COLLISION COURSES AT CANNES

MERCEDES BENZ sponsored an exhibition at the 49th Cannes Film Festival which featured photographs of the eponymous car in famous and forgotten movies down the years. In an odd coincidence, the exhibition was held in the year when the most controversial movie in the festival was David Cronenberg's adaptation of J.G. Ballard's novel, Crash, which operates from the thesis that being in, or witnessing, a car accident is sexually arousing.

Hissed and booed at its Cannes press screening, was booed again at Monday's closing night awards ceremony, when it took a runner up jury prize. Cronenberg's film opens on three consecutive sex scenes in an aircraft hanger, the camera room of a TV studio and the balcony of an apartment building before one of the participants, an advertising executive called James Ballard, played by James Spader, takes to the expressway in his car.

Swerving across the road and driving against the oncoming one way traffic, he causes a crash which kills the other driver. Soon he's back in his car, kissing the dead driver's wife (Holly Hunter) and after another near crash having sex with her. The consequences involve multiple sexual groupings, among them gay and lesbian sex, voyeurism of a back seat coupling in a carwash, rough sex and scar fetishism, in which the other participants are Ballard's wife (Deborah Unger), an accident victim (Rosanna Arquette) in calliper splints, and a heavily scarred renegade scientist (Elias Koteas).

The sex scenes are interspersed or overlap with a great deal of dangerous driving, the morbid close up photographing of the aftermath of a horrific collision, and the gross restaging of James Dean's fatal car crash for an avid audience which is promised a recreation of the crash that decapitated Jayne Mansfield as the next attraction.

The coldest and most clinical film to date from David Cronenberg and the most extreme and disturbing Crash is as technically accomplished as we have come to expect from the gifted Canadian director. It reiterates the recurring theme in Cronenberg's work and in virtually every movie set in the future that the human race remains primitive despite all the technological advances of this century.

The expression of that theme through the equation of sexual excitement and car crashes rings singularly hollow for the duration of Crash, an arid and austere experience in which the cars seem more real than the people in them. The movie's calculated outrageousness is so relentless that it eventually provokes mere numbness and often turns risible.

The other controversy at Cannes this year surrounded Danny Boyle's hugely popular Trainspotting not because of reheated claims that it glamourises drug taking, but because the festival director, Gilles Jacob, chose to include it in the official selection, but as an out of competition entry. "Gilles Jacob was too scared to show it in competition and too scared not to show it," was the view of David Aukin, head of Channel 4 Films, which funded the movie.

Had Trainspotting been screened in competition, the general consensus was that it would have been a prime contender for the major Cannes prize, the Palme d'Or. In the event, that award went to another British entry the first to win the Palme since Roland Joffe's The Mission 10 years ago Mike Leigh's superb Secrets And Lies on which I reported a fortnight ago and which goes on Irish release a fortnight from today.

Leigh's film also took the best actress award for Brenda Bleythn's raw, emotional performance, and while nobody disputed her merit for the prize, many believed that it would go to another British actress, Emily Watson, for her remarkable cinema debut in the Danish director Lars v on Trier's Breaking The Waves which took the jury's runner up prize, the Grand Prix de Cannes.

By a very long way the most powerful and intensely heartfelt of the five films directed by von Trier, it is set a remote Scottish coastal village in the early 1970s and among a small, tightly knit and deeply conservative community. Emily Watson gives a performance of astonishing range and depth as Bess, a naive and devout young local woman whose life is transformed, by marriage to an outsider Jan (Stellan Skarsgard) who works on a North Sea oil rig.

When their blissfully happy honeymoon has to end and Jan goes back to work, Bess is distraught and has one of regular conversations with God, pleading for Jan's return. Fate however has many cruel blows to deal the couple and what had begun as one of cinema's most persuasive and joyous celebrations of true love metamorphoses into harrowing melodrama. This passionate and riveting film delivers an emotional punch that lingers vividly in the memory for long afterwards.

The Cannes jury chaired by Francis Coppola gave the best director award to Joel Coen for Fargo which opens in Ireland next Friday, and the best actor award was shared between Danil Auteuil and Pascal Duquenne, an actor with Down's Syndrome, who costars in Jaco van Dorrnael's The Eighth Day, which received very mixed reviews at Cannes. Having arrived 20 minutes early for its festival showing last Thursday morning, I was one of over 200 ticket holders disappointed to find that the screening was vastly oversubscribed.

A formidable contender for the best actor at Cannes was the immensely versatile Mathieu Kassovitz, who was named best director at last year's festival for La Haine. Kassovitz gives a wonderfully expressive performance as Albert, the sly central character of Jacques Audiard's Un Hems Tres Discret (A Self Made Hero) which recalls Being There and The Front in its account of an impostor who becomes a hero in a war in which he has not fought.

In flashbacks we observe Albert's childhood fantasies in which he plays the hero growing up introverted and self cent red, he persists with those fantasies in adulthood and goes to inordinate lengths meticulously to create an heroic persona for himself in the winter of 1944/45. Mirroring the grand illusions perpetuated in France at the time, Albert finds it surprisingly easy to carry out and get away with his deception Audiard's clever, caustic and consistently entertaining parable which is elegantly devised as a pseudo documentary.

Bernardo Beitolucci's first film in 15 years to be set and shot in his native Italy, Stealing Beauty is a contrive and obvious picture of a 19 year old America (Liv Tyler) spending a summer holiday in scany where she finds her biological father and loses her virginity. The movie is gorgeously lit by Darius Khondji but there are few other pleasures in this cliche ridden and rambling yarn.

Accompanied by a grating soundtrack that seemed chosen at random from a jukebox, Stealing Beauty squanders the talents of a cast that includes the promising young Tyler, along with Donal McCann and Sinead Cusack as her hosts, Jeremy Irons as an ailing guest of theirs, and veterans Jean Marais and Stefania Sandrelli. Incidentally, a week after seeing Colm Meaney's name mis-spelt on the opening credits of The Van, it was curious to note that McCann was named Donald on the opening credits of Bertolucci's film and Donal on the closing credits.

Another film which was visually striking all the way but much less arresting in terms of substance was the Spanish entry, Tierra (Earth), the third film from Julio Medem, the Basque director of Vacas and The Red Squirrel. The complex but meandering Tierra features Carmelo Gomez as Angel, a man who believes himself to be half man, half angel and half alive, half dead rather like the movie itself.

Spike Lee's latest "joint", the surprisingly slight serious comedy, Girl 6, takes its title from the number allocated to an aspiring actress when, in desperation, she takes a job as a phone sex operator in Manhattan. Theresa Randle works valiantly with slender material in the central role, while Lee rounds up the usual suspects for supporting and cameo parts Madonna, Quentin Tarantino, John Turturro, Naomi Campbell and of course, Lee himself. The soundtrack is a compilation of greatest hits from The Artist Formerly Known as Prince But Now Known Again Simply as Prince.

Lone Star marks a return to the US and to form for John Sayles after his pointless Irish foray with The Secret Of Roan Inish. Ambitiously interlinking the lives of disparate characters with the skill he displayed in City Of Hope, Sayles goes a step further in Lone Star by cutting between events in a present day Texas border town to flashbacks 40 years earlier as a sheriff pieces together a story of corruption and murder involving his father (Matthew McConaughey) and a brutal, racist sheriff (Kris Kristofferson).

The 26 year old American director, Paul Thomas Anderson, makes a notable feature film debut with Sydney, an intriguingly structured and coolly methodical drama set in the gambling realms of Las Vegas and Reno. And he elicits fine performances from the four actors around whom his screenplay is built Philip Baker Hall as a ageing, mysterious and world weary Nevada denizen John C. Reilly as the down at heel young man to whom he becomes a surrogate father Gwenyth Paltrow as an insecure waitress who bolsters her income through prostitution and Samuel L. Jackson as a brash, small time crook.

After Secrets And Lies and Stealing Beauty, the third Cannes selection this year in which a character seeks out a biological parent was Flirting With Disaster, a breezy, intricately plotted and hilariously funny comedy of snowballing confusions and mishaps. It marks a confident and impressive leap for writer director David O. Russell after his debut with Spa n king The Monkey.

His astutely cast new film brings together a sparkling mix of rising young actors Ben Stiller, Patricia Arquette, Tea Leoni and Josh Brolin with such seasoned performers as Mary Tyler Moore, Alan Alda, Lily Tomlin and George Segal. The fast and free wheeling entertainment of Flirting With Disaster ended this year's Cannes Film Festival the most satisfying for some time on a high note last Monday night. Here's to next year's reportedly epic 50th anniversary celebrations.