Doing Cannes, Midlands style

Chris O'Dowd battles the Cannes elements. Photograph: Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images.

DARN YOU, Chris O’Dowd. You’ve brought the midlands weather with you. I meet the actor and comic – a native of Boyle, Co Roscommon – in a beachside tent that is struggling to resist a torrential downpour. Waves crash mean-spiritedly on the shore. Wind worries the tent-flaps. This is not how Cannes looks on the postcards.

“Yeah. This is Boyle. We’ve brought Boyle with us,” he says. “The festival is a lot bigger than I thought. It’s odd now because the rain has cleared the streets. When we came in there was so much mayhem. Everybody is promoting something.” O’Dowd is in town with a charming Australian film entitled The Sapphires.

Concerning an Irishman who gets to manage an Aboriginal soul group (shades of The Commitments), the picture played to great hurrahs at a late-night screening. His fiancée, the broadcaster and journalist Dawn Porter, was particularly moved. “I’d never imagined the cinema here was so big,” he says. “Getting a standing ovation was just mad. I looked around and Dawn was in tears.”

O’Dowd is a good man to talk to about the Cannes experience. He slightly shame-facedly admits that not only has he not previously been to this jamboree, he has never attended any sort of film festival. This is akin to starting your bobsled career on the Cresta Run.

“We thought this film was just going to get an Australian release and maybe a short run in the UK and Ireland,” he says. “Then the Weinstein Brothers picked it up and now we’re here at Cannes. It’s unbelievable. Ah, the parties are tough though. All those early mornings and late nights are tricky. I think I’m going to move here. It seems right. There are just so many parties.”

Ah, the Weinsteins. Bob and Harvey of that clan remain the most aggressive marketing team in the business. One hopes that they are taking good care of O’Dowd. Following the success of the hit comedy Bridesmaids, in which he played an amiable police officer, he finds himself in serious demand. He is in the new Judd Apatow film. He recently wrote and appeared in an autobiographical TV series called Moone Boy. He deserves special treatment.

“I’ve been surprised since the Weinsteins came on board how hands-on they’ve been. Harvey Weinstein brought me breakfast in bed this morning. He knows just how I like my eggs.” I think he’s joking.

It’s hard to overestimate the star wattage at Cannes. O’Dowd explains with boyish enthusiasm that he spotted Tom Hardy and Guy Pearce floating about La Croisette at the weekend. Those actors were in town for the premiere of John Hillcoat’s Lawless. But the red carpets swell with famous people who have nothing to promote. Apparently Jane Fonda and Jennifer Connelly are in town. One of the more bizarre sightings involved Cheryl Cole. It seems that the singer attended the premiere of Amour, the latest, defiantly high-brow film by Michael Haneke.

It is, thus, hardly surprising that luxury-goods manufacturers go out of their way to distribute their wares at Cannes.

O’Dowd and Dawn Porter were quite taken aback by their first visit to one of the cautiously named “gifting suites”.

“Oh, yeah, we had a great time with the gifting suites and whatnot,” he says. “I think that we got a honeymoon out of it. We’re going to have to chase that up.” Hang on a moment. Somebody gave them an entire holiday? “Yes. We went to the gifting suite and one place was promoting luxury resorts. It’s mostly dresses, moisturiser and things. But there was this place promoting a luxury hotel in Bora Bora. We told them we were looking for a honeymoon and they told us they’d give us four nights. Now, that’s some crazy shit.”

Get him. Chris really has hit the big time. I trust they tip the forelock when he returns to Boyle. “Oh it has changed. They treat me with a lot more disrespect. Ha ha!”

LIKE SOMEONE IN LOVE ***

Directed by Abbas Kiarostami Starring Rin Takanashi, Tadashi Okuno, Ryo Kase, Denden, Mihoko Suzuki, Kaneko Kubota

109 min, playing in competition

Abbas Kiarostami, the great Iranian director, has good reason to think himself Cannes royalty. Winner of the Palme d’Or for Taste of Cherry in 1997, he can now expect his films to walk into the main competition.

What funny beasts they have become. Certified Copy, a French release featuring Juliet Binoche, came across as a displaced variation on Harold Pinter. His new Japanese film plays like a slightly deadened comedy of manners. Many of the director’s tropes are still firmly in place: motivations are often obtuse; the camera is static; people spend an inordinate amount of time talking in motorcars. But working abroad has either changed him or (more likely) changed the way we see his films. They seem so much more like parlour games.

The latest experiment concerns Akiko (Rin Takanashi), an upmarket escort and student working in a glazed, neon-beautiful version of Tokyo. As the film begins, she is attempting to plan her latest date from a sleek, stylish bar. After a long taxi journey, she ends up in the home of an elderly professor (Tadashi Okuno) and quickly falls asleep.

The next day, confusions develop. Akiko’s angry boyfriend mistakes the old man for her grandfather and seeks relationship advice. The more they talk, the more confused the situation becomes.

Still best known for dusty tales set in the Iranian exterior, Kiarostami has somehow ended up directing a sex farce (with no sex) shot in the style of an upmarket commercial. Study hard and you will find him playing out familiar chess moves with his characters’ personalities. But the film is most notable for Katsumi Yanagijima’s gorgeous cinematography and for the well-maintained sense of galloping absurdity.

Despite his regal status, Kiarostami seems to attract more bovine booing from the often-irritating press pack than does any other major director. They made the noise at the end of Certified Copy. The new film’s hilariously sudden ending – featuring a jump-shock worthy of John Carpenter – set them off yet again.

For that reason alone, Like Someone in Love is worthy of recommendation.

ANTIVIRAL***

Directed by Brandon Cronenberg Starring Caleb Landry Jones, Sarah Gadon, Douglas Smith, Joe Pingue, Nicholas Campbell, Sheila McCarthy, Malcolm McDowell

117 min, playing in Un Certain Regard

Good grief. The rotten apple doesn’t fall too far from the maggoty tree.

When Brandon Cronenberg, son of David, ventured into film-making he must have known that parallels would be drawn with the older Canadian. Given that David is presenting a film in competition – his adaptation of Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis – the desire to compare and contrast was sure to prove plain irresistible. Well, Brandon has done nothing to nudge us in any other direction.

Even if Antiviral, playing here in Un Certain Regard, were directed by Joe Nobody, critics would still have pointed towards David’s early Canadian films. We are, once again, dallying with the gruesome body horror that characterised Shiver, Rabid and The Brood.

The picture imagines a future – blankly Canadian – in which obsession with celebrity has reached such an unhinged state that punters pay to have themselves infected with their idols’ diseases. The viruses are altered in order to stop them becoming infectious. One can, thus, happily enjoy Kylie Minogue’s stomach flu without fearing that it will spread to your dependants.

Things get complicated when an employee (Caleb Landry Jones, right) of the most successful clinic begins smuggling live viruses from the workplace in his own metabolism.

Are you following this? If so, you’re managing better than many critics at the press screening.

Cronenberg Jr demonstrates a promising gift for summoning neurotic unease. This universe, for all the polished surfaces, feels dirty, squalid and decadent. Few films have featured so much vomiting of blood. The pale Jones seems sickened to his very soul.

But the details of the plot are so muddled and overworked that it quickly becomes hard to maintain interest. To dally in the Cronenberg family aesthetic, the bloody innards of the story have been chopped into a bucket and flung carelessly at the screen.

Still, there’s enough going on here to suggest that the boy might eventually get to take over the company when dad retires. There’s a creepy thought.