Showing in the official selection at Cannes but out of competition, Christian Carion's Joyeux Noël (Happy Christmas) is a deeply moving anti-war drama re-enacting the 24-hour peace informally agreed by opposing troops in the trenches on Christmas Eve, 1914.
A German tenor instigates the truce when he sings Silent Night, and then the nearby Scots join in on the bagpipes. Soldiers hesitantly cross into no man's land, where they are soon sharing wine and chocolate, showing around pictures of the loves in their imperilled lives, and playing football in the snow.
Clearly, the conflict will never be the same for any of them, and an awareness of this prompts an outraged reaction and retribution from the officers safely away from the frontline.
This salutary story has been brought to the screen with great empathy, a striking visual style and superb production values. The fine international cast features Daniel Brühl, Guillaume Canet and Alex Ferns as the leaders of the German, French and Scottish regiments, along with Bruno Fuhrmann, Diane Krüger, Lucas Belvaux, Bernard Le Coq and Ian Richardson.
Showing in a Cannes sidebar, David Jacobson's Down in the Valley is a self-consciously modern western featuring yet another firmly etched portrayal from Edward Norton (one of its producers) as a volatile drifter obsessed with the trappings of the old west. A chance encounter with the daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) of a prison officer (David Morse) triggers off tragic events in an uneven, meandering movie that recovers in an imaginative, protracted climax. It also notably includes Rory Culkin, Geoffrey Lewis and Bruce Dern.
That film's US production company, Element Films, should not be confused with the Irish company of the same name, which produced Stephen Bradley's Dublin horror-comedy movie, Boy Eats Girl, launched in the Cannes market.
When lovelorn 17-year-old Nathan (David Leon) accidentally hangs himself, his mother (Deirdre O'Kane) resourcefully draws on voodoo mumbo jumbo to bring him back to life - not entirely successfully, as he returns with an intense desire to eat human flesh. The allegedly leafy Dublin suburbs are overrun by zombies in this entertainingly tongue-in-cheek romp, which amusingly transposes the US teen horror movie to a deftly employed Irish context.
The screenplay is by Derek Landy, who wrote Dead Bodies, and the cast includes Samantha Mumba, Laurence Kinlan, Denis Conway, and Tadhg Murphy, who steals the movie with elan. It goes on Irish release in September.
