Cannes 2010: Biutiful, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

It's late at night on the final Sunday of Cannes, just after the closing night ceremony, and I have to say that I was rather flabbergasted by the selection of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives for the Palme D'Or. I really wanted to like this film but I was, frankly, bored and let down. My first introduction to Apitchatpong Weerasethakul was 2000's Mysterious Object At Noon, which was nonsensical but oddly promising – a bit like Kevin Smith's Clerks but without the jokes.

I must confess, though, that I do not understand the praise this new film has been getting. It makes no sense, it is not particularly funny or charming. Odd things happen, but they are boring and badly acted. As far as I can tell, a man named Uncle Boonmee is dying, and, well, that's that; his dead ex-wife turns up, as does his son (who is now, explicably, a monkey ghost) and there's a bit about a queen who gets it on with a catfish. I didn't find this film at all magical, or sexy, or fun. I just found it to be unformed and silly. Although, to be honest, I was not surprised that it found favour with a jury headed by the man who put his name to the equally mystifying Planet Of The Apes. I was happiest with the Best Actor prize for Javier Bardem in Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's Biutiful (pictured). This film has been trashed by critics, and when I finally saw it this morning I was pleasantly surprised. If you know Inarritu's work it is (arguably) more of the same, but Bardem's powerhouse performance really grounds what could have been a trite, schmaltzy morality tale. He plays Uxbal, a smalltime Barcelona wheeler-dealer who variously manages street traders and communicates with the dead for a living.

His ex-wife is a bipolar flake, his father's burial ground is being sold off and, oh, just to make matters worse, did I mention that Uxbal is dying of cancer? Inarritu uses many of the same stylistic tics he employed in Amores Perros, 21 Grams and Babel (thankfully not the old fractured timeline thing, which he has finally abandoned), but Bardem infuses the film with a dignity that a lesser actor probably couldn't pull off. As a result, Biutiful is strangely unmoving but perhaps all the better for it. It reminded me of Paul Schrader's Light Sleeper, another deceptively strong film about circumstance and consequences.