Film-goers get used to certain narrative conventions over the course of their viewing lives. As Scream explained to us, if you say "I'll be right back", you've had it. Mr Right always shows up thinly disguised as a jerk. Grief is expressed by falling to one's knees and shouting "No!" as the camera zooms backwards into the sky. Different genres have their own ways of telegraphing what's going on. In telling you the plot they also tell you what kind of story - what kind of world - you're immersed in.
The beginning of this year's Cannes Film Festival, for example, seemed to draw on certain story-telling conventions with a distinctly Gothic flavour. There were rainstorms, freak waves clearing the beaches of bathers, clouds of volcanic ash disrupting air traffic. The industry market in the basement of the Palais des Festivals was filled with the rank smell of fear, perhaps exacerbated by a bad diet. An urchin in hand-me-downs could be seen clutching a hand-written sign: "Struggling writer - will work for food." Cannes has been in the grip of the pathetic fallacy: the woes of the film business seemed to be written across its skies.
By mid-festival the weather had brightened and the Croisette was jammed, per custom, with surreally good-looking people. Yet the official selection slate was still looking decidedly gloomy. Ridley Scott's Robin Hood, showing out of competition as the festival opener, is now widely regarded as the least merry man in the long history of the character. Contrarily Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps, Oliver Stone's blustering sequel to his Eighties business satire, might have benefited from some of Robin Hood's flinty realpolitik. Press areas were filled with the unmistakable sound of kvetching in a dozen languages.
Stephen Frears's comic-book adaptation Tamara Drew (from the Posy Simmonds graphic novel, itself a riff on Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd) has fared best of the non-competing slate. A bawdy comedy poking fun at the British countryside's middle-class enclaves, it stars Gemma Arterton as the titular heroine, a newly sophisticated city girl returning to the village where she grew up and setting hearts aflutter. Asked in a press conference why his film wasn't in the main competition, Frears joked that he "didn't want to lose", before saying he thought it would be "very, very cheeky" to place a comedy among the earnest contenders.
His cast seemed to share the bantering mood. Arterton was absent (she's in Hollywood for the premiere of Prince of Persia, or "The Princess and the Pea" as Frears pettishly called it) but Tamsin Greig and Dominic Cook were on hand to complain that Frears' directorial method amounted to laughing to himself and making the talent feel "insecure". Grieg, who is famous in Britain for her role in the agriculturally themed radio soap The Archers, claimed he told her: "You're only here because you know about farming." He objected: "I brought you to Cannes." "Oh thank you for getting me off the radio," she replied, eyelashes batting.
In the main competition the consensus critical favourite remains, at the time of writing, Mike Leigh's Another Year, a downbeat slice of British realism starring Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen as a couple whose solid marriage saves them from the misery and loneliness that swallows their associates. It's accomplished work but, critics claim, hardly a stretch for a director to whom quiet suburban despair comes as naturally as the pick of English character actors. Good stuff then, but, if you'll pardon the pun, perhaps not vintage.
Another highlight, rated by some as the pick of the festival, was Copie Conforme, a puzzling but resonant feature from Abbas Kiarostami, his first made outside Iran. The English baritone William Shimell, making his film debut, stars as a writer visiting Tuscany to promote his book, a philosophical inquiry into the importance of authenticity in works of art. Juliette Binoche's expatriate French antiques dealer takes a shine to him and the pair go on a very awkward date involving a good deal of aimless driving around, which is of course the director's trademark. It's a hypnotic and beautifully composed film, which could be in with a shout at the Palme d'Or - Kiarostami's second.
Events threaten to overshadow any such triumph, however. During the film's press conference, a call came in to say that the Iranian director Jaafar Panahi, who is currently in jail following Iran's post-election protests, had begun a hunger strike. He had been invited to sit on the Cannes competition jury. "The fact that a filmmaker has been imprisoned is intolerable," Kiarostami said. "It is art as a whole which is attacked." He also distributed copies of an open letter he had written calling for the director's release, "knowing that the impossible is possible". Binoche wept openly when Panahi's protest was announced. Later she praised Kiarostami's compassion. "He's humaniste, as we say in French," she said, "which has a very specific resonance in our history, and in our way of being different from the world."
In what has so far been a rather downbeat year for the festival, the Gulf has quietly been pressing its advantage. As The National reported last week, Abu Dhabi's Imagenation announced plans for a series of six Emirati-led features, starting with Sea Shadow, which the director Nawaf al Jahani will start shooting in the Autumn. The newly renamed Abu Dhabi Film Festival (formerly the Middle East International Film Festival) celebrated the new head of its film development and post-production fund. Born in Algeria, the producer and festival programmer Marie-Pierre Macia, whose CV includes running the Director's Fortnight sidebar at Cannes, will take charge of Sanad, a fund set up to support filmmakers in the Middle East.
Meanwhile the Dubai International Film Festival has been trumpeting its own support initiative, the Dubai Film Connection, a co-production market combined with a cash award. It has so far seen 10 films to completion with a further nine almost there. And the festival announced a partnership with Beirut DC, a Lebanese-based organisation set up to promote documentary filmmaking. DIFF is to provide a $10,000 (Dh36,730) incubation fund for a documentary course.
Finally Qatar announced the launch of the Doha Film Institute (DFI), an umbrella organisation set up to manage its various film initiatives. It comes under the management of Amanda Palmer, director of the Doha Tribeca film festival, which had its debut last year. Martin Scorsese was among the luminaries the DFI launch party on Friday night, as were Harvey Weinstein and Terry Gilliam. Scorsese praised Doha's continuing involvement with the World Cinema Foundation, his film restoration initiative. Working with the young filmmakers who took part in Doha Tribeca's one-minute film competition, he said he was struck by the way they were "hungry for film history".
"We're here tonight to celebrate the partnership of the Doha Film Institute," he said. "And thanks to the Doha Film Institute we'll be able to continue these restorations and work to a common goal, which is the preservation and dissemination of the works of the past in order to create a continuity with the future." At a time when the film industry is full of talk about the very uncertain shape of things to come, a rather passionate assertion of that continuity of past and future came from an unexpected quarter. The Canadian filmmaker Xavier Dolan has a stronger claim on the future than perhaps any other talent in Cannes at the moment. He is 21 years old and his second feature, Les Amours Imaginaires, just played as part of the festival's art house sidebar Un Certain Regard, where it received a standing ovation. Last year his directorial debut, J'ai tué ma mère, played in the Director's Fortnight, and picked up three awards. As if all this wasn't sufficiently detestable, he also looks like a miniature James Dean. He is, it's fair to say, one to watch. And, as it emerged during a panel discussion with the Canadian director Atom Egoyan, chairman of the short film jury, he is determined that you should watch him in a cinema.
"I can't imagine myself saying: 'I'm so excited, did you see my web film?'," he said scornfully. "No, go to the theatres like normal people, and not be assaulted by all this technology. The internet for me is checking e-mails and watching trailers." Indeed, he's such a Luddite in his cinematic outlook, he's started shooting in 35mm film - an "expensive discovery", he admitted. "But I have to shoot in film. It's just my new dream life." From the mouths of babes. If young things like Dolan can make it work, things may be looking brighter for Cannes, and cinema.