Brits line up for Cannes trophies

Film festival: Rape shocker steals headlines but Polanski tipped for success

The Brits are back at Cannes. After a year in the doldrums, British films and actors are on a high this weekend, with Miranda Richardson poised to take the Best Actress award for her role in David Cronenberg's psychological thriller, Spider.

Ken Loach's film Sweet Sixteen, regarded by the critics here as his best for years, has been tipped by the industry bible, Variety, to take tonight's coveted Palme d'Or award. And Mike Leigh's latest, All or Nothing, has been highly praised.

Richardson's co-star Ralph Fiennes is also in with a chance as Best Actor, along with Martin Compston, the 16-year-old star of Loach's film. Other strong candidates for the award are Adrien Brody in The Pianist, Belgian actor Olivier Gourmet in the Dardenne brothers' The Son, and Jack Nicholson, who plays a retired insurance man in Alexander Payne's comedy About Schmidt.

The other front runners for the Palme d'Or include The Pianist, the Finnish comedy The Man Without a Past, and the Palestinian satire Divine Intervention. But with the jury headed by David Lynch and including the mercurial Sharon Stone and Chilean avant-garde director Raul Ruiz, the outcome is hard to predict.

Much of the talk yesterday, however, was about Irréversible, the second feature by French director Gaspar Noé, who made his mark as a provocateur with his debut Seul contre tous, about a homicidal butcher. His new film, a violent rape-revenge drama, pushes Noé's taste in extreme subject matter, and even more extreme style, further still; it came with a special warning in the festival programme.

Narrated backwards and improvised from a four page treatment, Irréversible begins in a gay S&M club called Le Rectum, has a character graphically beaten to death with a fire extinguisher, and features an extended and even more explicit rape sequence. The film, without doubt the most brutal ever shown in the competition, has divided critics, a few hailing it as a masterpiece, many more loathing it, and quite a few walking out. Noé entered the film's press conference to a chorus of boos, but his star Monica Bellucci insisted, "The film is not a crime, it is about a crime." Noé commented, "Part of knowing man is knowing the beast within man."

Rather more warmly received was Roman Polanski's The Pianist, a painstaking recreation of the horrors of the Warsaw Ghetto during the Second World War based on the memoirs of Jewish pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman. As a child, Polanski himself survived the Cracow ghetto, and this film is his first for 40 years to be shot in his home country. "I always wanted to go back and make a film in Poland," he said. "I never found material which was close enough, but not too close to me."

Despite some heavy-handed touches, and a creaky script by British writer Ronald Harwood, critics agreed that Polanski's film has a personal authenticity and a seriousness that give it the edge over Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List.

The film could well be a Palme d'Or, although its traditional, even academic style could count against it in a festival that – in theory at least – tends to award innovation.