Cannes 2010: Round-up

The festival this year was a strangely low-key affair; as one broadsheet writer commented midway through, the mood at screenings was even quite sombre, as if everyone had just given up the will either to enjoy or deride it. There was little evidence of passion, and even the quite dreadful Rebecca H by Lodge Kerrigan elicited applause, when its maker was lucky to escape a lynch mob. My own feeling is that the festival is coasting. All it has done this year is find a semi-decent crop of films by its usual arthouse alumni and throw them together. Some films overlapped in themes and visual motifs (suicides cropped up a lot, and the two Hollywood efforts both featured major stars giving lectures), suggesting little or no thought had gone into the actual programming.

As for the awards, I'd like to know what outside pressure is put on the jury. Nobody from the international circuit held any hopes for the Mathieu Amalric's Tournee, which apparently was the toast of the French press (and won him the Best Director prize). And Juliette Binoche – whose face was on every street corner in the festival's official artwork – won Best Actress for a performance that, to me, wasn't as good as those in Another Year, The Housemaid and Poetry.

As for Uncle Boonmee, Apitchatpong Weerasethakul has been groomed by the festival for many years, and his win feels more depressingly inevitable in the festival's Grand National way of doing things (he has previous form, etc etc) than a genuine win for Thai cinema. I also think the film is grotesquely overrated and typifies everything that's snobbish about Cannes. I repeat: it makes no sense.

Neither did the Ukrainian film My Joy, and nobody tipped that for the Palme. Elsewhere, I was baffled over the decision to screen the massively popular Carlos only twice; Saturday afternoon/evening was dead, so why not a third screening? The buzz was dense on that, even for a TV movie – unlike Nikita Mikhailkov's shockingly bad Burnt By The Sun 2, to which many traumatised viewers are still suffering flashbacks. And why did Takeshi Kitano's Outrage (pictured) suffer such slings and arrows? It was slight and bloody but by no means terrible (ditto Biutiful).

In the sidebars, there were some nice finds. I didn't think much of its plotting but Silent House, a Uruguayan one-take slasher movie set in an old dark house, will stay in my memory for a long time. I was also taken with Simon Werner A Disparu, which promised to be a tense thriller but was actually a glossy, Gus Van Sant-style teen drama.

Directors Fortnight also threw up two grandly visual debuts from directors we're sure to see more of. Alicia Duffy's ravishing, if a little thinly scripted rites-of-passage tale All Good Children suggests an exciting new Lynn Ramsay-style British talent, while Two Gates Of Sleep, a wildly elliptical tale of two redneck brothers taking their dead mother to a remote burial ground, managed the incredible task of calling to mind the work of both David Lynch and Terrence Malick, whose styles you'd think might be mutually exclusive. Director Alistair Banks Griffin is definitely a name to watch, as is star Brady Corbet, who you may have seen in the excellent Mysterious Skin and the not-so-excellent Thunderbirds.

So that's it for Cannes 2010. It's a measure of the festival's failure to deliver that talk of Venice began before it even started. Needless to say, I'm already looking forward to it.