AT Cannes - as in Robert Altman's film of The Player - people describe movies to each other in the shorthand of amalgamated references. Consequently, recommending I Went Down to colleagues at Cannes, I have been describing it as "the Coen brothers meet Roddy Doyle". And there is much to recommend about I Went Down, which had its world premiere in the Cannes market this week and which is going down very well indeed.
The film marks a potent cinema debut for its screenwriter, the young Irish playwright, Conor McPherson, and it is an assured second cinema feature for director Paddy Breathnach after the underestimated Ailsa. Worlds removed from that moodily atmospheric chamber-piece, I Went Down is an exuberant, blackly humorous road movie, which follows the misadventures of two inept minor Dublin convicts who find within themselves the resources to prove their mettle under pressure.
The younger of the pair is the unfortunate Git Hynes (played by Peter McDonald) who, it transpires, was innocent of the crime of which he was convicted. His girlfriend leaves him while he is in prison and on his release he finds himself owing a debt to a Dublin gangster, Tom French (Tony Doyle). French sends Git down to Cork in search of a criminal associate, Frank Grogan (Peter Caffrey) and arranges for Git to be accompanied by the coiffed Bunny Kelly (Brendan Gleeson) who reads cowboy novels along the way.
The snowballing complications which ensue make for boisterous, sharply scripted and expletive-littered comedy with a truly dark edge and unpredictable twists and turns. Although the movie takes a while to find its true pace, it soon settles into a driving rhythm, smoothly shifting into overdrive for its cleverly-plotted extended finale.
The actors feast on McPherson's sharp dialogue with Brendan Gleeson, the Irish Depardieu, on scintillating form in a long-overdue big-screen leading role, and newcomer Peter McDonald very impressive as the aptly named but likeable Git. Peter Caffrey, Tony Doyle and Donal O'Kelly all shine in their supporting roles.
The movie is assembled in a striking visual style, with great credit due to lighting cameraman Cian de Buitlear and film editor Emer Reynolds, and the eclectic soundtrack runs from Sergio Mendes to the High Llamas, to Christie Hennessy.
The music in The Last Bus Home, the other Irish feature to have its world premiere in Cannes during the week, harks back to the angry self-righteousness of punk rock. Written and directed by Johnny Gogan, the movie opens on the day in 1979 when the Pope came to Dublin and closes 13 years later on the day when Ireland decriminalised homo-sexuality for consenting adult males.
For much of its duration, the film concentrates on the problems of a self- destructive punk rock band in Dublin, gradually shifting the emphasis on to the band's young gay drummer and his traumas in coming out. That narrative transition is rendered all the more awkward by an overload of melodrama in the later stages, although John Cronin's expressive performance as the gay drummer helps, as does Annie Ryan's as his sympathetic ally, the band's firmly independent manager. Brian F. O'Byrne is left with an underdeveloped role - as the band's aggressive and homophobic lead singer - until the movie's coda.
As it ponders why bands put so much work into getting off the ground only to throw it all away, the film directly asks whether they are afraid of success. However, as different as the period and the music are any movie about a struggling Duhlin band has a very hard act to follow in The Commitments, and The Last Bus Home admittedly made on a substantially smaller budget tails well short of that achievement.
Meanwhile, in the official competition at Cannes, Michael Winterbottom's Welcome To Sarajevo stands out from all the other entrants in the first six days of the festival. As the credits roll and Van Morrison's Young Lovers Do soars on the soundtrack, the film opens on a family's joyous wedding preparations - a sequence which ends abruptly when the mother is shot dead on the street by a sniper. The time is 1992, the beginning of the siege of Sarajevo.
As in so many movies set in war zones, the events are viewed through the eyes of a reporter, in this case a British television reporter played by an effectively understated Stephen Dillane. His character is based on the ITN correspondent, Michael Nicholson, whose book, Nataslza's Story, chronicling his impulsive decision to smuggle home and adopt an orphan abandoned by her mother, drives the screenplay by Frank Cottrell Boyce.
Michael Winterbottom's film persuasively deals with the working conditions of the international war correspondents, their responsibility to objectivity, their response when they themselves become the story, and their frustration at being shoved off the headlines by ephemeral stories about, for example, the British royal family. While its depictions of the sheer senselessness of random violence and destruction are startling and often powerful, the film's political point of view is certain to be controversial in the months ahead.
Ken Loach's incisive, socially conscious dramas, and the aforementioned Winterbottom's remarkable television series of Roddy Doyle's Family are evoked by Nil By Mouth, the first feature directed by Gary Oldman, who appears peripherally in the film. Shot in a murky lighting style and shot through with a rarely relieved intensity that becomes almost unendurable, this patently sincere and concerned drama is set among mostly unemployed, inter-related characters in present-day South London.
The film's dramatic centre is Raymond (Ray Winstone), a volatile middle-aged man whose entire life revolves around drinking, drug-taking, scams and strip clubs. His despairing wife (Kathy Burke), pregnant with their second child, is the victim of his shocking domestic violence, while her younger brother (Charlie Creed-Miles) spends all his waking hours desperately devising ways to support his drug addiction.
This raw, grim drama is driven more by character than by incident and Oldman elicits vivid, naturalistic performances from a fine cast that also notably includes Laila Morse, Edna Dore and Jamie Forman, with Ray Winstone being outstanding. With a closing dedication in memory of his father, the film is clearly a deeply personal project for Oldman and while he covers familiar ground with his screenplay, the acute social crises it raises have not gone away.
The other actor making his directing debut in the Cannes competition, Johnny Depp, suffered a critical savaging for his movie, The Brave, in which he plays Raphael, an alcoholic Native-American ex-convict hoping to finance a new life for his impoverished wife and two young children by volunteering to appear in a snuff movie in which he will be tortured to death. In the seven days he has to live, he hopes to earn the love band admiration of his family and friends.
The early scenes in which Raphael meets with the men who will pay for his life are chilling and arresting, not least because they are played with such a disturbing matter-of-factness by Marlon Brando and Marshall Bell. While The Brave mostly holds the attention and is accompanied by a stirring Iggy Pop score, it squanders its strong dramatic premise in a naive and disjointed screenplay. If turns quite ludicrous when Raphael quite implausibly constructs an elaborate fairground on the rubbish dump where he and his family live.
However, the inadequacies of Depp's movie paled in comparison with those of the pretentious and inane new Wim Wenders film, The End of Violence, which, inexplicably, was chosen to be shown after the festival's 50th anniversary celebrations on the Palais stage at Cannes on Sunday night. This meandering yarn follows two turgid plotlines to the point where they intersect utterly unconvincingly.
One strand features Bill Pullman as a fabulously wealthy Hollywood producer who has made his fortune out of selling mindless violence on the screen; the other has Gabriel Byrne as a brilliant computer scientist developing a massive top-secret public surveillance operation inside the Griffith Park Observatory.
The End of Violence is a good-looking but self-important film which is as preposterous as it is snail-paced and cluttered with irrelevant digressions. It is the first American movie from Wenders since the marvellous Paris, Texas, which most deservedly won him the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1984, but I will be astonished if he wins it again this year.
