South Korean film The Housemaid

This might seem a very silly thing to do but as I sit in the 2,300-seat Grand Lumiere in Cannes, probably the best cinema hall in the world, the question always at the back of my mind is: “How will this film go down at Mini Jaya in north Calcutta?”

The Mini Jaya crowd is pretty sophisticated for it is there seven years ago that I saw Chokher Bali, with my cousin, who lives locally, providing an informed running commentary explaining why Binodini was doing this or Ashalata doing that in the Tagore classic.

Applying the Mini Jaya test, I have to say I differ substantially with the winners picked this year by Shekhar Kapur and fellow members of the jury led by the American filmmaker Tim Burton.

“Wouldn’t it be perverse,” some of us journalists joked, “if the Thai film won?”

The Thai film has won.

The top prize at Cannes, the Palme d’Or, picked from 19 entries, has gone to Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, about a dying man who is visited by the ghost of his late wife and his long lost son who has come home in the form of a furry jungle spirit.

No, I, too, can’t see “House Full” signs going up at Mini Jaya for this one.

Accepting his trophy, Weerasethakul said mysteriously: “I would like to thank all the spirits and all the ghosts in Thailand who made it possible for me to be here.”

“I would like to thank my mother and my father, who 30 years ago, took me to a little cinema in our little town, and I was so young,” he remembered. “I didn’t know the concept of cinema. With this award, I think I know a little more what cinema is but it still remains a mystery.”

The best actress award went to Juliette Binoche, who — surprise, surprise — happens to figure on this year’s Cannes festival poster. Binoche is a lovely French woman but the film itself, Copie Conforme (Certified Copy), directed by Iran’s Abbas Kiarostami, will struggle to hold the interest of the audience.

Binoche plays a gallery owner in Tuscany who has a day out with a British author who is mistaken as her husband by a woman who runs a café. The author is persuaded to imagine he is the husband which allows Binoche’s character to berate him for failing to give her the kind of romantic attention he had showered on his wife in the early days of their marriage.

I kept looking at my watch to see when the film would end which is not the kind of behaviour a director likes to spot if he has slipped unnoticed into the back row to observe the audience.

One award I do agree with wholeheartedly is that for best actor — it goes to Spain’s wonderfully versatile Javier Bardem, who plays a father dying of cancer trying to make provision for his two young sons in Biutiful, a film by Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu.

I am not sure I agree, though, with the jury’s decision to make Bardem share the honours with Elio Germano in the unexceptional Italian film, La Nostra Vita (Our Life), directed by Daniele Luchetti.

Germano is cast as a young construction worker whose wife dies in childbirth, leaving him with the responsibility of bringing up two boys plus now the baby son.

(From left) US director Michael Rowe, French director Xavier Beauvois, French actress Juliette Binoche, Chadian director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, French director and actor Mathieu Amalric, Spanish actor Javier Bardem and Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul — the winners at Cannes

The prize for best director went — totally undeservedly in my opinion — to French actor-turned-filmmaker Mathieu Amalric for his story of the struggling manager of a burlesque dance troupe, Tournee (On Tour). The film was too repetitious, tedious even.

South Korean director Lee Chang-Dong’s Poetry took the best screenplay prize.

The second-place Grand Prix went to French director Xavier Beauvois’s drama, Of Gods and Men, based on the true story of seven French monks beheaded during Algeria’s civil war in 1996.

The French Algerian film, Hors La Loi (Outside of the Law), directed by Rachid Bounchareb — protests caused riot police to seal off the Palais des Festivals — was even more gripping, as was the American Fair Game, directed by Doug Liman, about dirty tricks played by George Bush’s White House.

But it was Chadian director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s A Screaming Man that received the third-place Jury Prize. The film chronicles the tragic consequences for a father after he loses his cherished job as a swimming pool attendant to his son amid his country’s civil war.

British journalists are unhappy that Mike Leigh’s Another Year, which was “seen as the favourite by many” (i.e. British journalists) won nothing. To be sure, this subtle film did deserve to come away with something. It is slow but there are finely observed changes that take place in the lives of an ordinary married English couple and their friends — and on a farming allotment — during the course of a year.

Ken Loach, another Cannes favourite, who won the Palme d’Or four years ago with The Wind that Shakes the Barley, based on British suppression of the Irish Republican movement, also came away empty handed. His new movie, Route Irish, again critical of the British establishment, is a revenge drama based around the deployment of private security contractors in Iraq.

As chairman of the jury, Tim Burton was honest enough to admit: “Each and every one of us has some favourites that didn’t make it.”

Jury member Kate Beckinsale, who put on quite a show with her red carpet outfits, joked: “We tried to invent more prizes.”