The word "festival" is supposed to conjure up joy, lightness, insouciance, merriment, n'est-ce pas? That's the theory, but for cinephiles the Cannes film festival is an ambivalent affair. For them, the annual 12 days on the Croisette are at once a delight and a morbidly obsessive binge, with a dash of boot camp thrown in. Oh, we'll rave wild-eyed about the masterpieces but you can also expect us to moan like ashen-eyed spectres about the four- or five-film-a-day regime, and the way the viewing schedule we so intricately worked out in advance suddenly fell to pieces when we failed to notice that this year's hot bet for Palme d'Or (Winter Sleep by Turkish master Nuri Bilge Ceylan) is a cool three-and-a-quarter hours long.
You always hear it said that we are here to celebrate the seventh art at its loftiest and headiest peak. Then how does one explain the festival opening with a scrap of tawdry tinsel like Grace of Monaco? I can't remember an opening film more roundly, or more justly, savaged by the critics: one French paper punned, "De Grâce!" ("Have Pity!").
The film is set after Grace Kelly stopped being Grace Kelly the movie star and became Her Serene Highness Princess Grace of Monaco, Duchess of Valentinois and Earthly Goddess of Ineffable Fragrance. The year is 1961, and Monaco is facing a blockade from France, which threatens to raid its coffers to finance the war in Algeria. Grace (Nicole Kidman) is opposed to such bullying tactics ("Colonalism," she declares, "is so 19th century"), squares up to nasty Charles de Gaulle and saves the day by making a speech about the power of love, therefore ensuring the survival of Europe's pluckiest little tax haven.
Never mind that Kidman (46) is somewhat mature to play Grace, aged 32 when the film was set, and never mind that she only really resembles her when it comes to the immaculately silky hair. Personally, I'd be happy to see Bill Nighy play the princess, if his performance were convincing. But it's been a while since we saw any sort of real performance from Kidman, whose features seem to have been embalmed in an eerily immobile L'Oréal-ad placidity. Kidman's Grace is a combination of debutante breathiness and a wide-eyed ingenue gaze, as if she's constantly walking in on a palace orgy just out of shot. It doesn't help that the camera has a bizarre penchant for shooting her face in extreme close-up, like a space probe searching for signs of life on a desolate planet.
Directed by Olivier Dahan, this tedious piece of gilded snobbery has been denounced by Monaco's royal family as a "farce" on the strength of the trailer alone; once the fuss has blown over about what a lousy film it is, Grace of Monaco will mainly be remembered as the film that made the Monegasques blow a monegasket.
As for the competition proper, so far it's looking lively. Whenever you hear of a director's "dream project", you tremble slightly, but given that Mike Leigh's dream project, a film about the painter Turner, is a 19th-century story, and that period did him well in Topsy-Turvy, there was every chance that Mr Turner might be rather fine. It's better than that – this is an extraordinary film, perhaps closer to big Victorian social canvases like Frith's The Derby Day than to Turner's own work. It's a huge tableau that offers an expansive sweep but also, in characteristic Leigh style, homes in on the fine details and eccentricities of society and character.
Structured as an episodic overview of the last 25 years of Turner's life, the film gives us the public man – exuberantly holding court at a Royal Academy vernissage – as well as the very private one. The intimate Turner engages with the various women in his life, shows filial tenderness for his elderly barber father (a very impressive Paul Jesson) and, in one very touching scene, waxes tearful as he sings Purcell's Dido's Lament in an off-key strangulated bray. As Turner, Timothy Spall is magnificent: it's a huge, energetically physical performance, whether he's holding forth grandiloquently or issuing a strange guttural hoot that is the character's taciturn trademark, something between Chewbacca and a rutting turkey cock.
Mr Turner will further fuel the tendency to refer to Mike Leigh's work as Dickensian, and justly so – in scope and density it feels like a deconstructed Victorian novel, the proverbial loose baggy monster. It's a terrific ensemble piece, with a magnificently irate Ruth Sheen among Leigh regulars, and less-known names excelling, such as Marion Bailey, as Turner's final consort, and Joshua McGuire, priceless as a foppish John Ruskin. The film also features some succulent period language, such as the imprecation: "Brook your ire, sir!" The film is so well liked here that someone could do a roaring trade in T-shirts: MR TURNER SAYS: BROOK YOUR IRE.
Early days yet but Mr Turner is clearly a frontrunner for the Palme d'Or. So is Timbuktu, by Mauritanian-born Abderrahmane Sissako. This year looks set to be a very current affairs Cannes, with major documentaries in the programme about events in Libya and Ukraine. Timbuktu may be fictional but it couldn't be more real and urgent: it dramatises the effects of Islamisation in Mali, with ordinary people's lives being fundamentally transformed by squads of "police Islamique" surveying every aspect of their conduct. The changes introduced start with the seemingly trivial (men forced to wear socks), and even afford some comic moments: boys banned from playing football instead play matches with an imaginary ball. But this humour only offsets the extremity: a couple buried up to the necks and stoned; a woman lashed for singing but continuing to chant even while she takes the strokes. It's a mightily defiant film, all the more powerful because Sissako isn't issuing a tract: he uses grace, lyricism, visual imagination and sweetly dark irony to get his message across. It's a very authoritative statement.
Also in competition is the latest from Canadian auteur Atom Egoyan, The Captive. Expect this film to put some backs up (it took some boos at the press screening) because Egoyan has made a teasing and playful puzzler out of something horrifying: a case of child abduction and imprisonment with grim echoes of the Fritzl case. Round this ghastly core, Egoyan spins a fragmented detective drama, in which Rosario Dawson plays a paedophile-busting cop, and Ryan Reynolds is the father of the missing girl. It could be accused of trivialising the unthinkable, but this genre thriller with an arthouse twist is Egoyan's strongest in a while.
There's another tricksy crime offering in The Blue Room, from actor-director Mathieu Amalric. Cannes just isn't Cannes unless you've seen one – or five – films starring the hardest-working man in French cinema. This year Amalric is wearing his director's hat, as well as his usual characteristic look of a bewildered veal calf, as the lead in his own thriller. Based on a Georges Simenon story, The Blue Room is a twist on classic French crime material, a tale of small-town infidelity, guilt and death – although we don't find out until an hour in exactly what the case is that Amalric's small-town adulterer is implicated in. Brilliantly conceived as a narrative Rubik's Cube, this arty and erotic modernist thriller is utterly seductive – and, you can bet, the most French film we'll see here this year.
In the opening films of festival sidebar sections, programmers seem to be doing their best to offset last year's complaints that there weren't enough women directors in the programme. Directors' Fortnight opened with Girlhood (Bande de Filles), by up-and-coming auteur Céline Sciamma, a specialist in the sexual and social travails of young Frenchwomen. This one is about an African teenager who joins a band of tough-as-nails jeunes filles: there are some brutal girl-on-girl rumbles but the gang also goes in for more innocent pleasures like dressing up in shoplifted frocks and lip-syncing to Rihanna. The film's a little flat dramatically but the young non-professional cast are electric: keep an eye on its charismatic lead, Karidja Touré.
And the official Un Certain Regard sidebar kicked off with Party Girl, directed by three unknowns, two of them women – Marie Amachoukeli, Claire Burger and Samuel Theis. This exercise in bustling, docu-style realism is about Angélique Litzenburger, a 60-year-old club hostess who decides to build bridges with her family and to give marriage a whirl – only to find that the lure of late nights, sullen single men and overpriced ersatz champagne is hard to resist. Viewed in isolation, Party Girl seems a routine piece of French lowlife realism in the Abdellatif Kechiche vein, with some lively screen presences but little new to reveal. Then you realise that Litzenburger is playing herself, that she's the mother of co-director Theis, and that Angélique's family members are also playing themselves – at which point the film takes on the colours of a daring and fascinating existential project, or therapeutic exercise.
It'll be a lively fest for Brit-spotters: apart from Leigh and Ken Loach in competition, there's a comeback film in store from John Boorman, and offerings from Matthew Warchus and editor turned director Andrew Hulme. Directors' Fortnight has already unveiled Catch Me Daddy by newcomer Daniel Wolfe. It's another ripped-from-today's-headlines story: in Yorkshire a young Muslim girl (Sameena Ahmed) goes on the run and is pursued by her brother and his posse. It's clear that an honour killing is in the offing, and that's the nitty-gritty that the film moves towards in its troubling finale. It's a slightly bumpy ride getting there, shifting gears between pursuit thriller, hard-times realism and lyrical film poem à la Lynne Ramsay. But it's an intriguingly intense debut.
No-show of the week
Alas, poor Grace – rarely was such an insipid film so controversial, though not among the critics, who have been pretty much in agreement about its awfulness. The real row was between the film's US distributor Harvey Weinstein and director Olivier Dahan over the cut. It was Dahan's cut that screened here, and good luck to Mr W if he thinks he knows how to improve it. Weinstein didn't show up for the opening night, instead sending a communiqué explaining that he was detained visiting a Syrian refugee camp, with writer Neil Gaiman, of all people. This must be one of the best festival no-show excuses ever. Last year Ryan Gosling didn't make it here for Only God Forgives because he was busy directing this year's Cannes entry Lost River. And Jean-Luc Godard, a few years ago, sent a scrawled fax to say that he was detained in Venice by "problems of a Greek nature" (which everyone took to mean a crash in his personal economy).
But for sheer insouciant absenteeism, you can't beat Gérard Depardieu, who failed to turn up at the Venice Film festival to launch Potiche, his 2010 reunion with Catherine Deneuve. The reason? A more pressing engagement at another festival in Armenia.
Tanks for the testosterone
The stars of action pic The Expendables 3 – among them Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mel Gibson, Sylvester Stallone, Harrison Ford and Antonio Banderas – are expected to proceed down the Croisette today in two Soviet-era tanks. Precautions, it seems, have been taken; the treads have been replaced with rubber tyres so as not to mince up the pavement, and the gun turrets removed. The assembled hard men might have a tough task; they'll be lucky if they can actually get anywhere along the Croisette on a Sunday, when the streets are filled with locals walking microscopic lapdogs on super-long leads.
My lips are sealed, but…
In addition to elbowing his way into screenings, yours truly is serving on the jury for the Critics' Week Grand Prix. The president is Andrea Arnold, who made her own Cannes debut in that section in 1998 with her short Milk, before graduating to the red carpet with 2006's Red Road. Jurist's omertà forbids me from telling you about the films, which in any case we haven't seen: but the themes include sexually conflicted Italian teens, American kids suffering strange visions, and a Danish woman with paranormal body hair issues. It'll be a bracing week.
