Present-day urban, middle-class Ireland might as well not exist given the scant - and generally derisory - acknowledgement accorded it by Irish film-makers, of whom a rare exception was the late, pioneering Irish director, Kieran Hickey. Another is the remarkably prolific writer-director Gerry Stembridge, who follows his grim marital break-up drama, Guiltrip, with the sunny, exuberant and immensely entertaining romantic comedy, About Adam. Launched in January at the Sundance festival in the US. It is making its European debut in the market at Cannes.
It's set among a southside Dublin family whom it follows through such recognisable locations as Meeting House Square, the Gallery of Photography, the Winding Stair, Arthouse and the Life bar. Lucy Owens (played by Kate Hudson) works in a fictitious, garishly nautical-themed city-centre restaurant and is wishing for a fresh face to turn up in her life - and he does.
He is Adam (Stuart Townsend), who effortlessly charms his way into her bed before going on to seduce both her sisters (Frances O'Connor and Charlotte Brady) - and in one of the movie's wittiest sequences, looks like he is about to add their only brother (Alan Maher) to his conquests. Stembridge's screenplay is cleverly devised to show key events from the perspectives of the different characters.
About Adam is not the first movie in which a beguiling young man worked his way sexually through a family - Terence Stamp did it in Pasolini's Theorem, as did Michael York in Black Flowers for the Bride - but familiarity with those antecedents never detracts from the abundant pleasures of Stembridge's sparkling, intoxicating comedy. It is, in fact, closer in spirit to the cinema of Pedro Alomodovar in its prioritising of women among the principal characters and in its use of bright, primary colours.
This delightful entertainment is played with panache and perfect timing by a fine cast which also includes Rosaleen Linehan (as the mother of the Owens family), Tommy Tiernan and Brendan Dempsey. As Adam, the driving force of the narrative, Stuart Townsend does his best work to date, and with the crucial presence and allure to make his character so seductive.
The other Irish movies in the market at Cannes this year are Nora, already on release in Ireland; When the Sky Falls, which opens next month; I Could Read the Sky and The Book That Wrote Itself, both covered here when they were screened at Galway Film Fleadh last year; and the third Northern Ireland comedy from the pen of Colin Bateman, Wild About Harry.
Declan Lowney, the award-winning, Wexford-born director of Father Ted and Cold Feet, makes his cinema debut with Bateman's story of Harry McKee (Brendan Gleeson), an obnoxious celebrity TV chef notorious for his womanising and heavy drinking. His wife (Amanda Donohue) is about to divorce him when he is attacked by four men (for no clear reason), goes into a coma and loses his memory of everything that happened over the previous 25 years of his life. Suddenly, he's 18 again, and even playing Deep Purple guitar solos, but his wife and her pushy solicitor (a thickly lipsticked Bronagh Gallagher) suspect it's all a ruse.
The first half hour of Wild About Harry is regularly hilarious, especially when the concussed Harry on his live daytime TV show exposes the sex life of an adulterous, bisexual MP (James Nesbitt). Although Bateman continues to pepper the picture with sharp one-liners, it takes on an uneasy air of schmaltz which feels at odds with the material and with Bateman's characteristic hard-edged humour. The ever-reliable Brendan Gleeson helps hold it together with one of his funniest and most expressive performances.
The eponymous Harry in the first of the four French competition entries at Cannes, Harry, He's Here to Help, is an enigmatic character (played by Sergi Lopez from Western) who inveigles his way into the life of a former schoolmate, Michel (Liam Gallagher lookalike Laurent Lucas), who has no recollection whatsoever of Harry when they happen to meet in a service station toilet. Soon, however, the wealthy Harry and his lover (Sophie Guillemin from L'Ennui) are staying at the run-down summer home of Michel, his wife (Mathilde Seigner) and their three children.
This thoroughly intriguing film is directed with aplomb - and under the influence of Hitchcock and Chabrol - by Dominik Moll, who collaborated on the devious screenplay with Gilles Marchand. Its sly, teasing plotline frequently echoes the scenario of The Talented Mr Ripley - or so it seems, because Moll stays several steps ahead of his audience and keeps us guessing all the way.
The consequences are equally unpredictable in Neil LaBute's often uproariously funny Nurse Betty, which is radically different in theme and tone from the director's sour and angry earlier movies, In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbours. Renee Zellweger is wonderfully sweet-natured as Betty, a naive, small-town Kansas waitress who is so traumatised by witnessing the brutal murder of her philandering, crime-dabbling husband (LaBute regular Aaron Eckhart) that she confuses real life with the medical soap opera to which she is addicted.
With the killers (Morgan Freeman and Chris Rock) on her trail, she sets out for Los Angeles to make contact with a character from the soap - a doctor played by an actor played by Greg Kinnear - with whom she is now convinced she has been involved. From this unlikely premise LaBute fashions a consistently witty movie which reflects perceptively on deceptions, delusions and role-playing in our media age as it reveals the intricate twists in the keen, knowing screenplay by John C. Richards and James Flamberg. The cast, all on rare form, also includes Allison Janney, Crispin Glover and Pruitt Taylor Vince.
Nurse Betty proved the more satisfying of the two American comedies in competition at Cannes this year, the other being Joel and Ethan Coen's O Brother, Where Art Thou?, which takes its title from the film planned by Joel McCrea's idealistic director in the Preston Sturges classic, Sullivan's Travels - and credits Homer's The Odyssey as the basis of its screenplay by the Coen brothers.
Set in 1930s Mississippi, this eccentric tall tale follows the quirky exploits of three escaped convicts, played by George Clooney, John Turturro and Tim Blake Nelson, who are advised by an elderly blind man that they will find their fortune at the end of a long and difficult journey.
Their encounters along the way include a young black musician (Chris Thomas King) who has sold his soul to the devil; a pseudo-homely, bad-tempered state governor (Charles Durning); a Cyclops figure in the duplicitous, one-eyed Bible salesman played by John Goodman; the crazed gangster, Babyface Nelson (Michael Badalucco); and Clooney's estranged wife (Holly Hunter), who is about to wed Durning's election rival named Homer (Wayne Duvall).
The episodic structure of the movie undermines it as a whole, rendering it less cohesive than the Coens' best work, and it tends to peter out towards the end. That said, there remains enough invention and imagination in it, along with such splendid setpieces as a Ku Klux Klan rally that's choreographed and shot like a Busby Berkeley musical. Clooney is delightfully droll as the vain convict with the Clark Gable moustache, there is a lovely bluegrass soundtrack, and the widescreen location cinematography of Roger Deakins is gorgeous.
The humour is sporadic and edgy in the Chinese entry, Devils On the Doorstep, the wildly protracted and self-indulgent second feature from writer-actor-director Jiang Wen after his more restrained and effective debut with In the Heat of the Sun. His new film is set in 1945, in northern China during the Japanese occupation, when a peasant (played by the director) is entrusted with hiding a captured Japanese soldier and his Chinese interpreter for five days - which turn into months, to the despair of the peasant and his village. There possibly is the kernel of an interesting movie in this shrill, laboriously paced picture which is pointlessly stretched out to almost three hours.
There are even longer films to come in the days ahead at Cannes, which made Blackboards all the more welcome. The shortest film in competition, it is directed by the 20-year-old Iranian film-maker, Samira Makhmalbaf, who made The Apple. Her new film opens on striking images of nine men carrying big blackboards on their backs as they travel through the mountain landscape along the Iran-Iraq frontier.
It is implicit that these men, itinerant teachers zealously seeking pupils to educate in return for any form of sustenance, are Kurdish outcasts in Iranian society. One of them tries to teach a group of illiterate boys hired to ferry heavy packages of contraband on their backs and across the border to Iraq. Another puts his blackboard up as a dowry to marry a young mother travelling with nomadic old men. Brief as it is, Makhmalbaf's film suffers from some rather tedious and overstated exposition, but it remains a bleak and illuminating picture of an unfamiliar culture.
Michael Dwyer's reports from Cannes continue on Friday's Vision page
