You'd think there was some sort of competition going on. In fact, it's been a while since such a concentration of A-list heavyweights have been vying for the Palme d'Or in Cannes – Michael Haneke, Pedro Almodóvar, Ken Loach, Paul Campion, Ang Lee .... However, this doesn't mean that the 62nd festival has been the best Cannes in memory: there have been few surprise discoveries, and more solid entries than masterpieces for the ages. Still, a consistently good time has been had by all – except, perhaps, by the odd auteur who is probably reconciled by now to the fact that he or she won't be walking off with a Palme at tonight's ceremony.
At the time of writing, we still have the new Gaspar Noé provocation to come, but in its second week the competition has one much-debated shocker to give him a run for his money. It is Antichrist, the latest from Danish showman Lars von Trier, and his first stab (believe me, stab is the appropriate word) at a horror film. Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg play a couple who visit a dark cabin in the woods: before long, sinister forces gather and the pair are going at it hammer and tongs (or rather, scissors and drills) in the mother of all marital tiffs.
The film piles on the Gothic paraphernalia – creepy mists, an already-notorious talking fox, even a shower of satanic acorns. It's all gruesome and utterly preposterous, not to mention extremely sexually explicit. But although the scares provide a front for von Trier's Strindberg-style sex-war theorising, it's still an overblown and very silly B-pic: call it "The von Trier Witch Project".
The week's big surprise was a cracking comeback from the great French veteran Alain Resnais. In the early 1960s, he changed the language of cinema with such puzzlers as Last Year at Marienbad, but of late he has explored a rather stuffy theatrical vein. Wild Grass sees Resnais finding a boisterous breath of new invention, spinning an extravagant, self-deconstructing, hugely entertaining story of unrequited love.
Crammed with delirious set design, red herrings, mischievous comedy and a dazzlingly inscrutable ending, Wild Grass showed a maestro rallying magnificently and – at the age of 87 – producing one of the liveliest, freshest films here.
Some other big names did their usual thing, for better or worse. Almodóvar's Broken Embraces was a film about film, with Penelope Cruz at her starriest as a screen diva. But despite flashes of visual brilliance, it was otherwise pretty much routine business for the man from La Mancha.
Ken Loach turned in a sturdy, relaxed comedy, Looking For Eric, about a man on the skids offered spiritual guidance from Eric Cantona. The football legend himself is an imposing, monolithic presence, but no Gérard Depardieu. But his co-star, the palindromic Steve Evets, is a screen natural, and his thoroughly likeable presence could give him a shot at the Best Actor award. As for the climax, when two busfuls of footie fans come to the rescue, it proves the old adage: "If it's blokes on a coach, then you're watching Ken Loach."
Tarantino's much-awaited, mystifyingly spelled Inglourious Basterds is a Second World War epic in which Brad Pitt leads a squad of Jewish-American soldiers to occupied France to take Nazi scalps – so gruesomely that one was almost tempted to start a chorus of "Don't let's be beastly to the Germans". It is, of course, a movie about movies, with the script harping on about Leni Riefenstahl, rather than blaxploitation, but otherwise it's the same prolix, obsessive old Quentin. I found it more entertaining than any Tarantino pic in ages, but it's more a series of overextended sketches than a fully conceived film. But there are some relishable performances – notably from Michael Fassbender in David Niven mode as, wait for it, a British film-critic-turned-war-hero, and from Austrian actor Christoph Waltz as the slimiest and most stylish screen Nazi in years. Watch him snap up all the Hollywood baddie roles traditionally offered to John Malkovich.
More fascinating Fascism came in Vincere, a grandly operatic piece by Marco Bellochio, about Mussolini's abandoned and mistreated first wife Ida Dalser. An imposing historical evocation, as well as an implicit attack on Silvio Berlusconi, Vincere is a magnificent showcase for Giovanna Mezzogiorno, who makes her Ida a tragic heroine of grand proportions.
The other key political film here was The Time That Remains, by Palestinian director Elia Suleiman – an eccentric memoir of his upbringing in Nazareth, and a tribute to his militant father, all carried off in a highly composed poker-faced style recalling Jacques Tati and Buster Keaton.
Of all the competition films, the overall critics' favourite is a jail drama by French director Jacques Audiard. A Prophet is about a young North African man who becomes a foot soldier for a Corsican prison gang, then rises through the criminal ranks. Audiard (who directed The Beat That My Heart Skipped in 2005) is a past master of tough low-life crime cinema, and his sure touch ensures that even the more improbable elements of his story – such as his hero out on day leave to pull off a gang killing – come off grippingly. It's not the most innovative film here, but its classic thriller toughness is unimpeachable.
But despite stiff competition, the film most likely to stand out as the gem of this year's festival comes from Cannes regular, Austria's Michael Haneke. The White Ribbon – subtitled "A German children's story" – is a departure for him: a historical drama set in a village on the eve of the First World War. Strange crimes are being committed, the local children are acting strangely and dark secrets begin to show through the curtain of bourgeois respectability.
The film is more quietly disturbing than most Haneke films, and is also extremely beautiful, its austere black and white compositions modelled on the period photographs of August Sander. I'll await a second viewing to decide whether this really is Haneke at his very best, but for now I suspect that The White Ribbon will be the film that will most resound in the mind after the red carpet has been rolled up and put in mothballs for yet another year.
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