Ireland goes to Cannes

Superstitious Cannes veterans swear by the weather. If it's good, the films in competition will be just as good; if it's bad, so are the films. That theory was certainly borne out last year when notable movies were as rare as clear skies for the anti-climax that was the festival's 50th anniversary celebration. Happily, this year's festival opened on Wednesday in blazing sunshine with temperatures soaring to 30 degrees, so the omens look good already. And for the first time in years, even the opening night movie was well worth seeing.

That film is Primary Colors, a sharp, cynical and scintillating political satire based on the controversial book by the former Newsweek columnist, Joe Klein, who hid under the mask of "Anonymous" until his cover was blown. The incisive and acerbic screen adaptation is by Elaine May, and the director is her former husband and stage partner, Mike Nichols.

The opening sequence introduces Jack Stanton, the progressive governor of a small American state and a candidate in the upcoming presidential primaries; prematurely grey and played with a soft southern drawl by John Travolta, he is, of course, a fictional character. We first observe him visiting an adult literacy class where he is moved to tears by stories of humiliation. Then he picks up the woman who's teaching the class.

But he is sufficiently convincing to persuade Henry Burton, the idealistic grandson of a celebrated black civil rights leader, to join the campaign. Played by the gifted young British stage actor, Adrian Lester, Burton is the film's narrator and its George Stephanopoulos surrogate. The candidate's other key handler, based on James Carville, is a sly, self-declared redneck strategist played by Billy Bob Thornton.

There are times when both handlers regret throwing everything behind Stanton and we observe them groaning when their man seems to have talked himself into a corner - only to bounce back triumphantly. It becomes more complicated when Stanton's sex drive goes into overdrive. His wife, Susan (Emma Thompson) is shown to be deeply upset over all the allegations of adultery, but she remains fully supportive of him in public. As the blunt-spoken (and lesbian) campaign trouble-shooter played by Kathy Bates tells Stanton: "I wish we'd castrated you when we had a chance".

Primary Colors is a rich, sophisticated entertainment which echoes The Candidate in its picture of a presidential hopeful (played by Robert Redford) with nothing much more than image going for himself, and the recent documentary, The War Room, in its riveting picture of the Clinton campaign for the White House. Heading an exemplary cast in which Kathy Bates and Larry Hagman are especially noteworthy, John Travolta gives the finest performance of his career to date.

Cannes this year is book-ended by movies from German-born directors, Mike Nichols with Primary Colors and Roland Emmerich with the blockbuster closing film, Godzilla, and both are out of competition. From an entry of over 1,000 features, festival director Gilles Jacob has selected 22 to compete for the Palme d'Or, with the emphasis heavily on film-makers who have participated at Cannes in the past.

They include Theo Angelopoulos with Eternity And A Day, its title already fodder for sneering to non-believers; Ken Loach with the story of a recovering alcoholic (played by Peter Mullan) in the Glasgow-set My Name Is Joe; Nanni Moretti, again starring in and directing an autobiographical piece, Aprile; and John Boorman, in competition for the fourth time and flying the Irish flag with The General, featuring the remarkable Brendan Gleeson as Martin Cahill.

Lars Von Trier, the Danish director of Breaking The Waves, is back with The Idiots, a dark comedy which at present seems the front-runner to provoke the de rigueur Cannes controversy with its minute or so of hardcore sex. Terry Gilliam may also be relied upon to push open a few envelopes with Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, featuring the ever-adventurous Johnny Depp as the counter-culture journalist Hunter S. Thompson.

The young Irish actor, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, is said to give a career-making performance opposite Ewan McGregor in Todd Haynes's evocation of the glitter rock era in Velvet Goldmine. Two further competition movies featuring Irish actors are Lodge Kerrigan's drama Claire Dolan, in which Colm Meaney joins Katrin Cartlidge and Vincent D'Onofrio, and John Turturro's picture of a 19th-century playwright (played by Turturro himself) in Illuminata, which also features Susan Sarandon, Katherine Borowitz, Christopher Walken, Rufus Sewell and Donal McCann.

Presiding over this year's features jury, fresh from his visit to Dublin, is Martin Scorsese. For the first time in Cannes history, five of the 10 jurors are women: the actresses Sigourney Weaver, Lena Olin, Winona Ryder and Chiara Mastroianni, and the Cuban novelist, Zoe Valdes. Completing the jury are directors Chen Kaige, Michael Winterbottom and Alain Corneau, and the Senegalese-born, French-raised rap singer MC Solaar.

In another first, Cannes has invited a separate jury to assess the short films in competition for the festival's second Palme d'Or, an award which launched Jane Campion's career when she won it for Peel. The five-member jury features two actresses, Emmanuel Beart and Angela Molina, and three directors, Jaco Van Dormael, Arnaud Desplechin and jury president Jean-Pierre Jeunet.

There are 14 international shorts in competition, among them one from Ireland - Martin Mahon's Happy Birthday To Me, a witty and diverting comedy scripted by Angela Burke and Jenny Sheerin, with Joan Sheehy on delightfully spirited form as a woman celebrating her birthday on April Fools' Day and attempting to attract the attention of a neighbour played by the redoubtable Brendan Coyle.

The bulging Cannes market is awash with Irish features this year, some completed, others which are in post-production and some others still at script stage. Reflecting the recent significant upsurge in production north of the Border, the Northern Ireland Film Commission is hosting a party in Cannes this evening to mark the market screenings of five feature films. They inlude two written by Colin Bateman - Divorcing Jack and Crossmaheart (formerly Cycle Of Violence) - along with Sunset Heights, Titanic Town and All For Love (formerly St Ives).

Meanwhile, the brilliant and tormented artist, Francis Bacon, is the subject of John Maybury's Love Is The Devil (with Derek Jacobi as Bacon) which screens on Tuesday in the official festival sidebar, Un Certain Regard. That section opened yesterday with Lulu On The Bridge, writer Paul Auster's first solo outing as a director after his Smoke spin-off, Blue In The Face, which he co-directed with Wayne Wang.

Lulu On The Bridge again features Harvey Keitel, this time as Izzy, a jazz saxophonist who is shot on stage at a Greenwich Village club, and the ambiguous consequences may or may not be a dream. They involve a chain of events which bring together Izzy and Celia (Mira Sorvino), a waitress who aspires to be an actress, for a tender romance.

The eponymous Lulu is the central character of Wedekind's Pan- dora's Box, a role coveted by Celia in a new film version by an actress-turned-director played by Vanessa Redgrave. Sorvino and Keitel are acutely touching in this sombre and digressive, though uneven, refection on fate, hope and tragedy. The bridge of the title is none other than Dublin's Ha'penny Bridge, the setting for two crucial scenes which were filmed on location there at the beginning of January.

It's beginning to seem like, wherever you look, there's no escaping Ireland at Cannes.

Michael Dwyer's next Cannes report will appear on Wednesday.