The basic ingredients of the classic western remain unchanged and infinitely adaptable. One of the leading contenders for the Palme d’Or this year, No Country for Old Men, is the latest example of this evergreen genre, currently enjoying a revival in the George W. Bush era. For Old West, read New West. And for New West, read America.

Adapted from the novel by Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Menis also the latest journey into America’s much-mythologised western heartland from the directors of Blood Simple and Fargo, Joel and Ethan Coen. Josh Brolin stars as an essentially decent Texan handyman who stumbles across a fortune in drug money. Javier Bardem plays the chilling psycho killer on his trail, and Tommy Lee Jones the weary sheriff attempting to prevent their bloody confrontation.

Although the film is set in 1980, the plot’s essentials could just as easily take place in 1880. “This is certainly a western in the respect that it takes place in the West,” says Joel Coen. “And it does have a character – talking about Josh specifically – who inhabits a lot of generic western characteristics. But I think when we read the novel we weren’t thinking about it so much as a western as that it took the genre and did unexpected things with it.”

Reflecting its role as a microcosm of France’s lifelong love-hate affair with Hollywood, Cannes has long served as launch pad for revisionist westerns. Elegant and haunting, the Coens’ film joins a growing list of recent Croisette debuts including Ang Lee’s controversial Oscar winner Brokeback Mountain, David Cronenberg’s subversive “Midwestern”, A History of Violence and David Jacobson’s Down in the Valley. All these films use classic western ingredients to question and subvert conservative American values.

Traditionally a reactionary and right-wing genre, the modern western’s Trojan Horse potential for antiestablishment critique first emerged in mid1950s and early 1960s cowboy sagas such as Bad Day at Black Rock, The Misfits and Lonely are the Brave. As the 1970s dawned, “postwesterns” including Midnight Cowboyand The Last Picture Show continued to deconstruct genre mythology. Such films were simultaneously mournful and scornful towards the lost, mythic West.

“The modern western has a tradition of looking at the West in terms of what has been lost,” says the cultural historian Michael Coyne, the author of The Crowded Prairie: Hollywood Western and American National Identity. “It’s about narrowing frontiers, restricted options, a kind of disillusionment with the myth and the promise. The filmic West is mostly talking about the 19th century, a romantic era when everything was still possible. But modern westerns are usually downbeat and antiheroic.”

This potent sense of honourable frontier values swept away by soulless modernity is a recurring neo-western motif, from Sam Peckinpah’s outlaw elegy The Wild Bunch (1969) to Sydney Pollack’s sentimental drama The Electric Horseman (1979). It surfaces again in No Country for Old Men.

No Country for Old Men is just the latest in a ten-gallon hatful of neo-westerns to emerge in the 21st century. Ridley Scott is about to direct Blood Meridian, another McCarthy novel about brutal frontier life. Brad Pitt will soon be seen in yet another version of the Jesse James story. Remakes of The Wild Bunch and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid are reportedly in production.

Meanwhile, the wayward British director Alex Cox has just completed his latest feature, a revenge saga cheekily titled Searchers 2.0in homage to John Ford’s iconic 1956 classic. “It’s not really a western, but it is a contemporary western,” Cox admits. “It’s about these guys who seek revenge on someone who caused them harm.”

Another key feature of New Westerns is that many are outsider-eye views of America made by foreign directors, from John Schlesinger to Wim Wenders to Ang Lee. A devotee of cinematic Americana, Wenders is back in Cannes this week to celebrate the 60th festival. Having won the Palme d’Or in 1984 with his lachrymose neo-western Paris, Texas, he returned 20 years later with its loose “sequel” Don’t Come Knocking, a contemporary cowboy saga written by its star, Sam Shepard.

Wenders believes that George W. Bush’s appropriation of cowboy imagery has helped to fuel the latest resurgence in anguished modern westerns. “America has assumed a role of paramount importance in the world,” he says, “politically, economically and militarily. But what sort of a role model does America play culturally and morally? The West is almost a perfect metaphor for the ‘inside’ of America. It’s the country in a nutshell. And the cowboy is not an obsolete hero. On the contrary, the White House gives that iconic American character a whole new miserable dimension.”

But Wenders also says that western imagery is no longer exclusively American. It is now global in its reach, an all-purpose cinematic allegory in troubled times. “It’s a landscape that belongs to everybody on the planet,” he says, “part of a myth that we all share.”

Cannes whispers ...

A black-and-white animated film about a young girl’s life under Iran’s ayatollahs provoked protests from Tehran of Western bias. Persepolis, one of 22 films competing for the festival’s top award, the Palme d’Or, is based on a comic-book series by the Iranian Marjane Satrapi.

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