Denys Arcand’s withering comedy about a middle-aged fantasist brought to an end last night the best edition of the Cannes Film Festival in years. The presence of an unprecedented six American movies in official competition had threatened to give the festival a lopsided feel, but the strength and depth of work from the rest of the world proved those fears wrong.

Whether all these films will turn up at your local cinema is another matter. The brilliant Romanian film 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, by Cristian Mungiu, is so unremittingly grim about backstreet abortions that many cinema exhibitors will simply flinch away. But Quentin Tarantino’s spoof B-movie, Death Proof, ought to do good business, and so should Joel and Ethan Coen’s thriller No Country for Old Men.

It’s especially fitting that Arcand’s closing-night film, L’Age des Ténèbres (The Age of Ignorance) should embrace the absurdity of the human condition, given the blizzard of examples that have been screened throughout the festival.

Marc Labrèche plays a crumpled civil servant in Quebec who spends most of his life dreaming that he is elsewhere. This mostly involves pretending that he’s a celebrity with a string of gorgeous beauties who pander to his every whim.

The comical reality, of course, is that his life is ghastly. His wife is having an affair with her estate agent boss; his two teenage daughters wouldn’t notice if he dropped dead. And the hour-and-a-half commute to his office – which seems to be located in the basement of a football stadium – is a soul-destroying tramp to a desk in the civil rights department. Here Labrèche is forced to listen to endless heartbreaking injustices without legally being able to help anyone.

It’s this impotent rage that the film captures so marvellously. His boss (Caroline Néron) figures in his revenge fantasies half-naked and trussed up like a Roman slave. Once a week Labrèche drags himself to a hospice to comfort his mentally sick and terrified mother.

The loneliness and pain are stifling. It’s the close and uncomfortable proximity between this grey man’s fantasies and the ugly banality of life that makes the film so compellingly true.

If the festival director, Thierry Fremaux, assembles an edition as good as this next year, the town will owe him a statue.

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