WORLD CINEMA NEWS

A sensation at Sundance and Cannes, the closing night film at Edinburgh will end the festival in style. It's the story of brilliant comic book writer Harvey Pekar, whose American Splendor series chronicles his own life with unflinching wit and honesty. Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini's movie is part adaptation, part biopic, part documentary: a formally brilliant piece of cinema that's also funny, moving and uplifting. With fabulous performances from Paul Giamatti, Hope Davis and the real Harvey Pekar, this is not to be missed.

The opening night film is cracker. David Mackenzie's adaptation of Alexander Trocchi's cult novel is subtle, sexy and superbly played by Ewan McGregor, Tilda Swinton and Peter Mullan.

Ewan MacGregor shines in the first word-of-mouth hit of the festival. Sukhdev Sandhu reports

Cannes always loves a good scandal and the first one of 2003 arrived on the weekend in the form of Scottish director David Mackenzie’s Young Adam. A funny, scabrous, brilliantly acted and photographed film, it's the first word-of-mouth hit of the festival. That it's not competing in the main competition this fortnight has already led to outrage among critics.

Based on a novel by Alexander Trocchi - smack addict, wife-pimper, friend of William Burroughs, and together with BS Johnson one of the finest post-war British novelists yet to be fully honored - Young Adam is an intellectual rake's progress, an existential barge movie. Ewan MacGregor gives his best performance in ages as Joe, a would-be novelist who goes to work on a canal boat in 1950s Glasgow. He's young and good-looking and speaks sentences (superficially) more poetic than the curt syllables spat out by his boss (Peter Mullan), with whose tough-talking but lonely wife Ella (Tilda Swinton) he begins a cramped and below-deck affair. This secret is intercut with another: his part in the death of a student (Emily Mortimer).

Mackenzie splices horror, black humor, dreamy sensuality and social observation into a consistently rich and unpredictable narrative. Nothing prepares viewers for a savage sex scene that is somewhere between American Pie and Last Tango in Paris. Thanks to cinematographer Giles Nuttgens, we also see the beauty of Scottish industrial landscapes: the glistening of gasworks after rainfall; the effect of sunlight on the rusting hulls of boats. His debut, The Last Great Wilderness, was promising, but Young Adam confirms Mackenzie as the most excitingly errant young director in Britain. Also showing out of the main competition is Rithy Panh's astonishing documentary, S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine. A Cambodian Shoah, the painfulness of watching it is almost as great as the importance of doing so. Panh brings together Vann Nath, a village painter, with some of his former torturers at the Security Bureau in Phhom Penh. Of the 17,000 prisoners held captive there from 1975 to 1979, he is one of only three to have survived. The film narrates a dark, dark narrative of methodical starvation, beatings and rape. What's worse, though, is to hear the guards speak of themselves as victims, hapless obseyers of state ideology, but showing no remorse to the real victims of their violence. They re-enact their daily patrols and we get an awful feeling that three decades later they're still the same murderous bastards. S21 is as much concerned with trying to get Cambodians not to forget their pasts, as it is with rekindling the facts of specific barbarisms. It is by some way the most important film of this festival.

Prima donna: Minnie Driver in Hope Springs

A romantic comedy, a classic adaptation and a Scottish road movie - three new British films all have their charms, even the one featuring Minnie Driver's trademark prima donna routine, says Sukhdev Sandhu

Hope springs infernal when it comes to films starring Minnie Driver. All too often she comes across like a spoiled child bawling her eyes out because she's just dropped a lollipop on the floor, a flouncy prima donna kicking up a fuss upon learning that she can't have the restaurant table she wants. How odd, then, that her latest role is in a romantic comedy, a piece of miscasting on a par with asking Daniella Westbrook to play Celia Johnson's part in a remake of Brief Encounter. Hope Springs, directed by Marc Herman, is based on a novel by Charles Webb, writer of The Graduate, and stars Colin Firth as Colin Ware, an artist who flees England to go to Hope, Vermont, after he learns that his fiancee, Vera (Driver), is going to marry someone else. O lucky man, one might think, but he takes it all very badly and finds solace in drawing pictures of the local townsfolk.

Their eccentricity extends to their high regard for his sketches, which, like all sketches in the movies, are comically poor. Ware, though emotionally constipated, finds that he is doted upon by Mandy, a "trained care-giver" played by Heather Graham. She likes her whisky, drives pell-mell through the local streets, and drops her clothes off within a day of meeting him. Not surprisingly, he begins to feel better. Then Vera rolls into town, turning her nose up at everybody and everything. Ware is meant to be torn between the two women, but Driver pouts and preens so melodramatically, it's hard to see why he was so upset at losing her in the first place. It's not much of a plot, and in many ways this is not much of a film.

The characterization is as skimpy as Vera's dresses, and the clunky soundtrack features a shockingly bad cover version of 10cc's I'm Not in Love. Some of the early scenes, especially those showing Ware freshly arrived in New England, may remind us of Brassed Off, Herman's superb film about ex-miners in the throes of social and mental breakdown. Such darkness is fleeting. And yet, despite everything, the film flickers by painlessly enough. Perhaps it's Ashley Rowe's russet photography; perhaps it's Colin Firth's pleasing drollery; maybe it's just the lovely summershine we've been enjoying these last few weeks - but Hope Springs is by no means as unwatchable as you might expect. Still, it's not a patch on I Capture the Castle, an adaptation of a novel by Dodie Smith that MGM tried and failed to film as long ago as 1943. Set in a near-idyllic rural past, and populated by fruity-voiced, middle-class people who orate magisterially about art and attend fancy dinners, it sounds like the kind of heritage drama that used to be popular in the mid-1980s. However, directed understatedly by Tim Fywell, scripted beautifully by Heidi Thomas, and blessed with uniformly excellent performances from its cast, it avoids all tweeness.

Cassandra and Rose Mortmain (Romola Garai and Rose Byrne) live with their idiosyncratic and bohemian family in a teetering, badly heated castle in Suffolk. Their father (played by the louche and spiky Bill Nighy) is a wasted sot, a stick-thin author who has spent 12 years failing to recapture the brief flicker of genius that was evident in his one and only novel. His wife, Topaz (Tara Fitzgerald), is unable to goad or inspire him. Bills pile up and are left unpaid. Eventually, a couple of handsome American bachelor boys (Henry Thomas and Marc Blucas) arrive, eager to see the estate they have

inherited. They, like us, are quickly smitten by the two sisters, not knowing that the girls see them as cash cows. Soon, though, Cassandra and Rose start tussling with each other, the castle itself is neglected, and the film becomes less bucolic and gambolling, more sad and painful. I Capture the Castle is a film that, albeit topped up with lingering and by no means unwelcome shots of Tara Fitzgerald dancing naked in the rain, recalls the kind of program that once upon a time was commonly seen on the BBC on Sunday afternoons. It has a sense of proportion, balanced elegantly between levity and melancholy, eloquence and wordiness. It derives much of its beauty from the rolling, verdant landscapes, but never loses sight of the fact that it is the characters - their loves and their squabbles, their fear of bankruptcy both financial and creative - that matter most. For all its charm, the film is also hard and flinty, with many tough insights into the necessary selfishness of desire. Like Dodie Smith's book itself, the character of Stephen (Henry Cavill), a local family hand who is in love with Cassandra, is somewhat underwritten. His heart remains an unexplored cave. Still, it's Romola Garai as Cassandra who steals the film. It seems scarcely believable that this is her first major role; she captures her character in all its complexity - her self-conscious naivety, her observational wit, her arty pretension and her child-like wonder, her selflessness as well as her blossoming sense of self. Hard it is to decide whether it would be better to be her or to spend the rest of your life with her. Actors who provoke that kind of dilemma are rare indeed.

The Last Great Wilderness is also set in the countryside. An erratic but always compelling cross between The Wicker Man and Lars Von Trier's The Kingdom, it's that rare beast - a Scottish road movie. It follows anti-hero Charlie (Alastair Mackenzie), who is driving to Skye to burn down the house of the man who stole his wife, and his temporary friend, a faux-Spaniard gigolo (Jonathan Phillips), who is on the run from a couple of gangland heavies who want to cut off his balls. They arrive at a strange retreat whose motley crew includes a dying old woman, a fat sex addict and an ex-churchman with paedophilic urges. The movie, shot on chill-inducing digital video by director David Mackenzie, never quite knows what it's doing. Is it a surreal send-up of Highland lore? A dark redemption tale about the importance of letting go some of the negative energies that stop us from truly living? A hipper version of an avant-garde classic such as Andrew Kotting's This Filthy Earth? Its own uncertainty keeps us alert and guessing. Meanwhile, some of the shots are hard to forget: Charlie trampolining in a forest; a joyful wake in which the retreat crazies walk across hot coals. Any film scored by the pioneering and ceaselessly adventurous Scottish band the Pastels has got to be good. And The Last Great Wilderness is better than good. Funny, grotesque, moving, it's a genuinely fresh and emphatically independent work from a major new directorial talent.

Nicolas Winding Refn made a splash with his last film, Bleeder. This one – a surreal murder mystery scripted by Hubert Selby Jr, starring the dependably marvellous John Turturro – is being compared to Lynch and Kubrick.

Jim Sheridan's latest is a semi-autobiographical tale of an Irish family moving to New York. Starring Samantha Morton, it sounds like the kind of big-hearted crowd-pleaser that festival audiences love.

A bold, fascinating experiment, Lucas Belvaux's The Trilogy builds three feature films, in three different genres (police thriller, romantic comedy, marital melodrama) from the same six characters, all living in the same town.

Cremaster Cycle
The festival is screening Matthew Barney's epic cycle of art films in its entirety. Start with Cremaster 4, the first in the series, or be brave and book yourself in for all seven hours.

Crimson Gold
Definitely not your average Iranian film. The director of The Circle, Jafar Panahi, exposes the hidden divides of his country, but through a mix of Mike Leigh-style comedy and gangster film action.

Comandante
Oliver Stone interviewed Fidel Castro for three days straight to make this documentary portrait. This version features new material that Stone added in response to criticisms of not pushing the Cuban leader hard enough.

I'll Sleep when I'm Dead and The Terminal Man
I'll Sleep When I'm Dead is Mike Hodges' first film since Croupier, and it's another gangland thriller starring Clive Owen. The Terminal Man is a new director's cut of his 1974 sci-fi drama.

Awards - 2003 Cannes Film Festival

'It was a kiss. It happens all the time'

Singer Patricia Kaas is better known in Britain for kissing a married man than for selling records. Harry de Quetteville meets her

Friends: Jeremy Irons and Patricia Kaas in Cannes

Patricia Kaas, her pale blue eyes glistening in the gloom of the somber hotel, would like everyone to know that she is not unhappy. Nor is she timid. Nor depressed. Nor lonely. And definitely not sad. "I am not sad. I am not sad. I am not sad," she insists. "But I am a human being. Sometimes, I wake up and the skies are grey and everything's horrible."

On the surface, there is little for her to be sad about. For Patricia Kaas is a beautiful woman, with skin drawn tightly over crisp-edged bones that owe everything to her German mother. And inside this elegant, almost frail-looking 35-year-old is a voice that has made her rich and famous. She is a sultry French superstar, celebrated for singing like Edith Piaf and looking like Marlene Dietrich.

It's not a bad combination, and it's helped shift many millions of records across the world. Few of them, perhaps, have ended up on the shelves of British or American shoppers - eternally skeptical of foreign talent. But they love her in Moscow. She goes down a storm in Hanoi. In Germany and Japan, her slinky outfits and capacity to belt out the hits have secured her a loyal following. Above all, they adore her in France, where she is treasured as an enduring talent to put the modish waifs of pop stardom to shame. She was around before Vanessa Paradis, and she has remained in the limelight long after the Lolita charms of Paradis - Mrs Johnny Depp - have faded from view.

She is often pigeonholed as the French Madonna. But though she shares Madonna's taste for hard work, she doesn't play the pop game, and has no appetite for the celebrity life. She has woven herself into the French cultural fabric discreetly, but indelibly, much as did Charles Trenet, Georges Brassens or Jacques Brel. It would be no surprise if, half a century from now, her voice a few notches deeper, she was as much an icon as those greats. Her moody and intimate numbers have a knack of appealing to fans of every age and class. For all that, she was virtually invisible on the British radar until recently, when, quite by accident, she stirred things up very nicely. If you want to attract attention in London, there can be few better ways of doing so than by grabbing one of Britain's much-loved leading men - a married one, at that - and planting a distinctly French smacker on his lips outside a trendy Soho nightspot.

In July last year, Jeremy Irons, who has been married to Sinead Cusack for almost three decades, was on the receiving end of Kaas's kisses. Suddenly, the rumors began to fly. Had Kaas, free and single, done the dirty on Mrs Irons and snatched away her husband? After all, Kaas and Irons had been closeted away together for months in such romantic settings as Morocco and Paris, where they had been filming the forthcoming And Now Ladies and Gentlemen, a romantic thriller about a jazz singer and a British jewel thief. The film's director, Claude Lelouch, revealed that the pair had formed a "magical leading couple bond" during shooting of the film, which is a rare foray into acting for Kaas. "It's hypnotic, incredible," Lelouch said at the time. "At the end of two days with Patricia, Jeremy told me how impressed he was with her." Then, just when the dust seemed to be settling on the episode, up popped Irons and Kaas in Cannes, when the film closed the festival. Hand in hand, they stepped across the famous red carpet, as camera shutters clicked like crazy. The chemistry seemed undeniable.

Surely, Patricia Kaas, one of the most reticent and scandal-free celebrities in France, a woman who, by her own admission, "doesn't like going out much", hadn't turned into a man-stealing predator? She sighs at the very thought of it, and at the limitless and incomprehensible prurience of the British. "We just kissed each other," she says. "It was a kiss. When I read that we were supposed to be having an affair, it made me laugh, because I'm a single woman. But for Jeremy, it was a problem. He's a married man; a man with commitments. "It was the end of the filming and we had dinner and we had a drink, but that was it. It happens every night in Paris. I kissed Claude Lelouch, too, but no one seemed interested in that."

For her, the biggest consequence of the episode is that she has lost a good friend. "It's a shame because, afterwards, I stayed in touch with Jeremy, and though I would love to call him when I am in London so we could go and have a bite to eat, I can't. The moment we sit down in a restaurant together, someone will take a photo and the whole scandal mill will be off again." Indeed, Kaas hardly seems a very convincing man-stealer. Nervously wrapping her hands one around the other, the words spill out anxiously as she recalls her childhood and her route to stardom. Despite those chiselled Germanic features which seem so aristocratic, Kaas grew up in a poor family with six sisters and brothers, on the Franco-German border. Her father was a coalminer and her mother, to whom she was very close, pushed her towards singing. The rest of the journey towards fame and fortune reads like a classic celebrity fairy tale. She started performing in concerts at the age of eight and, by the time she was 13, she was singing cabaret at a club across the German border in Saarbrucken, every Saturday night. It was there, aged 19, that she was talent-spotted by a local architect, who pulled a few strings and helped her to record a demo tape in Paris. The tape eventually landed on the desk of Gerard Depardieu. Intoxicated by the country girl with the delicate looks and the smoky vamp voice, he produced her first single, Jealous, which led to a series of hits. Since then, Kaas has been at the top of her profession - although she has undergone numerous dramatic makeovers to maintain her durability. "People tried to make me something that I wasn't at the beginning of my career," she admits, with one of the little self-deprecatory laughs that pepper her rapid-fire conversation. "Even Madonna went through that fishnets and bangles phase." The hairspray and oversized earrings have been replaced by the kind of relaxed chic - a pair of tailored green trousers, a gently frilled, off-the-shoulder silk top - that only comes at a price. But even though she "indulges a bit in clothes", Kaas is the antithesis of the brash, self-satisfied star. Rather, she often seems to need a good hug and a promise that everything will be all right.

Yet, success always has its bitter twist. For Kaas, it was that her mother, who had done so much to launch her career, died when she was 20 and on the threshold of stardom. Soon after, her father died and, 15 years on, she seems scarcely to have recovered. "I am not sad, but I am melancholic. When you lose your mother at 20 and then your father soon after, melancholia is part of your life," she says. Even now, she carries the teddy bear which she gave to her mother as she lay dying in hospital. Her romantic life has had its ups and downs, too. A six-year relationship with Belgian singer Philippe Bergmann ended badly, last year. She fled Paris, where she had lived since her career took off, for Zurich. "I wanted to get out. To breathe," she says. "I had split up with the man I loved. I felt suffocated." The split has been almost as upsetting as the death of her parents. "When we broke up, it was hard - thinking 'Perhaps I've already known the great love of my life'," she says. "When you are 25 or even 30, you can just do things. When you get to 35, things are different.

Time is more precious to me now. I've got my priorities." One of which, to complete the restless thirty something profile, is to have a baby. Though there is the slight problem of finding the right man.

"I don't have to find the man of my life," she says. "I just have to find the baby's father." Behind the delicate façade, there is a toughness and determination, born of years running a successful career in a notoriously tough business, that makes you think she'll succeed in her quest before too long. She's certainly making an effort, and is knocking down the protective wall that she says she built around herself as a young woman. "I always doubted myself," she says. "I doubted the way I looked, my body, my voice - everything. Before I did the film, I really lacked confidence in myself. I've never been the kind of person who can just go up to someone and start a conversation. But I am more open now." That must help when it comes to the dating game? "To meet a man today, you have to make the first move, and I wasn't brought up like that. It's difficult." But Kaas has discovered a secret weapon to overcome the problem. His name is Tequila and he was a present from Claude Lelouch after And Now Ladies and Gentlemen was finished. "He is a little Maltese dog, like a little white rat, really," she says, smiling broadly. "But he's great because, normally, people are too scared to come up and talk to me. But when I'm walking Tequila, they just come right up. He helps me to meet people."