BRITS TRIUMPH IN CANNES 2008

Okay, Britain is not going to win the Palme D’Or this year. It has no films in the main competition. But it is not the end of the world. The country has half a dozen excellent films featuring large in Cannes' other big strands and may well come away with some important silverware.

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But Cannes is as much a Market – a place for buying and selling films - as a Festival and in this Market, Britain is likely to do very well indeed.

Just look at the big titles now ready to hit British cinemas in the next few months and to be sold globally if they have not done so already.

John Maybury’s astonishing Edge Of Love will be released at the end of June. Ostensibly about Dylan Thomas (Matthew Rhys) it features big performances from Keira Knightley and Sienna Miller that will be the subject of much daydreaming and discussion.

Batman will be back in July, disguised at The Dark Knight, with director Christopher Nolan showing no signs of creative fatigue in his efforts to help Christian Bale bring unforeseen depths to such a cartoon character.

In August, Knightley in back in costume and back in trouble as the tantalising 18th century Duchess Georgina in The Duchess, living a life of luxury and directed with verve by Saul Dibb, who made his name dealing with drugs and depression on a very different kind of 'sink' estate in London.

What's this? More period drama in early October, with Hayley Atwell sporting the 1940s costumes in cinema’s big take on Evelyn Waugh’s celebrated novel Brideshead Revisited.

At least the same week will bring some contemporary entertainment in the shape of How To Lose Friends And Alienate People, with Simon Pegg standing in for journalist Toby Young as the man who can have everything that NY magazines can offer, yet still find some way to throw it all away.

Then the Christmas fare. First course, The Reader, with Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes, directed by the audacious Stephen Daldry, in a story of a young German boy who has an affair with an older woman only to later find out she had been an Nazi prison guard.

And Winslet again, with Leonardo DiCaprio this time, to open the new year with Revoutionary Road, an explosive tale of shattered suburban dreams in 50s America.

There are seven British films that will be much talked about in Cannes. But they are only the tip of the iceberg. Or, in Cannes, the tip of the ice cream cone.

Still to come this year are the acknowledged favourites Bond, Potter and Narnia (starring a new Prince, Ben Barnes, above), along with some lesser known but tantalising titles like An Education (a 60s mismatched love affair).

Not to mention the rumour mills about pictures in early stages, such as a new BBC film of Jane Eyre headed by Ellen (Juno) Page, which leaves the imagination perpelxed, and a first stab at Martin Amis’s seedy novel London Fields directed by David Mackenzie, who has decisively proved his talent for such off the wall material.

So no Palm D’Or this year alas. But a lot of excellent British films to take the mind off the matter at home and around the world.

Posted May 7, 2008.