This year’s Cannes film festival, with its bias toward former Palme d’Or winners and a liberal smattering of stars either established (Johnny Depp, Brad Pitt, Penelope Cruz) or thrillingly on the rise (Michael Fassbender, Abbie Cornish, virtually the entire young cast of Taking Woodstock), brings with it the promise of artistic integrity and serious red-carpet action. This is technically known as “Essence of Cannes”. Yet however idiosyncratic or unpredictable the films themselves may be, the line-up proves that this most illustrious of festivals is a well-oiled machine in which even apparent surprises have precedents and can be telegraphed well in advance.

Past Masters

Four of this year’s 20 competition entries are directed by previous recipients of the top prize, the Palme d’Or, shortening the odds considerably that the winner will be looking at completing a matching set of book ends. Isabelle Huppert and her jury will be picking over new works from these proven favourites: Jane Campion, who won in 1993 with The Piano and is offering Bright Star, with Ben Whishaw as John Keats and Cornish as Fanny Brawne; Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction, 1994), who returns with Inglourious Bas­terds, starring Brad Pitt as a Jewish-American officer gleefully bumping off Nazis in occupied France; Lars von Trier (Dancer in the Dark, 2000), who directs the horror movie Antichrist; and Ken Loach (The Wind That Shakes the Barley, 2006), bringing Looking for Eric (as in Cantona).

Can the Palme d’Or go to the same director twice? The Dardenne brothers are the most recent film-makers to do the double, following their 1999 win for Rosetta with The Child in 2005. Then there was Bille August (Pelle the Conqueror, The Best Intentions), Emir Kusturica (When Father Was Away on Business, Underground), Shohei Imamura (The Ballad of Narayama, The Eel), Francis Ford Coppola (The Conversation, Apocalypse Now) and Alf Sjöberg (Torment, Miss Julie). Most double winners have seen a gap of only four or five years between Palme d’Ors, which makes Loach’s comedy the favourite from the 2009 crowd.

No Laughing Matter

The prizes at Cannes, however, rarely go to comedies. Sure, there was humour in Mike Leigh’s Secrets and Lies, and in Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, but these are not laughfests. You’d have to go all the way back to M*A*S*H, in 1970, to find the Palme d’Or going to an honest-to-goodness comedy; before that, Richard Lester’s The Knack... And How to Get It (1965) and The Birds, the Bees and the Italians (1966) were rare in making laughter translate into awards.

This year, it’s hard to tell where the comedy will be found. The opening film, Pixar’s 3-D adventure Up, is sure to be a gas, but it’s not in competition. Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock will have its share of giggles, if the trailer is any indication. Loach has put the high-fibre history lessons of The Wind That Shakes the Barley on hold for Looking for Eric. And the art-house favourite Alain Resnais has had his lighter moments of late, but will his competition entry, Les Herbes folles, be in a comedic vein? It is described as a romance “in eight phases, corresponding to the rules of flying, and... the safety pro­cedures before takeoff”. Its chances of going home with gold will be greatly improved if the mood is harrowing rather than hilarious. Which brings us to:

Agents provocateurs

Cannes is nothing without a bit of the old ultraviolence, and it will be a sorry day if Gaspar Noé (returning with the 2½-hour Enter the Void, his first feature film since the stomach-churning Irréversible) and Park Chan-wook (who brings his vampire movie Thirst to the ­festival that gave his brutal revenge thriller, Oldboy, the grand jury prize in 2002) cannot be relied on to supply the necessary outrage. If they are on brutal form, and if Tarantino’s Inglourious Bas­terds delivers on the violent promise of its trailer, then expect an almighty brouhaha about on-screen brutality. This is, after all, the festival that looked adoringly upon The Eel (man brutally murders cheating wife within opening moments), Wild at Heart (man is beaten to a pulp by Nicolas Cage within opening moments) and Pulp Fiction (where to begin?). It was also the launchpad for such causes célèbres as David Cronenberg’s Crash, Man Bites Dog, La Grande bouffe, Pasolini’s Arabian Nights and Louis Malle’s Pretty Baby.

Always the Bridesmaid

Just as the Oscars has its shaming roll call of great directors unjustly overlooked, so Cannes has let plenty of cinematic visionaries slip through the net. Many would assume that François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard nabbed a Palme d’Or or two in their time, but no. Truffaut took the best director prize in 1959 — the year of the nouvelle vague’s inception — for his debut, The 400 Blows, beating Buñuel, Resnais and Michael Powell. Godard didn’t even get that far; in competition six times, he has never had a sniff at the Palme.

None of which bodes well for this year’s eternal bridesmaids, Pedro Almodovar and Michael Haneke. Both have been praised and rewarded, yet neither has gone home with the Palme d’Or. Almodovar won best director for All About My Mother (1999) and best screenplay for Volver (2006). Could his noir-tinged drama Broken Embraces, with another star turn from Penelope Cruz, take him all the way to the top? Haneke returns with The White Ribbon, a parable of fascism set on the cusp of the first world war. Like Almodovar, he has one best director win, for ­Hidden (2005), as well as the grand jury prize for The Piano Teacher (2001). The latter starred Isabelle Huppert, who, as this year’s jury president, may not want to be seen playing favourites.

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