Cannes Film Festival: Where did all the fizz go?

It's generally expected that critics return from Cannes with at least one story headlined, "Riviera Row Over Shock Sensation" or "Croissants Fly In Croisette Fury". "Disappointment on the Côte d'Azur" doesn't have the same ring. But this year you wonder how it could have gone wrong. With a competition line-up including Richard Linklater, Sofia Coppola, Nanni Moretti and Donnie Darko whiz-kid Richard Kelly, at least it couldn't be dull, could it?

But it largely was - there were pleasures, let-downs, some egregious duds, but very little to get either upset or ecstatic about. Even the worst were simply turgid: you would have given anything for the euphoric dreadfulness of Vincent Gallo's instantly notorious The Brown Bunny.

You want the bad news first? Richard Kelly's eagerly-awaited Southland Tales featured a futuristic airship called the Megazeppelin, and a Megazeppelin was just what the film was - one made of lead, at that. When Donnie Darko became a cult sensation, too many people whispered in Kelly's ear that he was a genius: unfortunately, some of them had their chequebooks to hand. His follow-up is a laborious bloated folly - a sci-fi farrago about the apocalypse, set in a near-future LA, with Sarah Michelle Gellar as a porn star, Dwayne ("The Rock") Johnson as an amnesiac actor, and a cast of dwarves, grotesques, anarcho-hippies and Justin Timberlake. It's incoherent, appallingly acted, altogether an agony at two hours 40 minutes.

The competition's one real controversy was Marie-Antoinette, admired by many but so vociferously booed by the sans-culottes at its press show that you feared that Sofia Coppola would be the first auteur beheaded on the Palais steps. The film doesn't quite sustain the quirky Altmanesque grace of its opening, but it's a conceit that generally pays off to heady effect: make something that looks like a traditional frocks-and-porcelain drama, but lace it with Eighties pop from the likes of Gang of Four and Bow Wow Wow ("I Want Candy" over panoramas of petits fours). Kirsten Dunst is affecting, if predictably dizzy, as the ingenue who falls into the star role at Versailles - a metaphor for contemporary stardom, or for la Coppola's own position as pampered Hollywood royalty? But as an essay on the dangers of conspicuous expenditure, the film was something of an own goal - the cake budget alone must have been astronomical.

If you were after something more economical, measured and adult, there was nothing to equal Climates. Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan daringly casts himself and his wife Ebru Ceylan as an Istanbul couple who split up while on holiday, then meet up again in snowbound Anatolia. Ceylan uses High-Definition video, with all its precision and clarity, to get under his characters' skin with an acuity comparable to Ingmar Bergman, but he also creates some of the breathtakingly stark landscape shots that made his Uzak so special. It's a small film, which often counts as a criticism in Cannes, but it's intensely personal, and confirms Ceylan as one of today's real auteurs - one of those film-makers who, as they say here, has a signature.

The competition's one absolute left-field revelation was The Family Friend, by Paolo Sorrentino, Neapolitan director of surprise art-house hit The Consequences of Love. I can't begin to say how crazy and inspired this film is - a fragmented, Fellini-esque parable about a loathsome yet oddly sympathetic moneylender. Veteran actor Giacomo Rizzi scuttles around a surreal provincial landscape as the ancient, goblin-like protagonist, while Sorrentino orchestrates a sometimes baffling narrative of corruption, exploitation and sexual betrayal.

Visually and narratively, it's popping with ideas, arguably too many to accommodate coherently, but I sincerely hope this fevered dream of a film gets a British release, as well as the Cannes recognition it deserves.

By Sunday night, we'll know who won the Palme d'Or, and smart money is on Volver, the latest from Pedro Almodóvar. It's a pleasure, if hardly a revelation, but it shows the man of La Mancha simplifying his game after the confused Bad Education. Penelope Cruz plays a Madrid housewife with her Marigold kitchen gloves laden with trouble - murdered husband, mother returned from the grave, lunch to cook for 30 - and all one can say is, "¡Que mujer!". Cruz is dazzling, more than making up for all those dodgy English-language performances. Witty, sparky, torridly sexy, she's a European star in the grand old-school mode of Sophia Loren.

The other critics' favourite for Palme d'Or is Babel, the latest from Mexican director-writer duo Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu and Guillermo Arriaga. If you've seen Amores Perros and 21 Grams, you'll know what to expect: but this multi-strander starring Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett and Gael Garcia Bernal takes the formula to a global level, with episodes set in Morocco, Mexico and Japan. This time, however, as the team shove their characters into harrowing, predictably interlinked crises, the result feels manipulative and forced. One French critic complained that the film summed up the current parlous state of world cinema; indeed, this self-important exercise is world cinema in the same way that Peter Gabriel is world music.

Other big names produced disappointment after disappointment. Nanni Moretti's The Caiman was an 8¹/2-style satire about Silvio Berlusconi. It's strident, messy and coarse, but on the credit side, released in Italy earlier this year, the film no doubt played a part in getting its target out of office.

US indie stalwart Richard Linklater offered Fast Food Nation, a fictionalised treatment of Eric Schlosser's book on the US meat racket, but Linklater might have done better with a documentary: this was contrived, shapeless and laden with sophomore slacker polemic. And my own personal sorrow was that lovable old Finnish gloomster Aki Kaurismäki, in Lights in the Dusk, came up with something less than business as usual, a hard-times story unleavened by his usual sardonic wit. Even his dog actor didn't have quite the canine charisma of his previous mutt thesps. Maybe it's time for the hard-living maestro to change his brand of vodka.

j.romney@independent.co.uk