-day Mississippi, a biopic in The Life And Death of Peter Sellers (starring Geoffrey Rush), which has come under attack for playing with the facts even before anyone has seen it, and serious new auteurist work from Walter Salles, Olivier Assayas, Wong and Kusturica, who, if he wins with Life Is A Miracle, will become the first director to take the Palme d'Or three times.

Good luck to the jury in finding relevant comparison points between such diverse subjects and styles - and in putting up with the fountain of film references certain to spew from their voluble chairman in the days ahead.

Despite the critical mauling last year, Cannes remains irresistible to directors as their potential place in the sun. The festival's artistic director, Thierry Frémaux, proudly announced last month that this year's event attracted 1,325 entries - up from 908 in 2003 - from 85 countries.

Being selected for competition can be a double-edged sword, however. For every Tarantino, Coen or Kusturica who walks away victorious there are the walking wounded whose films are critically and commercially demolished overnight after a Cannes screening, notoriously Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, David Lynch's disastrous spin-off from his television series, The Brave, Johnny Depp's naive directing début, and, from last year, Vincent Gallo's embarrassingly vacuous and narcissistic The Brown Bunny.

Cannes continues to thrive on controversy, which it attracts like a magnet. No publicity stunt is regarded as too low or gross at an event that draws 5,000 members of the media, from the most resolutely serious film critics to the most blatantly gossip-hungry tabloid hacks. It's hardly a coincidence, given that Moore is a shrewd self-publicist, that the controversy about Fahrenheit 9/11 broke last week, in the run-up to its world première at the Grand Théâtre Lumière on Monday, even though Disney told Harvey Weinstein, of its Miramax subsidiary, a year ago that it could not release such a provocative film in a presidential election year - the film reportedly exposes links between the Bushes and rich Saudi Arabian families, including the bin Ladens. Fahrenheit 9/11 would have been the hottest ticket at Cannes regardless of all that media fuss, but then nothing succeeds like excess.

Any event showcasing such an anti-Bush film might be deemed safe from terrorist attack, but given the bombings in Madrid in March, the massive media presence and the glitzy Hollywood line-up - Pitt, Cameron Diaz, Charlize Theron, Tom Hanks, Eddie Murphy, Sean Penn and Naomi Watts are all due to visit - security has been stepped up. More than 1,000 extra police officers, including bomb squads, dog handlers and patrol-boats crews, have been deployed.

Not for the first time the biggest threat comes from within France. It is 36 years since les évènements of May 1968 spilled south, bringing Cannes to an abrupt halt. Although this year's festival is most unlikely to meet such a dramatic fate, there are warnings of disruption from audiovisual workers engaged in a long-running dispute with the French government over cuts in unemployment benefit.

Last week a group of them invaded the Canal Plus newsroom in Paris, in the middle of a bulletin, to declare they would be protesting at Cannes - and at the weekend about 50 of them temporarily blockaded a Paris warehouse holding prints for screening at the festival. The workers will give a press conference today, to outline their grievances; they have the backing of many of the French directors whose films are being screened.

In the crowded festival marketplace, where hundreds of movies vie for distributors' attention, the new Michael Winterbottom film, his third in 15 months, is certain to play to packed houses. Made on a shoestring, Nine Songs chronicles an intense sexual relationship through reputedly graphic footage of real sex involving the actors Kieran O'Brien, who played the son of Robbie Coltrane's character in Cracker, and US newcomer Margo Stilley.

Pedro Almodóvar's new film, Bad Education, which opened the festival on a high note on Wednesday, first made the headlines in France last month, when the country's largest cinema chain, EuroPalaces, was forced to withdraw its trailer from all cinemas showing Mel Gibson's The Passion Of The Christ. A Catholic fundamentalist group, the Brotherhood of St Pius X, had objected to the trailer for the film, which pivots on a story of clerical sex abuse at a boys' school in the 1960s.

Contrary to their fears, Almodóvar's treatment of this theme and its consequences is subtle and measured. Now in his 50s, the gifted Spanish writer and director continues to move further away from the kitschy camp of his earlier features. Bad Education is as serious-minded as its immediate predecessors, Talk To Her and All About My Mother, substantially less melodramatic and, unusually, all about men.

In Almodóvar's partly autobiographical screenplay for Bad Education one of the protagonists is a young film director in 1980s Madrid called Enrique (Fele Martínez), who is seeking a new project when an unexpected visitor (Gael García Bernal) offers him a script. This handsome young man introduces himself as Ignacio, Enrique's closest friend at school in the 1960s, who has changed his name to Angel to further his ambitions as an actor and volunteers to play a transvestite in the film. The script is based on their experiences at the school, where the manipulative Father Manolo jealously separated them to prey on Ignacio.

Almodóvar astutely adopts classic 1940s film noir as the model for this complex but enthralling, stylish and accessible drama, which is accompanied by a brooding score that recalls the Hitchcock soundtracks of Bernard Herrmann. There is an even more explicit nod to Hitchcock in the film's resonant references to Vertigo as the plot twists and turns with impeccable assurance.

Having won the best-director prize at Cannes five years ago, for All About My Mother, Almodóvar opted to have Bad Education screened out of competition, although it surely would have figured among the awards had he allowed it to be eligible. In a very fine cast the outstanding performance comes from Bernal, a fast-rising young Mexican actor, as both the enigmatic Angel and the troubled transvestite of the film within the film.

Happily, the jury has another opportunity to honour Bernal, for his thoughtful, expressive portrayal of the young Che Guevara in The Motorcycle Diaries, Walter Salles's competition entry. It begins in January 1952, when Ernesto Guevera de la Serna, a 23-year-old medical student specialising in leprosy, leaves his well-to-do family behind in Buenos Aires and takes off with his pharmacist friend Alberto Grenado (Rodrigo de la Serna) on an 8,000-mile journey through Argentina, Chile and Peru en route to Venezeula.

The two close friends travel as uneasy riders aboard a 13-year-old motorcycle inaptly named the Mighty One, and their eventful trip, which lasts far longer than they had imagined, presents sexual prospects for the gregarious Grenado, while Guevera remains dutifully faithful to the middle-class girlfriend he left behind. Their encounters are by turn comic, dangerous and eye-opening as they travel through extremes of climate - and of wealth and poverty.

In the venerable tradition of the road movie this proves to be a journey of self-discovery for the idealistic young Guevera, as his social conscience is nagged by the experiences of people he meets along the way: dispossessed farmers, exploited mine workers and the inhabitants of a leper colony.

Working from Guevara's diaries of the journey, Salles, the Brazilian director of Central Station, eschews didacticism and preachiness to subtly observe the gradual formation of a socialist revolutionary, years before he became known as Che, joined up with Castro in Cuba and was murdered in Bolivia in 1967, becoming a poster boy for that turbulent period of world change.

"This isn't a tale of heroic feats," the film declares in a caption that opens and closes the story, but it is nonetheless highly effective and illuminating, as the viewer is drawn deeper and deeper into a tale that it tells with admirable command of narrative and visual style. If this standard holds we could be in for a vintage Cannes.