If the relevance of a film festival depends in part of its ability to avoid being typecast as favoring a single genre, then Cannes...aw, jeez, Bono just went by. He was hurrying in the twilight across the wooden walkway that leads from the festival offices to the Palais, in view of  the press aerie, and when a random video shooter went to grab some footage, he teased his blonde companion, presumably a workmate, by grabbing her arms to frame her for the shooter. Since a spring rain had just washed across the bay here, he also almost slipped and landed on his butt.

Bono was headed for the evening screening of Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona, and though Allen's continuing high profile at the festival seems more a matter of obligation than cinephilia (critics have been mixed on the film) the U2 front man is doing the correct film buff thing tonight.

Now, where were we? Cannes' varied mix? What put me in mind of that notion was the back-to-back film-going experience of seeing a sweet-tempered, typically French but hardly predictable troubled-family tale (Un Conte de Noel) that was closely followed by perhaps the festival's grittiest offering, from the Un Certain Regard section, Hunger.

The latter film, which that caused a stir on the festival's first day is from U2's Ireland--not the band's congenial Dublin, however, but bloody Belfast, during The Troubles. And further still, it's set in the notorious Maze prison where Irish Republican Army hunger striker Bobby Sands was the first of ten to die of starvation, but not without first being brutalized by his British jail keepers.

Perhaps that's already enough to cause you to give it a miss, thinking that even with the relevance of those years of struggle to more recent headlines abut Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, it would be just too grim a dose of what you already know from the evening news.

It's a thought I initially shared, as did reviewers I've spoken with here. But the good cinematic news is that this grim and at times grisly film, which has been picked up by Mel Gibson's Icon Film Distribution arm for Australia and New Zealand, is so determined to stick by Steve McQueen's directorial ethic that it plays more timelessly than that. (McQueen, moniker notwithstanding, is a 39-year-old Englishman who happens to be black and presumably was not in Sand Pebbles.) At heart it asks us to wonder at the willingness of these men--who were in many cases killers themselves-- to die, agonizingly for their political (or as the film steers us to believe, spiritual) principles. "What I wanted," says McQueen, "is to know what it felt like to be in the Maze at that time--to capture what is not written about in books."

For someone with a casual knowledge of those (anything but casual) years of strife--most intense between 1966 and Sands' death 27 springs ago in May of 1981--this unsparing version of history will not only open your eyes but demand full attention from your ears. The prisoner's fatally important discussion, over much business with cigarettes in a talk with  a tough-minded priest,  is a tour de force of compelling (if dauntingly accented) onscreen dialog.

When McQueen was approached by BBC's Channel 4 to make the film, "There was no Iraq war, no Guantanamo Bay, no Abu Gharib prison but time's gone by the parallels have become apparent."

That's a sentiment to warm the heart of Cannes jury president Sean Penn, who snapped the world press and many festival goers to attention with his opening declarations of the importance of films that address geopolitical realities--thus his support of the documentary about post-tsunami volunteers, The Third Wave, which also brought Bono out in support.

But Penn vowed not to show bias, especially as regards his director pal Clint Eastwood, who's here in competition with The Changeling.

"We're all very mindful of what it is to be a filmmaker or to be an actor," he told the press conference busily smoking in contravention of French law, adding that the jury's burden is "is to be wide awake with an empty bladder at the beginning of every film."

And if you're seeing Hunger, perhaps an empty stomach--not for whatever empathy that  may invoke with the bravely relentless Sands, but because there's some sternly graphic footage to be seen. And yet, as it makes its stately way towards a foregone conclusion, it's worth every minute you put into it.

Almost entirely in another vein is Un Conte de Noel (to be dubbed A Christmas Story in the U.S.) from a Cannes favorite, seasoned writer-director Arnaud Desplechin. Already hailed in France as one of Catherine Deneuve's exemplary performances--she unblinkingly plays the role of a somewhat regal but drolly unsentimental matriarch--it also features Diving Bell and the Butterfly hero Mathieu Amalric as her reprobate son Henri and Deneuve's real-life daughter, Chiara Mastroianni, who does her famous genes credit both in beauty and acting chops.

Faced with a form of leukemia that may or may not be staved off with a bone marrow transplant, Deneuve's Junon has to consider whether to get the marrow donation from the deeply troubled teenage nephew of the had-drinking, maddeningly obtuse. Henri. "I was obnoxious from five to seventeen,"   he admits, and Almaric wins laughs without sacrificing the poignancy that he and this warmhearted saga, have in abundance. With a taste of Bergman's Fanny and Alexander, and the high-IQ drollery that recalls the  sibling-rivalry of Salinger's Franny and Zooey, it should come to the States, with the right marketing scheme, as a robust art-house entry that's likely to poise you near the edge of tears many a time . "I go to the cinema to live better," is how Despelchin's press conference comment came through the headphones in translation, and odd as that may sound, this is the kind of film that may actually help a viewer do just that.

Last night's most boisterous party was at a beachside club for the extremely well-received Waltz With Bashir, an animated documentary from Israel about the 1982 massacre at the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon.  (also unveiling at the festival is I Want To See, in which Deneuve tours war-ravaged Lebanon with locally raised actor Rabih Mroue.)

Writer-director Ari Folman, who's' shot several live-action documentaries, captured his subjects in live action but then turned the footage over for  animation (not rotoscoping, though it's so meticulously drawn it resembles films made with that technique) to the Bridgit Folman Film Gang.

In great part autobiographical, Waltz With Bashir  should be another Penn pleaser. It's another film that declared itself with a strong reception, to be both a small-scale US phenomenon on the scale of the recent Perseoplis and even, word is, a potential winner of the Palme d'Or. Though the festival is still spooling up, awaiting the potent American entries described in an earlier post on this site, it's already stacking up as a considerable artistic success.

Back at the festival headquarters, there's no sign of Bono and the rest of the crowd watching the last minutes of Allen's film--but a somewhat bedraggled feline just scampered across the catwalk, fifty feet high, where the singer had earlier traipsed. Stay tuned to this site for continuing Cannes postings.

(Jury president San Penn greets Bono on the red carpet as they attend Un Conte de Noel--and promote post-tsunami docu The Third Wave; photo by George Pimente/WireImage)

(Catherine Deneuve and daughter Chiara Mastroianni on the red carpet for the debut of Un Conte de Noel at Cannes; photo by VALERY HACHE/AFP/Getty Images)