Barely four days into the 58th Cannes Film Festival, cinematic gem-hunters have already discovered much to gloat over although none of the films unveiled so far have evoked unqualified praise.
Canadian auteur Atom Egoyan's rare studio film cast in the mould of whodunit,
Where the
Truth Lies, American filmmaker Gus Van Sant's defiantly uncompromising portrait of an angst-ridden musician,
Last Days, and Woody Allen's darkly sly out-of-Competition film,
Match Point, have whipped up excitement all around.
Interestingly, all the above-mentioned films probe the dark side of the human mind without the slightest semblance of apology, Woody Allen's Match Point especially so. Set entirely in London - unusual for filmmaker who rarely moves out of Manhattan for his films - his latest work is about social climber who finds a rich godfather on marrying the latter's daughter. But then he goes and commits the mistake of beginning an affair with a struggling but smouldering American actress.
The mistress declares that she is pregnant even as his wife makes heavy weather of conceiving her first child. All hell breaks loose. The cosy life that the man has meticulously built is in danger of falling apart. So he makes another mistake. He kills the mistress. But that folly turns out to be a perfect murder and he goes scot-free.
Allen's typically tricky premise here is that man has no control on his life and everything, yes everything, is driven by luck. So if you are lucky you can get away with murder. A dangerous message all right but the humour that the writer-director injects into the tale saves Match Point from teetering over the edge.
The tennis analogy in Match Point is all too obvious - a service can hit the top of the net and either move forward or knocked back into the server's court. If it topples over to the other side, you win. If it doesn't, you lose. We know that, but the witty, even devious and dodgy manner in which Woody Allen states the obvious makes Match Point a film that, at a level, provokes thought.
In the Competition with his second successive film, Gus Van Sant delivers a characteristically slow, meditative, unadorned look back at the 1994 suicide of Kurt Cobain, leader of the grunge group Nirvana. His last film, Elephant, inspired by the real-life Columbine shootout, bagged the Palme d'Or in 2003.
Is Last Days in the same league as Elephant? It is probably better. Van Sant appears to have perfected his minimalist storytelling style where the linear and the episodic co-exist in remarkable harmony. But it would be too much to expect the jury to make it two-in-three years for Van Sant especially when the rest of the field is exceptionally strong.
One of the Competition films that has made a strong impression is Where the Truth Lies, Egoyan's adaptation of a novel about a 1960s murder of a luxury hotel waitress in the room of a popular showbiz duo. Many years later, a woman journalist wants to unravel the truth behind what exactly happened that night. The search is fraught with heartburns and surprise revelations even as the girl plays mental games with the two ageing men, played with remarkable felicity by Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth.
Where the Truth Lies is as dark as any Egoyan film one has seen, but it does let in a few, stray moments. They lighten the burden of the moral trauma that the key players face in this journey into a dark secret of the past. It is not vintage Egoyan but it works remarkably well as a whole.
The Cannes Competition has only just got underway and it has already thrown up films that are as intriguing as they are exciting. Will the fare spread out for the week ahead sustain the momentum? There is reason to believe that it will.