The festival doesn’t technically end until the closing ceremonies tomorrow night, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s over now. There’s nothing left to do but wait for the announcement of the prizewinners, and that won’t come for another 28 hours or so, which means I get to have a quiet dinner, sleep past 6:30 am tomorrow morning and play tourist for a day. I consider it my reward.

In eleven days, I’ve seen 38 movies, including all 24 of the titles in the Official Competition. I’ve drunk my weight in bottled water and espresso and eaten far more pastry than is probably good for me. But forty minutes ago, three magic words appeared on my PDA screen: “No upcoming appointments.”

Damn right.

Fortunately, I’m going out on a relative high: This morning’s screening was Laurent Cantet’s outstanding drama The Class, about a teacher’s interactions with his students in a Paris-area high school over the course of a year. It’s blunt, nervy and brilliant – a movie about education that makes the laborious process of opening young minds seem both thrilling and terrifying.

People are bound to compare it to all such American standards as To Sir with Love, Dead Poets Society, Dangerous Minds and Mr. Holland’s Opus, and that’s reasonable inasmuch as all of those films also revolved around teachers and students, but The Class is a far sharper work than any of those. Its social commentary is often so subtle that it’s almost subliminal, and for all the insight the film offers into the mixture of idealism, exasperation and pragmatism that gets overmatched, overworked teachers to troop back into their classrooms every morning, its principal hook is emotional.

It’s also a spectacular debut for François Bégaudeau, who wrote the novel on which the film is based, co-wrote the screenplay with Cantet and Robin Campillo, and stars as the fictional teacher François Morin, coping with two dozen students who are by turns insolent, arrogant, entitled and even explosively violent.

Watching Bégaudeau/Morin deal with each new mini-crisis – a student’s refusal to read from “The Diary of Anne Frank,” or another’s inability to engage with his classmates on any level other than snide insults – makes for some of the most suspenseful and immediate filmmaking of the festival. If there’s any justice here, he’s become the front-runner for the Best Actor prize.

Today’s other screening was tomorrow’s closing-night presentation, What Just Happened? Pilloried at Sundance, it no doubt landed here because (a) Robert De Niro agreed to do the red carpet; (b) jury president Sean Penn appears in it, playing himself and (c) the final scenes are set at this very festival, which means the black-tie audience at the Grand Lumiere, in the presence of Robert De Niro, will have the fourth-wall-bending experience of watching a movie about a black-tie audience watching a movie in the Grand Lumiere in the presence of Robert De Niro.

Blows your mind, right? If only the movie was any good; based on Art Linson’s engaging memoir of his exploits as a big-time Hollywood producer, it’s an utterly mediocre showbiz comedy in which De Niro races around Los Angeles juggling post-production on a troubled thriller and pre-production on a Bruce Willis movie that’s endangered by the star’s appearance on-set with a Grizzly Adams beard.

Nothing particularly funny happens – certainly nothing as funny as Linson’s story about seeing The Untouchables with writer David Mamet, who wasn’t aware that Brian De Palma had inserted an opera sequence into the final cut – and the gags about agents with ulcers and producers constantly yammering into telephone headsets were played out decades ago.

Still, it’s not the worst Hollywood movie Barry Levinson has made, and you can’t really blame it for being small-time when the biggest moral dilemma is whether or not Bruce Willis will shave. When it turns up on DVD, you might even crack a smile.

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Cannes fun fact: Web-based translation software isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. This is the only explanation for Transporter 3’s tag line, bannered across a giant billboard here: “Rules Remain the Same, Except Some Changes”.

Oh, giant billboards, I think I’ll miss you most of all.

I never would have believed it a week ago, but it turns out that Cannes is, in the end, just like every other film festival. It slows down towards the end.

Sellers and buyers alike started clearing out on Wednesday, there having been very little buying and selling. The strength of the Euro, and therefore the weakness of the U.S. dollar, is blamed for the quiet times in this year’s film market.

But who dares wins: IFC Films picked up six movies for U.S. distribution, including Steve McQueen’s Hunger and Arnaud Desplechin’s Une Conte de Noel – both of which would place in the top five of the 32 films I’ve seen so far – and Sony Pictures Classics is reportedly sniffing around James Toback’s Tyson. Still, none of the majors acquired a single title, which is unusual.

Of the big American entries, Steven Soderbergh’s Che is still without U.S. distribution, as are James Gray’s Two Lovers and Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York. And I can see how all three films could pose major hurdles to boutique marketing departments.

Che is now widely agreed to need major surgery before anyone puts it in front of a paying audience. Two Lovers is “tonally challenging”, which means it requires you to pay some frickin’ attention to the performances instead of having the screenplay spell everything out for you. And as for Synecdoche, New York ... well, let’s start a new paragraph.

I saw Synecdoche this morning, at 8:30 am, and it pretty much blew me away. Kaufman’s directorial debut is as conceptually daring and narratively complex as his screenplays for Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind – and elements of all three films can be spotted in this one – but with his own hand on the joystick, he burrows further into his idiosyncratic world than ever before.

The movie stars Philip Seymour Hoffman as a struggling Schenectady theatre director – his idea of innovation is casting young actors in the leads in a production of Death of a Salesman – who spends most of his time obsessing about the state of his health and watching his marriage crumble.

After a MacArthur Genius Grant lands on his doorstep, he decides to launch the most important theatrical project of his career, or anyone else’s, building a replica of his home and workplace in a Manhattan warehouse and hiring actors to play the people in his life. As the project expands, so does the warehouse, and in the last third of the film Kaufman leaves conventional narrative behind entirely, taking his film into genuine surrealism while retaining its powerful emotional kick.

Although Kaufman is viewed as an intellectual gamesman, his scripts have never been afraid to tackle real pain. Being John Malkovich has a pretty horrific ending, and Eternal Sunshine is one of the most devastating love stories of this decade. Even Adaptation is ultimately a story about love and death.

Synecdoche goes right for the same dark territory, but it sneaks up on you. At first, it seems to be about nothing more than its own bellybutton, but as the details pile up and the narrative gains momentum, it’s possible to see what Kaufman has in mind, and it’s a stunner. I fully expect this to be one of the most divisive movies screened at Cannes this year; I also don’t expect to fully appreciate it until I see it a second time. And a third.

Two films I don’t ever need to see again, however, are Eric Khoo’s My Magic and Wim Wenders’ Palermo Shooting, which I watched in quick succession this afternoon.

My Magic is easily the worst of this year’s Competition entries, a clunky, melodramatic father-son story about a drunken magician (Francis Bosco) who performs increasingly brutal stunts in order to build up a nest egg for his young son (Jathisweran). It’s only 75 minutes long, so at least the mawkish, amateurish scenes of empty suffering – imagine a David Blaine stage production of The Passion Of The Christ, on a fraction of Blaine’s usual budget – was over quickly.

Palermo Shooting runs about 130 minutes, but it felt like I was in the Salle Debussy with it for three or four years. It’s another of Wenders’ travelogue dramas, wandering around Palermo with a German photographer (Die Toten Hosen member Campino, who looks oddly like a Eurotrash version of Jerry O’Connell) who encounters odd sights and sounds while snapping pictures and sort-of courting a comely art restorer (Giovanna Mezziogiorno).

As with virtually every movie Wenders has made since his misbegotten apocalypse epic Until the End of the World, the soundtrack is overstuffed with a who’s-who of cool kids, and Lou Reed has a bizarre cameo, showing up as a sort of hologram in a bar. Oh, and Campino has vivid dreams where a hooded man is shooting arrows at him, leading – somehow – to a climactic confrontation with Death himself, played by Dennis Hopper as an amiable “service provider” rather than a monster to be dreaded.

Vividly directed? Sure. Delusional? Yup. Batshit crazy? Absolutely. Palermo Shooting is so far up its own gastrointestinal tract that it’s not even funny – well, until Hopper arrives, at which point everything becomes worthwhile. When the DVD comes out next year, skip to the second-last chapter and treat that sequence as a stand-alone short film. It won’t make a lick of sense, but neither does the complete feature.

In the midst of all this, I seized the opportunity to escape the screening rooms for a couple of hours and walk up to the Provencal lunch held annually by Cannes’ mayor, Bernard Brochand, at the gorgeous Place de la Castre, which overlooks the festival grounds. Steamed cod, fresh vegetables, a handmade aioli and some spectacular regional wines in the company of colleagues and dignitaries – how could I refuse?

**

Cannes fun fact: Guests of the mayor receive a complimentary bottle of cold-pressed local olive oil, which is going to be a wonderful cooking aid if it survives the trip home.

Cannes is sluggish today. And with good reason – as far as I could tell, the whole town was hung over from attending one party or another, or all of them in succession. I only attended the one for El Cant Des Ocelles, mostly because two glasses of bold Catalan red contain all the alcohol my liver can handle.

In a festival that runs on a paramilitary schedule, last night’s blowouts had to have been strategically planned to take advantage of this morning’s lack of an 8:30 am screening – an apparent nod from the powers that be that we’ve been working very hard all week, and deserved a bit of a lie-in. At least that’s how I’ve chosen to interpret it.

But just in case you think I took it easy, I have not; first, there was Delta, a dreary Hungarian drama about miserable people living miserable lives in a miserable town.

An intense young man (Felix Lajko) comes home after a long absence. He is taciturn and drinks much brandy. He buys some timber and begins to build a long bridge to an island in the middle of a river. His parents give him the stink-eye, but his sister (Orsi Toth) helps him. Then the siblings start work on a house, where they both will live. Dark clouds gather. Secrets surface, or at least one of them does. Two or three others remain pretentiously unspoken. There is also a turtle.

Delta arrives with a grim buzz – its original star, Lajos Bertok, died midway through the shoot and had to be replaced by Lajko – and its bleak story will surely appeal to the Romanian New Wave, if “appeal” is the right word. But I can’t say I’ve given it a second thought since the lights came up in the auditorium.

Next up was one of the big gotta-sees of the festival: Steven Soderbergh’s four-and-a-half-hour Ché, which was pitched as a one-time-only fusion of the two feature films he’s just completed about revolutionary icon Ernesto Guevara.

The current plan has the movies being released separately later this year as The Argentine and Guerrilla, each feature running about 130 minutes. That’s assuming Soderbergh doesn’t do any further fine-tuning; he was working on these movies right up to the last possible minute – tonight’s sumptuous digital presentation didn’t even have opening titles, just an “intermission” card between the two films.

There is minimal biographical detail and absolutely no backstory on offer, Walter Salles having covered Guevara’s early years in The Motorcycle Diaries just a couple of years before. In these films, Ché is a fully-formed zealot of the people.

The Argentine jumps back and forth between a number of key events in his relationship with Castro and Cuba, using his fiery 1964 speech to the United Nations as a kind of chronological anchor.

Guerrilla picks up a couple of years later, with Ché having assumed his later role as a sort of revolutionary evangelist, training a new generation of freedom fighters in Bolivia.

The Argentine is told in the fragmented, slightly stylized manner of Soderbergh’s Out of Sight and Traffic, while Guerrilla is a much more conventional work, with a linear narrative. Given the level of experimentation in The Argentine, I found myself wondering whether this material was originally supposed to be presented as another chopped-up thread within that film, and then “saved” by turning it into a separate feature.

Here’s the funny thing, though: Neither movie really lets us know Ché Guevara at all. Benicio del Toro plays him as a man so committed to his cause that he’s cast everything else aside – family, friends, his own physical and emotional needs – to bring “the revolution” to the world. He’s attained a kind of Zen calm in his belief that his movement is sure to outlive him.

Since del Toro is never more charismatic than when he channels his charisma into watchfulness, he’s a fine choice for the role, but the part as written could have been played by a Ché T-shirt that gets progressively more ragged as the story goes on.

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Cannes fun fact: Ché Guevara would have considered this festival an obscenity. Seriously, you charge two euros for a can of Sprite, you’re just asking for an armed uprising.

Today has been one of the strangest days of my life.

At 5 pm local time, I attended the premiere of Albert Serra’s El Cant Des Ocells, a minimalist, largely silent black-and-white interpretation of the journey of the three wise men to Bethlehem to meet baby Jesus and his parents.

That was weird enough, but weirder still was learning how to say “I’m with Jesus’ dad” in French for the after-party.

Here’s the thing: Jesus’ pops, Joseph, is played in the film by Mark Peranson, a polymath of Canadian cinema who’s the editor of the internationally respected Cinema Scope magazine, a programmer at the Vancouver International Film Festival, and a former film reviewer for NOW.

Full disclosure: He’s also my first cousin.

So you can imagine that seeing him projected up on the screen – as a Biblical figure in a droll retelling of the Nativity story, no less – was a little jarring. But he pulled it off; he even delivered all of his (improvised) dialogue in Hebrew, rather than the Catalan dialect used by the rest of the cast. The reason Joseph doesn’t respond to Mary’s request that he bring her some water, he told me after the screening, was that he didn’t understand a word the actress was saying.

Mark is also finishing up a documentary about the shoot, Waiting For Sancho. If TIFF’s programmers are on the fence about booking Serra’s film – which they shouldn’t be, as it’s exactly the sort of weird, distinct vision any film festival should be proud to include – I’d suggest they run the two together as a special presentation, and give our audiences something to talk about for hours after the lights come up.

Scheduling quirks – a meeting here, some interviews there – have made today’s screening load a little lighter than usual: In addition to El Cant Des Ocells, I saw just two other films.

First up was Clint Eastwood’s The Exchange, which was known by the inappropriate title Changeling up until a couple of days ago; the print screened for the press bore only the French title, L’Exchange. It’s a fact-based period drama starring Angelina Jolie as Christine Collins, a Los Angeles single mother whose young son Walter disappeared one Saturday afternoon in 1928; five months later, the LAPD announced the boy had been found in Illinois, and returned him to Collins – who immediately realized that they’d made a mistake and given her someone else’s kid.

It wasn’t hard to figure out; the boy she lost was about three inches taller than the boy she got back – and he wasn’t circumcised, either.

Instead of admitting their error and reopening the search for her son, the image-conscious LAPD decided to dismiss Collins’ concerns as typical female hysteria and cover up the mistake, starting a campaign to discredit Collins that landed her in a mental institution for six days before a radio preacher campaigned to set her free – and that’s just the first 90 minutes of Eastwood’s stolid, edge-free production, which goes on to fold in two courtroom showdowns and a weirdly artificial coda that’s supposed to provide uplift but instead falls entirely flat.

J. Michael Straczynski’s insistent script, which plays like a particularly ambitious TV movie, pushing Jolie through one confrontation with an unsympathetic authority figure after another until she finally gets to remind us how powerful an actress she can be. But when she really lets loose, it’s a moment that doesn’t belong in the misty past; it’s an Oscar clip straight out of the present day.

That said, The Exchange looks like the work of an old master next to Lucrecia Martel’s La Mujer Sin Cabeza, translated on-screen as “The Headless Woman”. (The literal translation, “The Woman Without A Head”, more appropriately captures the sense of disconnection so central to the film.)

Martel’s previous film, The Holy Girl, was an exceptional drama about a teenage girl obsessed with a much older doctor. This one’s also about obsession, sort of, following the middle-aged Veronica (María Onetto) who hits a dog with her car while driving alongside a canal, sustains a head injury in the collision, and spends the rest of the film wandering around in a vaguely hallucinatory daze, eventually becoming convinced she killed a human being in the accident.

Except that she didn’t – we saw the dog on the road behind her at the beginning of the film. But where were the three boys who were walking along the canal with it in the pre-title sequence? What’s this about a drowned child being found near the canal? What’s with all the weird stuff Veronica is doing and seeing? And why was I constantly flashing on some old Tim Robbins thriller while watching this film?

Even if it didn’t owe such an obvious debt to that ladder movie with that Jacob guy, La Mujer Sin Cabeza would be a dull, pretentious slog through some very familiar territory, and the crowd at the Salle Debussy had no trouble booing loudly over the end credits. This was the first time I’d heard that kind of reaction at a screening, which I think means this year’s festival has been above average.

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Cannes fun fact: Two members of the Toronto Film Critics Association turn up on festival screens this year. In addition to Mark’s co-starring role in El Cant Des Ocells, Montage’s Mark Glassman turns up as one of a dozen web-chat participants in Atom Egoyan’s Adoration. Beat that, Los Angeles Critics Circle! And documentaries don’t count.

For someone who’s spent years hearing horror stories about endless lineups, pointless security measures and late starts to screenings that throw off your schedule for the rest of the day, I’ve found Cannes to be surprisingly well-coordinated and easy to navigate – even when suffering my atrocious French, the staff are unfailingly polite and courteous. I’ve fallen into the habit of saying “bonjour” (or, if it’s after six, “bon soir”) to anyone with whom I briefly make eye contact.

I’ve brought this up to veterans of the festival, and they all say the same thing: “Yeah, it’s really different this year.” I guess I’m just lucky; even the fellow who refused me entry to yesterday’s overstuffed Indiana Jones press screening – well, me and about five hundred other people – was pleasant and apologetic rather than dismissive.

Today, though, I must have time-traveled back to one of the bad years. With the exception of the day’s first screening at the Lumiere, things were running behind schedule everywhere. Taking a few hours off to write didn’t result in a break of any kind, either; by the time I got to the Competition screening of Marco Tullio Giordana’s Sangue Pazzo, the domino effect resulted in a complete failure of the calendar. Arriving at the Salle Debussy at 6:30 pm for an announced 7:15 pm screening, I wound up standing outside with the rest of the assembled press until about 7:30 pm, when they finally decided to let us in.

Once the cast and crew had been trotted out onstage for a hasty introduction (star sighting: Monica Bellucci!), the movie finally started at around 7:45 pm; 150 minutes later, the obligatory ecstatic applause for the filmmakers pushed the start time of the next feature back even further. So down the stairs I went to line up once again ... and wait. And wait some more. James Gray’s Two Lovers, originally advertised as a 10 pm start, got underway around 10:40 pm and let out at 12:20 am, into one of the coast’s charming little rain showers.

It’s been a long day.

At least the movies were good. I don’t have anything too terrible to say about any of the four features I saw today. (The running tally is now 26, for those of you playing along at home.)

I started with Lorna’s Silence, the latest drama from Belgian social realists Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne; this one follows an Albanian émigré (Arta Dobroshi) in a green-card marriage to a clinging junkie (Dardennes regular Jérémie Renier) who has a crisis of conscience when their marriage reaches its built-in expiry date. The Dardennes being the Dardennes, things get awfully complicated.

Next up was Pierre Schoeller’s Versailles, another bleak French-language film about people on the outskirts of society – in this case, a young homeless woman (Judith Chemla), her very young son (Max Baissette de Malglaive) and the enigmatic hermit (Guillaume Depardieu) whom they meet in the middle of the woods surrounding the titular palace, an encounter that sends all three lives in unexpected new directions.

It’s a sharper than usual variation on the grouch-and-child formula dreaded by festivalgoers the world over, with a more realistic perspective than usual. I’d considered Depardieu a one-note scowler for years, but between this and The Duchess of Langeais, he’s starting to grow on me. And the kid isn’t one of those cloying-urchin types who make my pancreas hurt, so that helped.

Sangue Pazzo (Wild Blood) comes from the director of the six-hour Italian stunner The Best of Youth, so expectations were naturally high. Actually, they were stratospheric at my screening, which appeared to have found room for every Italian journalist, guest and dignitary attending the festival. And if it isn’t quite on the same level, it’s still a really solid wartime drama, the true story of Italian screen actors Osvaldo Valenti and Luisa Ferida, who became lovers in 1940 and made a number of Fascist-approved pictures as WWII raged on, an employment choice that ultimately led to their execution as collaborators by partisans in 1945.

Valenti and Ferida are played by Luca Zingaretti and Monica Bellucci in full Actors Acting mode, but that works for the larger-than-life nature of the characters – especially Valenti, who in addition to being something of a ham was also a massive cokehead, according to the film. And Giordana frames their dilemma of loyalty as an acting challenge: perhaps they were only playing collaborators. But what if they were better actors than they realized?

Finally, there was James Gray’s Two Lovers, a real surprise from the director of Little Odessa, The Yards and last year’s excellent We Own the Night. The intensity and New York authenticity is the same – it’s shot in some of the same Brighton Beach neighbourhoods as Little Odessa – but the material is very different.

There’s not a cop or a thug in sight, and no epic chase sequences; instead, Gray has made a claustrophobic study of a troubled young man (Joaquin Phoenix) who finds himself obsessed with an equally unstable neighbour (Gwyneth Paltrow) just as he meets a nice girl (Vinessa Shaw) who could turn his life around if he’d only stop ignoring her.

I hate making these predictions, but in a year in which Sean Penn is the president of the Competition jury, Phoenix sure seems like a lock for the Best Actor award. He’s absolutely nailed the puffy, nervous physicality of a man trying desperately not to look as though he spends every waking hour on powerful medication, and his performance is as soulful as it is awkward.

It wasn’t until about half an hour after the screening ended that I’d just watched a canny reversal of The Heartbreak Kid, and one that’s as dark, as socially relevant and as uncompromising in its psychology as Elaine May’s original film. Here’s hoping she sends him a thank-you card, written in Peter and Bobby Farrelly’s blood.

**

Cannes fun fact: Even the crappy little dessert trays that are laid out at press functions here are exquisite, because they’re French, and French desserts are awesome.

I am blue.

Which is a good thing to be at Cannes, since the Bleu press pass is reasonably well-respected and gets you into just about anything you want to see. The trick is you have to wait in line while the Rose and Blanc press go in ahead of you – and if they all decide they want to see the same screening, the Bleus are pretty much screwed.

See, the holders of the Blanc card get to swan into just about any screening they want as soon as the doors open, with no waiting in line or pleading with the polite but resolute staffers turning you away. It’s much the same for the Rose crowd, and in fact I can discern no practical difference between the two. The Blancs probably get to take an extra piece of chocolate at the Nespresso cafe on the second floor of the Palais.

But I hold the Bleu card, and so I not only do not get that second piece of chocolate, but I was unable to attend the press screening for Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull, even though I arrived a good half-hour before the scheduled start time – and even though the Lumiere auditorium holds 2300 people and there aren’t 2300 accredited press at Cannes. (I probably should have turned up earlier, but I’d been assured admittance wouldn’t be a problem, and I wanted to catch the first screening of Wong Kar Wai’s Ashes Of Time Redux, which I discuss below.)

Anyhow, as the polite but resolute staffer holding the “Ferme” sign explained, “Everyone wants Indee”. And those of us who are Bleus will try to catch him tomorrow afternoon at the repeat screening at the Salle des Soixantième, which holds just 400 souls and will therefore be a total madhouse. Weather permitting, I plan to camp out two hours in advance with my laptop and a panini. And if that doesn’t work, I’ll catch it when I get back home. It’ll be the exact same movie, after all.

Getting shut out of Indiana Jones wasn’t all bad, though; I used the time to gear down a little, grabbing a quick and dirty (and deeply satisfying) Chinese food lunch with a friend and then going to see Il Etait Une Fois ... Lawrence Of Arabia, a French television documentary about David Lean’s 1962 masterpiece playing here in honour of the director’s centenary, along with a restored presentation of This Happy Breed.

Yeah, Anne Kunvari’s doc is really just a super-sized DVD supplement, but since Lawrence is one of my very favourite films, it was sheer pleasure to spend an hour watching archival footage of Lean – who died in 1991 – and a contemporary interview, in French, with Omar Sharif. Conspicuous by his absence was Peter O’Toole, who’s seen only in clips from the film and the occasional candid still, but I suppose he had his reasons.

Due to a couple of social engagements – which, I swear, were also opportunities to strengthen industry contacts and talk up movies I admire, like Joanna Hogg’s excellent British drama Unrelated, which isn’t in the festival proper but is trying to land distributors in the movie mega-mall that is the Marché du Film 2008 – I only saw two other movies today, bringing my total count to 20.

Come to think of it, I’m not sure I can even count Ashes Of Time Redux as a new feature. It’s really just a souped-up reissue of Wong’s 1994 Ashes Of Time, a post-modern take on Chinese action movies that remains a cockeyed classic of sorts. Various distribution quirks – and the rather enthusiastic nature of Hong Kong film pirates – have released a number of alternate versions of the film into the world. As Wong says in the film’s press notes, Redux aims “to rectify this situation, we decided to revisit this project and create the definitive version.”

Advances in digital mastering technology mean that the film can now be brighter (and louder) than ever before; if you’ve only seen Ashes Of Time projected in a scratchy old 35mm print, this new version is an eye-opener. I guess I’ve been lucky in my DVD choices, though, since I didn’t really notice much of a difference in the film itself. Redux has a listed running time of 93 minutes; the U.S. DVD release clocks in at 95; and the Hong Kong disc claims to run 99. (People today were wondering about a two-hour cut, though that may only be a result of an erroneous listing in the press book.)

I also saw Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah, an energetic but slightly exhausting multi-character indictment of thug life that finds the mob’s corroding influence working at every level of Italian society. Based on Roberto Saviano’s damning book, it’s sort of a Mediterranean City Of God – if not as stylish or as structured as that film, and so overstuffed with characters that the weaker storylines start to feel like distractions from the more urgent threads. Not a bad movie by any means, but there’s certainly a tighter, more effective film inside the one they screened this morning.

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Cannes fun fact: for all the obsession with celebrities and gossip, there is not a single person here who cares about Ashlee Simpson marrying Pete Wentz over the weekend.

Here’s something you might not know about Cannes audiences: they are very, very supportive of the films they see, even when the films themselves are not very good, and especially when there’s talent in the room.

Thus, all you really need to do to guarantee a rapturous response – an ovation that goes on and on and on, rising and falling like waves on the sea – is have Catherine Deneuve show up at the premiere of a movie where Catherine Deneuve is driven around Lebanon for 70 straight minutes.

This movie exists. I’ve seen it. It’s called Je Veux Voir (I Want To See) and it’s really no big deal. A movie-star riff on Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste Of Cherry from directors Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, it plants Deneuve (as herself) in a car with actor Rabih Mroué and follows along as he drives from Beirut to the southern edge of the country, so a small film crew – which includes Hadjithomas and Joreige, playing themselves – can shoot footage of her touring the lands just north of the Israeli border, which were reduced to rubble by Israeli shells during the countries’ “second war” in 2006.

But the brief glimpses of a devastated landscape are really just secondary to the filmmakers’ delight in their own meta-ness, and their love of their star. It’s a love I happen to share – she’s really quite amazing in Arnaud Desplechin’s Une Conte de Noël, which I saw yesterday, but the concept of this exercise means she can do very little besides peer through a car windshield, fuss with her seatbelt and light the occasional cigarette while the audience applies its own politics to the charged imagery.

Doesn’t matter, though. She was there, she waved regally from the stage when the film was introduced, and when the movie was over, and the house lights found her sitting in the audience with the rest of the cast and crew, she moved a young woman to tears by leaning down and planting kisses on her cheeks. If Cannes has a queen mother, Deneuve is it.

The four other screenings I attended today were not quite as memorable. Walter Salles’s Linha De Passe is a perfunctory exercise in scrappy squalor, following a Sao Paulo family as they struggle with issues of morality and identity. It’s the kind of movie that ends with a twelve-year-old kid driving a bus down a highway as the soundtrack swells triumphantly – never mind that his legs probably aren’t long enough to reach the pedals.

Next up was Cloud 9, Andreas Dresen’s gray German drama about a sixtysomething seamstress (Ursula Werner) who risks her comfortable marriage when she begins a torrid affair with a 76-year-old customer (Horst Rehberg). The dreary digital video aesthetic is impressive, as is the cast’s willingness to spend a great deal of screen time in various states of undress, but there’s an element of calculation to everything that left me suspecting I’d watched a very elaborate stunt. As a German friend pointed out to me after the screening, “if this same script was filmed with beautiful thirty-year-olds, it’d be terribly banal.” But way hotter, obviously.

Not hot in the slightest – and I mean that as a compliment – was 24 City, the latest in director Jia Zhang-Ke’s meditations on the cultural and literal disintegration of his native China. This one finds Jia setting up his tripod in the depressed town of Chengdu, where a massive factory is about to be torn down and replaced with condominium apartments.

Eight people deliver lengthy monologues about their lives in Chengdu, illustrating the sea change in Chinese sensibilities as the nation moves inexorably from Communism to capitalism; half of them are actual Chengdu residents telling the stories of their own lives, and the other half are fictional characters played by Joan Chen, Zhao Tao, Lu Liping and Chen Jianbin. The gambit is slightly distracting – the actors are comfortable in front of Jia’s camera, while the “real” interview subjects are hesitant and slightly fidgety – but it serves the concept surprisingly well.

My last screening of the day was Service, an unclassifiable Filipino picture from Brillante Mendoza centring on a family-owned porn theater in an unspecified city. If Je Veux Voir is an accidental answer film to Waltz With Bashir, Service is the cracked-mirror version of Une Conte de Noel, exploring the power dynamics and long-buried resentments within a splintering family and coming up with a very different narrative.

It’s a roundelay of enthusiastic sex, venomous insults, slap fights, minor catastrophes and major gross-outs, and that’s before the goat shows up. People might complain about its excesses, but there’s no question that Mendoza has made precisely the movie he wanted to make. And it has a goat in it.

**

Cannes fun fact: Gummi bears are a perfectly acceptable candy to put out for buyers and critics wandering through the film market in the lower level of the Palais. But note that buyers and critics wandering through the film market in the lower level of the Palais have filthy, grubby hands.

Mike Tyson is a very large man. I know this because he walked right past me on the way on and off the stage of the Salle Debussy, twice, for the premiere of James Toback’s first-person documentary Tyson, which played tonight in Un Certain Regard.

Toback’s movie – essentially a feature-length monologue from the former champ, who tells the story of his life directly to the camera – is a fascinating accomplishment. The director has known Tyson since the late 1980s, and gave him a slightly self-mocking cameo in Black And White that ended with the boxer throttling a giddy Robert Downey Jr.

Toback’s long friendship with Tyson gives the movie an intimate, unmanaged tone; the director is never seen or heard, but he’s clearly being supportive and encouraging of his subject. He’s also able to illustrate Tyson’s stories with a remarkable range of archival footage, dating all the way back to Tyson’s earliest sparring sessions with trainer Cus D’Amato, and doesn’t shy away from including clips where Tyson comes off looking like a raging psychotic.

But as engrossing as the film may be, it’s nothing compared to the experience of seeing Tyson take the stage, even if he spends most of his time smiling politely and letting Toback have the spotlight. The audience goes completely crazy for him; I think the event may turn out to be one of the highlights of the festival.

Less high, I’m sorry to say, is the debut of Woody Allen’s latest, Vicky Cristina Barcelona. The audience is nothing if not polite, but it’s another minor effort from an increasingly uninteresting filmmaker who’s still writing scripts as if it was 1973 outside his window.

Tout le monde was buzzing with the news that this film -- about two vacationing Americans (Scarlett Johansson and The Prestige’s Rebecca Hall) who fall into the orbit of a painter (Javier Bardem) and his crazy ex-wife (Penélope Cruz) – includes a love scene between Johansson and Cruz. It does, and it’s precisely as detailed as any other sex scene from an Allen movie. The man is not known for his erotic imagination, and in fact his insights into sex and love seem downright musty these days; when was the last time you heard a twentysomething use the phrase “make love” without irony?

At least, thanks to Bardem and Cruz’s lusty scene-chewing, this one is funny on purpose, as opposed to last year’s execrable Cassandra’s Dream, still unreleased in Canada.

Far more satisfying is Arnaud Desplechin’s Une Conte De Noel, another richly detailed, perfectly cast seriocomedy from the director of the brilliant Kings And Queen. That film’s stars, Emmanuelle Devos and Mathieu Amalric, are reunited here as lovers; Catherine Deneuve gets a meaty role as Amalric’s ailing mother, and Jean-Paul Roussillon, Anne Consigny, Hippolyte Girardot and Deneuve’s real-life daughter Chiara Mastroianni deliver fine supporting work. Someone really should pick this up. It’s a lovely, lovely film.

I also manage to catch up with the very buzzy Waltz With Bashir, which you could describe as “the Israeli Persepolis” if you wanted to demonstrate your total lack of understanding of either movie. Yes, it’s an animated memoir set in the Middle East. But this one is the wrenching story of one man – specifically, filmmaker Ari Folman – trying to come to terms with his experiences as an Israeli soldier in occupied Lebanon in the early 1980s.

Folman’s choice to tell his story – and the stories of several other veterans – through stylized digital animation is both visually striking and dramatically inspired; the medium lets him plug us directly into the mindset of his 19-year-old self, all bright colors and loud noise, while also allowing him to present a number of stunning sequences that would be entirely unwatchable if they were presented in live action.

**

Cannes fun fact: Each of Mike Tyson’s hands is the size of a whole brisket. Which could explain all those first-round knockouts, when you think about it.

Specifically, I am Box 1397, and people stuff me full of paper. After every screening at the Palais des Festivals, it’s customary to drop by the press boxes and see what new flyers, advertisements or magazines have been delivered by hopeful publicists. The boxes aren’t enormous – see photo – but I came back from today’s festivalgoing with the equivalent of the Toronto white pages in my bag. Not the kind of weight you want to lug around to five screenings, the press junket for Blindness and a seaside interview with Montréal director Denis Villeneuve, who’s here with an inventive little short called Next Floor. Oh, and to a spur-of-the-moment interview by a student documentary crew, for which I’ll post a link as soon as it goes online.

Fortunately, there are recycling bins everywhere in the press areas, and people are using them very efficiently: I saw one reporter simply pivot on his hip and dump the contents of his box out into a nearby bin in one swift, elegant movement.

I haven’t worked up the courage to do that yet; I’m afraid I might unwittingly toss out an invitation to a party. Of course, that would mean someone had invited me to a party, and that I had time to go.

Where was I? Oh, right, seeing movies. I’ve had the full range today, starting with Pablo Trapero’s grimy Leonera (“Lion’s Den”), about a pregnant woman who’s allowed to raise her child in prison while awaiting trial for the murder of the man who may have fathered him; great performance from Martina Gusman in the lead, but the script was patchier than I would have liked.

Next, there was Kung Fu Panda, which is much, much, much better than you might think – it’s funny, it’s clever, it’s visually sumptuous and I’d even go so far as to call it the first non-Pixar effort to approach that studio’s standard for fully realized characters and environments. This is a terrific kung-fu picture that just happens to use talking animals instead of human beings.

Third up was Three Monkeys, which has no monkeys in it at all; instead, it’s Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s latest grim drama, revolving around a family trying desperately to ignore at least two horrible truths gnawing away at their lives. It ain’t a crowd-pleaser – the pacing is grindingly slow, and Ceylan’s digitally tweaked palette takes its inspiration from a tobacco stain – but it does what it does very well.

Fourth and best of the day was Hunger, about which I expect you’ll be hearing a great deal before too long. An impressionistic drama about Bobby Sands’ 1981 hunger strike, it’s a devastating and defiantly non-partisan film that’s going to piss off some people by its refusal to stake out a moral position.

Finally, I closed the night with a screening of Tokyo!, a trio of short works by Michel Gondry, Leos Carax and Bong Joon Ho set in the titular Japanese city. As you’d expect from these directors, the films are idiosyncratic and eccentric in equal measure – only Michel Gondry would tell a story in which a young woman realizes her destiny by becoming a chair – but they’re enjoyable enough as a lark.

Cannes fun fact: The seats in the Salle Debussy are equipped with little flip-up writing surfaces, such as those seen in university lecture halls. Nobody uses them, but they’re there.

I am in Cannes, and it feels like I’m the only one here.

The rest of the assembled press, celebrities and cineastes are watching the opening night gala, Fernando Meirelles’s Blindness, so the Croisette is eerily silent. This is kind of cool, actually, since the film’s last movement includes a long sequence in which Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Alice Braga and Danny Glover, among others, wander through a cityscape similarly emptied of people.

I have been awake now for 34 hours.

I’m not complaining. That’s just the price of crossing the Atlantic from west to east. But most of the time, when one does that, one doesn’t have to immediately stumble out of the massive Palais des Festivals complex – where, I might add, one has never been before in one’s life – onto a standing interview set and talk to CBC Newsworld about how great it is that Canada has a couple of dogs in this year’s Palme d’Or fight.

Do we, though? Is Blindness a contender, with its moody artistry tangled up in a metaphor that’s ultimately unfilmable? And does anyone short of Atom Egoyan’s publicist really think Adoration has a shot?

People don’t want to hear that stuff, though. So I bring up the issue of the strong American competition – Eastwood! Soderbergh! James Gray’s Two Lovers! Um, that Barry Levinson movie nobody liked at Sundance! – and that seems to mollify my interviewer.

There are lots of American films vying for the Palme this year, and notable American Sean Penn is the president of the jury. Therefore, if the Canadian films don’t win anything, it’s obviously a nationalistic snub. Unless a French film wins, in which case it’s a different kind of nationalistic snub.

Right. Whatever. Meanwhile, Blindness – which I think works really well for about half its running time, before it turns into a grotty, grown-up riff on Lord Of The Flies with a dollop of 28 Days Later – just got slammed in today’s Variety, which will probably work against its chances. Adoration doesn’t screen until next Thursday, after most of the other heavy hitters, so maybe Egoyan’s characteristic minimalism will seem like a breath of fresh air.

Basically, nobody knows anything. Just like the start of every other film festival I’ve ever attended, except this one has Cate Blanchett in the audience. And she’s gorgeous.

Cannes fun fact of the day: Werner Herzog has just announced plans to remake Abel Ferrara’s sleaze-tastic Catholic psychodrama Bad Lieutenant, with Nicolas Cage in the role previously essayed by a literally balls-out Harvey Keitel. I’m hallucinating, right? That can’t be real.