At 7.30am on Cannes's main strip people wearing dinner jackets and cocktail dresses held handwritten signs that read "Only God Forgives", triple-underlined, and "Please! Only God Forgives!" They might have been members of a doomsday cult, one with an imperious dress code, but no: a Ryan Gosling film was about to premiere in the Grand Théâtre Lumière and this lot were ticketless, hoping by dressing smartly to pick up last-minute invites. They looked on while several hundred of us filed in for 90 minutes of early-morning ultra-violence.
Moviegoing at the festival runs round the clock. There are marquee screenings not long after dawn and teatime premieres; four-hour Holocaust documentaries for supper and Asian gumshoe flicks at midnight. The Gosling film, Only God Forgives, directed by Drive's Nicolas Winding Refn, made extremely strange breakfast viewing. In the back row an usher discreetly napped while Refn's tense, brutal movie unfurled.
Gosling plays Julian, a taciturn hood who, with his brother Billy (Tom Burke), runs a drugs cartel in Bangkok. Billy, the volatile one, murders a teenage prostitute which brings on the wrath of a local police chief, Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm). Dumpy and balding, a karaoke fiend who dresses in a short-sleeved shirt, Chang makes an unlikely avenger but with a sharp little sword he takes decisive action against the brothers. Further killings bring in Julian's mother Crystal (played by Kristin Scott Thomas, almost unrecognisable as a gravy-tanned blonde) and then things really get messy. Creative use is made of whisky tumblers, woks, hair pins. I quite enjoyed it.
On every newsstand in Cannes there's a magazine with Gosling on its cover, alongside the headline: L'art du cool. The Canadian actor clearly has it, and in Only God Forgives he's a magnetic presence – unblinking, unhurried, outfitted for Refn's gruesome finale in buttondown shirt and waistcoat, the costume as wonderfully inappropriate as those early-birds wearing bow-ties and high heels outside.
However, as Cannes entered its second week, I began to fear for the industry's wardrobe professionals. The thumbs that must have been twiddling on film sets around the world… Nakedness has been very big this year. "The nudiest festival I can remember," said one Cannes regular after a run of screenings including Rebecca Zlotowski's Grand Central, Alain Guiraudie's Stranger by the Lake, François Ozon's Young and Beautiful and Abdellatif Kechiche's Blue Is the Warmest Colour, the leads in all spending as much time in the buff as not. Even Paolo Sorrentino's The Great Beauty, about growing old in despair, has its share of skin – the introduction of a major character via lengthy striptease, for instance. But the Italian director's surreal, beguiling film has plenty besides to recommend it.
We meet Jep (Toni Servillo, who starred in Sorrentino's 2008 hit Il Divo), a suave Italian novelist who turns 65 and realises he's wasted his life carousing and party-hopping around high-society Rome. "I didn't just go to parties," Jep muses, "I had to have the power to make them a failure." For all its stranger whimsies (a full-cast opening dance sequence, a CGI giraffe, the unremarked death of a major character), Sorrentino's script is packed with terrifically precise one-liners. You're a misogynist, Jep is told, to which he replies that he's a misanthrope: "Where hate's involved you must aim high." Later, at a plastic surgeon's clinic, a woman trying to lose weight tells her doctor: "I've just been to India. I had amazing dysentery."
The bleak humour of plastic surgery – expensive, hubristic, its results so often cruelly comical – is embraced by Steven Soderbergh in his satisfying new work, Behind the Candelabra. A biopic about Liberace (played by Michael Douglas), it is for the most part the tale of a relationship in the late 1970s between the pianist, known to his friends as Lee, and long-term boyfriend Scott (Matt Damon). Their money-nourished romance is tender at first then fractious and unhappy. Beneath the love story Soderbergh and his team of make-up artists tell a fascinating visual story about facial reconstruction. And re-reconstruction. And re-re-reconstruction. With the aid of an alcoholic surgeon (Rob Lowe), Lee and Scott work on themselves tirelessly, getting smoother, shinier, sharper and finally so surgery-wrecked that Scott is afraid to show his face to his family. Lee, for a stretch, has to sleep with his eyes open.
The two leads are tremendous, and Douglas is the popular choice to win a best actor award at festival's end. But it's the sense of invited physical ruin that lingers. It certainly made it harder, post-credits, to stroll out into Cannes, where the pinched lips and harassed foreheads are a depressingly familiar sight.
Saturday night inside the festival's giant screening room, the Salle Debussy, had the feel of a party. It was the first showing of the new Coen brothers film, and once every seat had gone people flopped down on stairs and sat crossed-legged in the aisles. It was worth the cram. Inside Llewyn Davis is a hoot. It follows a fortnight in the life of luckless Llewyn (Oscar Isaac), a throaty folk singer in 1960s Manhattan who has begun to feel that jumper-wearing harmony groups are making his rootsier, uncommercial music redundant. In Big Lebowski fashion the Coens launch Llewyn on a meandering quest involving cats, a Chicago impresario and several memorable cameos, including John Goodman's jazzman (a heroin addict and practitioner of black magic) and Stark Sands's rising strummer, a private in the army who cheerfully announces: "Armaments are not my thing."
Carey Mulligan has fun in her supporting role as the foul-mouthed folkie, Jean. "Everything you touch turns to shit," she tells Llewyn. "You're like King Midas's idiot brother." This, though, is Oscar Isaac's movie. An actor with a strange CV (he was the bearded bad guy in Ridley Scott's Robin Hood… and not a lot else), Isaac wrestles a place alongside the best of the Coens' unorthodox heroes. In scattered musical interludes he performs convincing and anguished folk songs which, unusually, are given the space to play out from start to finish. Quipping through Llewyn's layered misfortune – Woody Allen with a guitar case – Isaac never lets pathos squash the humour in the Coens' superb script. "Don't you ever think about the future?" asks an exasperated Jean, to which Llewyn can only reply, after a think, "Like flying cars?"
Guillaume Canet, the French actor-turned-director who made 2011's Little White Lies, is a great favourite here at Cannes. His picture is on a bus stop in the centre of town – not an advert, just a big blow-up of his face: have a bit of Guillaume while you wait. I worry that picture might have to be taken down after his new film, Blood Ties, premiered last week. This is Canet's first English-language work, a 70s-set cop thriller co-scripted with James Gray, and it's a lolloping, two-and-a-half hour dud – terribly paced, and boring enough for someone in the audience to flip open his phone and text for a good half-hour in the middle. It said much about the general malaise, at the screening I attended, that nobody told him not to.
Clive Owen plays a crook, Chris, new out of jail. His brother Frank (Billy Crudup) is a cop, charged to keep Chris out of trouble. Do events come to a head? Over a heist? A heist that involves crashed Cadillacs and stubby pistols and calls for back-up and crim-on-crim betrayal? Check, check, check. Little White Lies had a marathon running time that was justified, I think, by a well-meant effort to give room to a large group of central characters. No such excuse for Blood Ties, which is lifeless from Chris and Frank's first encounter, and finds poor James Caan and Marion Cotillard lost in fuzzy supporting roles.
The trouble is that Blood Ties has none of the flinty, worked-on little lines that enliven the best thrillers and help distract from implausibilities of plot. By the end, exhausted by cliché, I'd resorted to simply writing down the worst: "You're a fine officer but this looks bad, Frank…" "Trust me, this is just the beginning…" "I've never been more sane in my life!"
After its premiere, one of the local Cannes newspapers panned the film, writing of Canet, "alt mal intégré la difference entre hommage et caricature". Although I can't translate that precisely I'm pretty sure I agree.
Better, brighter, sharper was Valeria Bruni Tedeschi's comedy A Castle in Italy. It tells of retired screen actor Louise (played by the director, who also co-wrote the script) and her family, once very wealthy and now in decline. Louise, in her 40s, wants a baby with her younger boyfriend, Nathan (Louis Garrel). Meanwhile her brother (Fillipo Timi) copes with a degenerative illness and her mother (Marisa Borini) ponders selling the family Breughel to settle debts. Scenes between Louise and Nathan are the nimblest, benefiting from great economy of storytelling. In conversation with a minor character, Louise is seized mid-sentence by an impulse to see Nathan and literally sprints across Paris to meet him. That's how you keep things moving! (Canet, let's guess, would have had her ease upright, muse over a route, tie her shoelaces, choose a coat…)
This is a strongly autobiographical work, based on Bruni Tedeschi's recent real-life experiences and in which she cast both her own mother and her only-just-ex-boyfriend to play their fictional counterparts. (Alas no role for Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, the director's sister.) Plenty of people I spoke to in Cannes found A Castle in Italy too pleased with itself, even a bit offensive, given that its central thrust is the story of family learning to cope with being slightly less than ultra-rich. Still, I found it funny and touching, a close study of the fussy relationships between family members. It was also notable as the only film by a female director in competition for the Palme d'Or.
Will it get the prize? Probably not. Cannes regulars have been having trouble picking a winner this year, resorting to rumour, second-guessing, everything but tea leaves. Didn't somebody see Nicole Kidman, one of the judges, well up while watching Like Father, Like Son, the Hirokazu Kore-eda film about cute kids? Alexander Payne's latest, Nebraska, another of his comedy-dramas about an ageing man adrift, went down well but there's a feeling Steven Spielberg, chairing the jury, won't want to toss the prize to an American peer. The arthouse crowd adored Blue Is the Warmest Colour, a three-hour epic about a lesbian love affair; my choice would be Sorrentino. At the time of writing, there's still a Jim Jarmusch (Only Lovers Left Alive) and a Roman Polanski (Venus in Fur) to come. The winner will be announced on Sunday night.
This article was corrected on 29 May to state that Ryan Gosling is Canadian, not American.
