Saints and sinners

It was the year Michael Moore was canonised and the earth moved for the stars of '9 Songs', reports Michael Dwyer in Cannes

Dressed entirely in black, Quentin Tarantino bubbled with enthusiasm as he announced the winners at the closing ceremony of the 57th Cannes Festival. A self- confessed film geek, Tarantino has progressed from humble video-store clerk to winner of a screenwriting Oscar and the Palme d'Or for Pulp Fiction - and, for the past fortnight, to president of the jury that decided who would get this year's awards.

Yet on Saturday, as he reeled off the citations, he was as excitable as a child let loose in a sweet shop. It was not the demeanour one might associate with a 41-year-old film-maker with five pictures to his credit and arguably the highest international profile of any US director since Steven Spielberg. His passion and warmth were as refreshing as they were infectious - all the more so at the end of 11 generally satisfying days at a high-powered event that somehow straddles the extremes of art and commerce and of hype and glory.

When it came to presenting the Palme d'Or to Fahrenheit 9/11 - given with pride, Tarantino declared - the festival completed its canonisation of Michael Moore, the director of this heartfelt attack on President Bush and his government. Two years ago Cannes presented the world première of Moore's Bowling For Columbine, which collected a prize from the jury, went on to win an Oscar and became the most commercially successful documentary ever released in the US.

Moore's new film, which never misses an opportunity to ridicule Bush, is deeply biased and will raise troubling questions for anyone naive enough to believe that the documentary is the purest, most impartial form of film-making. Its victory at Cannes will embarrass the White House and the Walt Disney Company - which has prevented its Miramax subsidiary from releasing the film in the US - and the publicity generated at Cannes can only ensure that Fahrenheit 9/11 replaces Bowling For Columbine in the record books.

Moore is aiming higher that that, determined that his film will be released in the US over the July 4th weekend and that its populist blend of polemic and satire will reach the half of the US population that does not vote, encouraging enough of them to go the polls to vote in a new president.

Tarantino and his fellow jurors - four of the nine panellists are American - insisted their award to Moore was not politically motivated. "We all agreed it was the best movie," he said, adding that it was a very close race between Fahrenheit 9/11 and Old Boy, Park Chan-Wook's stylish, violent and unsettling psychodrama, which took the runner-up award, the Grand Prix.

Old Boy was one of several films in competition that had been seriously undervalued by many of the international press at the festival, as was Clean, the gritty and touching new film from the French director Olivier Assayas, whose ex-wife, Maggie Cheung, deservedly was named best actress for her intense portrayal of a drug-addicted singer desperately trying to sort out the mess of her life after her rock-star lover fatally overdoses. An understated Nick Nolte plays the dead man's father in this moving drama of a woman struggling to find the responsibility within herself to change her lifestyle and justify regaining custody of her six-year-old son.

Coincidentally, Clean was one of two French entries featuring potent collaborations between former spouses, the other being Comme Une Image, Agnès Jaoui's scintillating comedy drama, which took the best-screenplay award for Jaoui and Jean-Pierre Bacri, her co-star, co-writer and ex-husband.

Having failed to win anything at Cannes last year, when it had five entries on show, France made it three out of three this year when Tony Gatlif, a dedicated chronicler of the lives of the socially marginalised and underprivileged, was named best director for Exils, his Algerian-set road movie.

The Jury Prize, a minor award traditionally reserved for feature films, was shared this year between an actress - the splendid Irma P. Hall, who plays the resourceful landlady in Joel and Ethan Coen's The Ladykillers - and, amazingly, Tropical Malady. After establishing a quite intriguing premise, this wilfully obscure film by the Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul descends in to self-indulgence for a protracted sequence set in a jungle by night in which it is virtually impossible to see what's happening.

The other big surprise was the jury's decision to give the best-actor prize to 14-year-old Yuuya Yagira for his appealing performance as the eldest of four abandoned children in Nobody Knows, Hirokazu Kore-eda's involving but pointlessly overstretched Japanese entry.

There were several more worthy candidates for the prize, chiefly Gael García Bernal's thoughtful, expressive portrayal of the young Che Guevara in The Motorcycle Diaries, the excellent new Walter Salles film, which, inexplicably, went unrewarded by the Cannes jury, and Geoffrey Rush's show-stopping performance in the title role of The Life And Death Of Peter Sellers, which also went home empty-handed.

Opening on a dazzling credit sequence by the Irish animator Paul Donnellon, this unflattering biopic charts the rise of Sellers from his days as a radio star on The Goon Show, and a local hero in early British hit comedies, through international success as the bumbling Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther films to his final (and best) performance in Being There, before his death, at 54, in 1980.

The film never flinches from depicting Sellers as anything other than a horrible, selfish and deeply insecure man more at home in the skin of the characters he played with such gusto than in his own, essentially miserable, self-pitying life. He is shown to be mindlessly cruel towards his first wife, Anne (Emily Watson), and their two children; fixated by his pushy mother (Miriam Margolyes), a true Mrs Worthington; and meeting his match in his second, much younger wife, the actress Britt Ekland, zestily played by Charlize Theron.

Stephen Hopkins, best known for his work on the television series 24, allows his film to wallow in hyperactive excess at times, but it exerts a consistent fascination in its adept recreation of key Sellers scenes from his best-known films and in his running battle of egos with Blake Edwards, director of the Pink Panther series, who is played with wicked aplomb by John Lithgow.

Only Stanley Tucci's uncertain portrayal of Stanley Kubrick jars in a fine cast headed by Rush's virtuoso performance, which ought to have been rewarded by the Cannes jury.

The jury also passed over 2046, the long-anticipated film by the Chinese director Wong Kar Wai, which, despite three years in gestation, finally arrived at Cannes last Thursday night, too late for its first two scheduled screenings, and as what was widely regarded as a work in progress. We will return to 2046 when Wong eventually delivers his final cut of the film, which may be much later this year.

Another Chinese director, Zhang Yimou, delivered a highlight of the festival with House Of Flying Daggers, which was shown out of competition. Inevitably prompting comparisons with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Zhang's deliriously staged melodrama is set in 859 as the Tang dynasty is in decline and the authorities seek out the guerrilla army known as the House of Flying Daggers.

Time and again during the film the audience broke in to loud applause, as Zhang piled on a succession of impeccably choreographed musical and action set pieces, although the film loses some of this exhilarating momentum in its later stages, when it becomes preoccupied with a slender and none-too-original treatment of that movie staple the romantic triangle.

Apart from Fahrenheit 9/11 the biggest talking point was a no-budget British two-hander, 9 Songs, which was shown three times in market cinemas too small to accommodate most of the panting journalists and potential distributors who begged to be let in.

As one of those who managed togain a seat I can report that 9 Songs is as sexually graphic as it has been described. It is an adventurous and risky departure for one of Britain's most productive and accomplished film-makers, Michael Winterbottom, who moves between genres with a skill and ambition rare among his contemporaries.

This is his third film in 15 months, following the superb Afghan refugee drama In This World and the futuristic thriller Code 46, which has yet to be released, and he has already started shooting his new movie, Goal!, which is set in a Premiership football club.

There are nine songs in 9 Songs, the first performed by Black Rebel Motorcycle Club at the Brixton Academy, in London, the meeting place for a young Englishman and a younger American woman who become involved in a passionate sexual relationship. Subsequent concert performances - featuring, among others, The Dandy Warhols, Primal Scream, Super Furry Animals, Franz Ferdinand and Michael Nyman - are intercut with no-holds-barred footage of the lovers, with the man's reflections on the affair while he is on a research project in the Antarctic.

Winterbottom throws out the conventions of narrative cinema to concentrate on those elements very rarely depicted with any candour in films made outside the pornography industry: what usually happens off screen when characters get deeply sexually involved with each other. There are close-ups of penetration, cunnilingus, fellatio and ejaculation as the two actors gamely immerse themselves in the heat and passion of the characters they portray.

Taking the role of the woman is an inexperienced actress using the pseudonym Margo Stilley to protect her identity - although her real name was eagerly exposed by sections of the British media - and the man is played by Kieran O'Brien, who had a recurring role as Mark Fitzgerald, the son of Robbie Coltrane's character in Cracker, and was also cast by Winterbottom in 24 Hour Party People and Goal!

The dialogue is minimal in this provocative film, which is more intent in dwelling on the intimacy of a sexual relationship in all its detail. Winterbottom transcends the potential pitfalls of pornography because of the natural ease with which this intimacy is expressed - and because he places the viewer in the uncomfortable role of voyeur.

His bold and challenging film is certain to encounter censorship problems all over the world. It has been acquired by Tartan Films for distribution in the UK and Ireland, although even a provisional release date has yet to be set in either country. There is no doubt that 9 Songs - and Fahrenheit 9/11 - will continue to engender masses of debate in the months to come. Not for the first time, the controversy started at Cannes, which was comfortably back on form this year.