With massive billboards everywhere along the Cannes seafront trumpeting everything from Bad Boys II to The Matrix Reloaded, Tomb Raider II to Charlie’s Angels II, The Italian Job to Terminator 3, one could be forgiven for thinking that Cannes is all about summer sequels. But while the Hollywood studios spend big here to launch their movies international, one of the joys of Cannes is uncovering those movies that don’t come equipped with a multi-million promotional budget but yet still hope to make a splash. A case in point being Campbell Scott’s off-center directorial effort Off The Map which opened Critic’s Week. Set in New Mexico in the 1970s, this small-scale character piece, based on a play by Joan Ackermann, starred Joan Allen and Sam Elliot as a married couple struggling to bring up their daughter in the middle of nowhere. Both actors do fine work, but it was the sensational performance of 13-year-old unknown Valentina de Angelis as their plucky offspring that really scored, the film deflating every time she was off screen. Then there was Shari Springer Berman’s and Robert Pulcini’s American Splendour, previously a hit at Sundance, which played here in the Un Certain Regard section. This sad, poignant, beguiling but ultimately very moving biopic told the story of Harvey Pekar (Paul Giamatti), a morose file clerk from Cleveland who took to chronicling his mundane, downbeat existence in a self-published comic called American Splendour, and even made it as a regular on the Letterman show for a while. Although Giamatti, who gives the performance of his career thus far, couldn’t make it to Cannes to promote the film, the real Harvey Pekar did, along with his wife Joyce who’s played onscreen by Hope Davis.

Also in Un Certain Regard was Young Adam starring Ewan McGregor, Tilda Swinton, Peter Mullan and Emily Mortimer. Based on a forgotten novel by Beat novelist Alexander Trocchi and set on and around the barges and canals of Glasgow, Scotland in the 1950s, it’s an existential mood piece with McGregor as an amoral womaniser and would-be writer, drifting by on a barge owned by husband and wife Mullan and Swinton whose passionless marriage he prises apart. Featuring a fractured narrative structure and numerous vigorous sex scenes, including truly one disturbing sequence involving custard and ketchup, this sophmore effort from Scottish writer-director David McKenzie didn’t completely convince, but, nevertheless, revealed him as one of British cinema’s brightest prospects, and McGregor’s continuing willingness to exhibit his manhood on screen. Another film dealing with sex was The Mother which screened in the Director’s Fortnight. Written by Hanif Kureishi and directed by Roger Michell (Notting Hill, Changing Lanes), The Mother told the story of an older woman who begins an affair with her daughter’s young handyman lover (Daniel Craig) after the death of her husband and was anchored by a wonderfully sympathetic performance from British TV actress Anne Reid.

In main competition was Turkish entry Uzak, which revolved around the lives of Mahmut (Muzaffer Ozdemir), a divorced photographer living alone in Istanbul, and his distant relative Yusuf (Mehmet Emin Toprak) who comes to stay with him having been laid off at his factory job in the country and who arrives in the city looking for a job on a ship. Written, directed,
photographed and edited by the very talented Nuri Bilge Ceylan, it was beautifully composed and exquisitely observed study of loneliness deserving of some recognition come the prize giving next Sunday.

On the party front, Saturday night saw a very elegant and civilised affair thrown by HBO to celebrate its films here, American Splendour and Gus Van Sant’s competition entry Elephant, as well as their in-production The Life And Death of Peter Sellers. Among the guests were Sellers’ actors Geoffrey Rush, Emily Watson, and Stephen Fry, Andie MacDowell, New Line chief Robert Shaye, Van Sant, Harvey Pekar and his wife Joyce, and My Big Fat Greek Wedding producer Paul Brooks. Later it was off to the MTV/T3 party which took place a coach-ride outside Cannes in Pierre Cardin’s Palais Bulles, a fantastical space-ship style villa which was decked out like a set from Terminator 3. Among the guests were T3 stars Kristanna Loken, Claire Danes and Nick Stahl, director Jonathan Mostow, Jerry Hall, Pierre Cardin and Matrix visual effects designer John Gaeta, as well as Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose appearance outside the Carlton hotel on Friday had almost brought the seafront to a halt, and who was seen happily pressing the flesh of any hand offered to him.

More Cannes Coverage:
Day Two:
The biggest splash was made by The Matrix Reloaded which screened on Thursday night on the back of some mixed stateside reviews.
Day One:
The 56th Cannes Film Festival opened on Wednesday with Fanfan Le Tulipe, an ever-so-disappointing period piece starring Vincent Perez and Penelope Cruz.