Five years ago the adventurous Cairo-born, Canadian-raised filmmaker, Atom Egoyan, made his debut in competition at Cannes with the rich and fascinating exploration of disparate troubled characters in Ex- otica, and received the International Critics' Prize. In 1997 he was back in Cannes with his first literary adaptation, The Sweet Hereafter, a brooding, deeply moving picture of a small town traumatised by the consequences of a school bus crash, and it received the runner-up prize, the Grand Prix du Jury.
Egoyan returned to Cannes for last Monday night's world premiere of his ninth feature film, Felicia's Journey, a thoughtful, intensely atmospheric work which surely places him as a prime contender for the festival's major prize, the Palme d'Or, at next Sunday's closing ceremony.
Adapted by Egoyan himself from the 1994 novel by William Trevor, Felicia's Journey features a remarkably expressive central performance from the young Irish actress, Elaine Cassidy, as the eponymous Felicia, a naive 17year-old from Co Cork who succumbs to the charms of her sweet-talking boyfriend, Johnny Lysaght (Peter McDonald from I Went Down) and becomes pregnant after he leaves to work in England.
Rebuffed by her own widower father (Gerard McSorley) and by Johnny's cold, withdrawn mother (Brid Brennan), Felicia journeys to Birmingham in the hope of finding Johnny. Instead she catches the attention of Joseph Ambrose Hilditch (Bob Hoskins), an ostensibly mild-mannered, middle-aged bachelor who is meticulous about his work as the catering supervisor at an industrial firm.
In his private life, however, Hilditch is just as fastidious at preying on vulnerable young women and murdering them.
Hilditch is utterly fixated on his late mother (played by Egoyan's actress wife, Arsinee Khanjian), a television chef who once rivalled Fanny Craddock for popularity, and he prepares each of his evening meals exactly to her recipes, watching videotapes of her programmes as he cooks. His other videos are furtively filmed tapes of his victims, the latest of which he labels "Irish Eyes" after first meeting Felicia.
Deftly and effectively employing a non-linear structure which cuts seamlessly between past and present as it outlines the personal histories of the two principal characters and draws them together, Egoyan's film creates and sustains an eerie, chilling mood of foreboding and fear as the wily predator gains the trust of the gullible innocent that is Felicia.
One of Egoyan's most compelling reflections on his recurring theme of marginalised characters, Felicia's Journey gains incalculably from the subtle portrayals he elicits from his two leading players. In his finest performance since Mona Lisa - which won him the best actor award at Cannes - Bob Hoskins is perfectly understated as he reveals the Jekyll and Hyde personality of Hilditch, and Elaine Cassidy, who is from Wicklow, is wonderfully natural as Felicia, despite the fact that this is only her second leading role in a feature film, after The Sun, The Moon and The Stars.
The new Irish feature, Accelerator, which was launched with several screenings in the market at Cannes, is a showcase for further emerging Irish talent, both before and behind the camera. Directed with energy to burn by Vinny Murphy, Accelerator deals with a frenetic car chase from Belfast to Dublin involving five male drivers and their female companions, travelling in five stolen cars, and it's triggered by the long-time rivalry between two of the drivers who are from opposite sides of the Border.
Murphy, who also wrote the screenplay with Mark Stewart, succinctly establishes the mostly nihilistic young protagonists before cutting to the chase and pumping up the throttle - and the pulsating techno score by Adrian Uttley (from Portishead) and David Holmes.
The race is paved with incident, involving brushes with sectarianism, the Garda, and a cyclist who's in the wrong place at the wrong time - along with an unexpectedly budding romance and some sharp repartee. There are only so many ways to shoot such an extended car chase from within and without the vehicles, and lighting cameraman Seamus Deasy copes dextrously within these confines. In a movie replete with nods to other films (most explicitly to Bonnie and Clyde), the impressive young cast notably includes Mark Dunne, Aisling O'Neill, Gavin Kelty and the Scottish actor, Stuart Sinclair Blyth.
The young English actress, Keeley Hawes, who attracted attention recently as the young Diana Dors in an ITV mini-series, brings a beguiling freshness to the pivotal role in The Last September, Deborah Warner's confident crossover from theatre into cinema, which was shown as the closing film at last month's Dublin Film Festival but subject to a press embargo because the print had not been finally graded then. Shown in the Directors' Fortnight section at Cannes on Sunday night, the film was greeted with sustained, enthusiastic applause.
Elegantly adapted by John Banville from Elizabeth Bowen's novel, The Last September is set in 1920 and acutely observes the dying days of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy. Keeley Hawes plays the free-spirited Lois Farquar who lives on the Co Cork estate of her uncle (Michael Gambon) and his wife (Maggie Smith). As local nationalists up the ante in their conflict with the Black and Tans, the estate is visited by a couple (Lambert Wilson and Jane Birkin) who are down on their luck, and by a London socialite (Fiona Shaw), a former lover of the Wilson character.
The parallel themes of the nationalist struggle for independence and young Lucy's yearnings for freedom eventually merge in an awkward contrivance through which Lucy becomes sexually involved with a former childhood friend who is now an IRA gunman (Gary Lydon). The film is altogether more persuasive in its depiction of the end of an indolent era and the self-delusions of the inwardly insecure characters.
Shot in a series of precise compositions by the Polish cinematographer, Slawomir Idziak, this assured and involving study of a collective state of mind features Maggie Smith on sparkling, purse-lipped, acerbic form and Fiona Shaw in a warm and radiant performance which significantly enhances the experience.
Set eight years earlier, in 1912, Terence Rattigan's factually based play, The Winslow Boy might seem to be an unlikely subject for writer-director David Mamet, who eschews expletives for once in this respectful adaptation of a compelling moral drama, first filmed in 1948 from a screenplay by Rattigan himself. Showing in the Un Certain Regard sidebar at Cannes, Mamet's film firmly taps into the contemporary resonances of the play's theme.
Nigel Hawthorne is aptly authoritative as the London paterfamilias who obstinately challenges the Lords of the Admirality in his dogged quest to clear his 14-year-old naval cadet son of the charge that he stole a five-shilling postal order. The solid cast notably includes Jeremy Northam as the astute attorney who takes on the case, and the impeccable costumes are the work of the accomplished Irish designer, Consolata Boyle.
Inevitably, there have been some disappointments, too, as the 52nd Cannes Film Festival reached the halfway point yesterday. Among these has been Pola X, the much-anticipated fourth feature from the now 39-year-old enfant terrible of French cinema, Leos Carax, and his first since the ambitious - and notoriously profligate - Les Amants du Pont Neuf eight years ago.
Pola X is a visually striking and initially intriguing but ultimately tortuous film of a tortured artist, a novelist played by Guillaume Depardieu, who, unconvincingly, comes to the realisation that to achieve the truth in his work, he must put his bourgeois existence behind him and suffer for his art. Neither the all-too-brief presence of Catherine Deneuve nor an extended stylised sequence of graphic sex can disguise its essential shallowness.
Even grimmer and bleaker in its outlook, Lynne Ramsay's first feature, Ratcatcher, showing in Un Certain Regard, is similarly marked by its director's undeniable visual flair. Yet, despite attracting some passionate admirers at Cannes, Ratcatcher is too self-consciously indebted to the much superior socialist cinema of Ken Loach and too inconsequential in its plotting as a memory film to achieve any lingering effect. Nevertheless, there is enough evidence of her vivid cinematic sense to hold out promise for her future work.
A dispassionately observed and clearly well-intentioned picture of an impoverished Glasgow family at the time of a protracted refuse collection strike, Ratcatcher centres on the dreams and sexual awakening of a 12-year-old (William Eadie) who's riddled with guilt over his role in the horseplay that led to another boy's drowning. Its period setting is so ill-defined that it took a look of the press book to establish that it's set in the mid-1970s. A simple caption would help audiences without recourse to such resouces.
Michael Dwyer's next Cannes report will appear on Friday's Vision page.
