Closing on Thursday, May 23, with the screening of Pistolets en Plastique (Plastic Guns), Jean-Christophe Meurisse's absurd and resistible comedy, this year's Directors' Fortnight has blown hot and cold. It is somewhat surprising for a program since one would expect the selection committee's preferences, led by an artistic director who balances both likes and dislikes, to preclude such stark incongruities.

Moreover, rumors from the Festival's other sections, starting with the competition, have also muddied the aesthetic waters this year, sowing havoc in all camps. In the Directors' Fortnight's own garden – which has always encouraged wild and somewhat crazy plants – Julien Rejl, in his second year leading the Cannes Festival's main parallel selection, embraced eclecticism.

However, this eclecticism was different from his predecessors – such as Olivier Père and Edouard Waintrop – who poached from the murky waters of popular and genre cinema to inject dialectics and energy into the festivities. Rather, it was a desire to showcase the most extensive possible array of global independent creations, from French auteur cinema to the independent US scene, Japanese animation and Argentine narrative experimentation. This is a noble and legitimate ambition, but one that must be reconciled with the fact that the field of radicalism produces its own repetitions and vanities, no less than mainstream production, and perhaps even more so given the freedom it claims.

In this respect, the most embarrassing issue was the epigone syndrome – where something is done much less well or as a tribute that cannot shake itself free. Such was the case, among others, of Yoko Kuno and Nobuhiro Yamashita's Ghost Cat Anzu with regard to Miyazaki, or India Donaldson's Good One with regard to Kelly Reichardt. A unique case, but more poignant was the profound discomfort provoked by Mongrel, Chiang Wei Liang's Taiwanese film. On the pretext of confronting us with a morally abject situation (the shameless exploitation of undocumented workers in Taiwan), it uses the opportunity to pile up shocking scenes, in reality, more sordid than reckless and which themselves are stripped of any dignity. A case in point is the long, static opening shot of a mentally handicapped man's emaciated and extensively soiled buttocks being meticulously cleaned by an exploited home helper. Not just anyone can be Pasolini.

It's very fortunate, at last, that the Fortnight also conveyed its own charm. This was mainly found in the French and US contingents, which, with five and four films each respectively, formed the backbone of this selection. On the French side, Ma Vie Ma Gueule (This Life Of Mine), by the late Sophie Fillières; A Son Image (In His Image), by Thierry de Peretti; Patricia Mazuy's La Prisonnière de Bordeaux (Visiting Hours) and Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel's Eat the Night reaffirmed – in the realms of the intimate, the romantic and the political – the creativity and uniqueness of auteur cinema that old and new puritans continue to stigmatize, and whose model is the envy of many foreign filmmakers.

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