Cannes: Day Three continued

Plus a report on 'Keane', a powerful and disturbing new film directed by Lodge Kerrigan and starring Damian Lewis.

May 13 2005

Into its third day, Cannes continues in steadfastly unremarkable fashion, with nothing remotely resembling a great film in sight, let alone any masterpieces.

A number of movies have tried this writer's patience enough to provoke a walk-out: the Argentinian 'Nordeste', for example, was a perfectly professional look at the issue of illegal child adoption (with Carole Bouquet proving herself extremely fluent in Spanish as a Frenchwoman in search of a baby), but also entirely predictable and dull, while 'Be With Me', by Singapore's Erik Khoo, started in promisingly elliptical and enigmatic fashion before sliding fatally into a far more conventional and saccharine tale of longing, loss and disappointment.

These films played, respectively, in the Un Certain Regard strand and the Directors' Fortnight. Fortunately the main competition was more satisfying.

Atom Egoyan's 'Where the Truth Lies' is certainly a huge improvement on 'Ararat' (see Dave Calhoun's review here) but it's also his most mainstream offering to date, whereas Gus Van Sant's 'Last Days' is really rather radical.

It's not an easy film, and is unlikely to appeal to Nirvana fans, even though it's very clearly inspired by the death of Kurt Cobain.

But it's an intriguing, brave and sporadically brillant movie all the same, following Michael Pitt's stoned wreck of a musician around a country house and its gardens to witty, resonant and compelling effect.

Though the cinematography is beautiful and the use of sound and music extraordinarily effective, it's Pitt's performance as the shambling, mumbling deadhead that gives the film its coherence: though essentially a one-note role, he invests it with marvellous nuances and a strange grace that is at times balletic.

If there's any justice, he'll surely be a contender for the Best Actor prize.

The same would probably hold true for Damian Lewis, the lead in Lodge Kerrigan's 'Keane', were the film in competition rather than in the Directors' Fortnight.

Lewis is on screen throughout, often with only extras or passers-by for company, as a man haunted to the point of near-insanity by the abduction of his six-year-old daughter some months back.

Most of the time, Keane simply wanders the city, stopping strangers to ask, somewhat over-optimistically, if they've seen the child, or blaming himself for her disappearance.

Kerrigan shoots these dark nights of the soul raw and close-up, so that the film sometimes approaches the intensity and integrity of the Dardenne Brothers' films; he also allows enough room for ambiguity for us to remain uncertain about the precise nature of Keane's psychosis.

It's a tough movie, but powerful and compassionate; indeed, it's probably the best movie I've seen in Cannes so far.

For more Cannes stories, click here

• 
•