23 May 2007, 3:28 PM
Time moves so fast in Cannes that things one saw from a few days ago are already lost in a fog of intervening films. However, it's great to be able to report that Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country For Old Men runs no such risk of being lost and forgotten during the course of the week.
An adaptation of novelist Cormac McCarthy's contemporary western, the film has tremendous authority both in its spare, confident style and formidable performances.

Josh Brolin is an ordinary trailerpark guy who makes the fatal mistake of lifting a case of cash from the site of a drug deal gone wrong, an action that triggers the remorseless, automaton-like killer Javier Bardem and sets in motion a manhunt across Texas. Resigned to the evil that men do, philosophical sheriff Tommy Lee Jones knows exactly where the situation is headed but attempts to limit the damage done nonetheless.
The film has flashes of grave humour, a strong sense of fatalism as the violent action becomes ever more frequent and deeply-felt, and some stunning set pieces that are amongst the best the Coens have pulled off (including one in which Brolin waits on a dark hotel room for Bardem's arrival, which outdoes the 'Danny Boy' sequence from Miller's Crossing).

After the dodgy comedies Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers, No Country finds the brothers back in the Blood Simple territory in which they thrive. It's a terrific thriller - scenes, images and exchanges carry real force and weight - and in Javier Bardem's killer Chigurh they have a bad-guy character who'll live in moviegoers' imaginations like Robert Mitchum's Harry Powell in The Night of the Hunter.
But that's not all from the Coens.

A special commission for the festival's 60th anniversary, To Each Their Own Cinema is a two-hour collection of 33 three-minute films by the likes of David Cronenberg, Roman Polanski, Wong Kar-Wai, Ken Loach, Walter Salles and so on. The theme is memories and feelings for cinema and the quality was, by and large, pretty low. However, a few stood out (thank goodness, because the festival is now running one before each feature, meaning I'm having to watch them all again), most notably episodes from Abbas Kiarostami, the Dardenne brothers and Lars Von Trier, whose short could start a trend amongst filmgoers of taking a hammer to the cinema to deal with persistent talkers.

Best of all though were the three sublimely funny minutes from the Coens, in which Josh Brolin's character from No Country - the trailerpark cowboy - finds himself in the foyer of an arthouse cinema trying to decide between Renoir's The Rules Of The Game and Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Climates. It's a playful mini-masterpiece, very generous in its view of how even supposedly difficult films can appeal to an unlikely audience.
Two classics from the Coens in as many days - so far Cannes 2007 belongs to them!