Blogging at Cannes is like trying to hit a moving target from a high-speed motorcycle. The minute you’ve successfully perched yourself down on the sidewalk, opened up your laptop, typed in your WiFi password and started writing, your power supply runs out, or the security guards let you into the theater early. Having already written most of the rest of this entry, I’m inclined to save Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Three Monkeys for some other time time. Suffice it to say that the movie is to his career as Story of a Love Affair is to Antonioni’s—it starts as almost a conventional genre film and then becomes a more typically Ceylanian study in mutual alienation. And like Climates, it features another suspenseful is-it-or-is-it-not-consensual? sex scene. One question: Why monkeys?

Hypewise, this year’s edition is off to a slow start, partly as a function of programming; Dardennes, Eastwood, Soderbergh, Egoyan and Kaufman won’t bat until next week. As of this evening, four Competition titles have unspooled, but that still leaves a lot of empty slots in Screen Daily’s critics’ ratings grid. (With less than half the jury in, Blindness is averaging a tepid 1.6 out of four stars.) Meanwhile, the horserace to the Palme d’Or was stabled for part of the day as Cannes rolled out the red carpet for the cast of Kung Fu Panda.

This morning many journalists wandered over to the parallel festival known as Directors’ Fortnight, where the opening film—the beyond-dark stalker comedy Four Nights with Anna, Jerzy Skolimowski’s first movie in 17 years—ended with a multilingual Q&A, which went sentence by sentence from Polish to French to English. Founded when Cannes filmmakers took to the streets in May 1968, the Fortnight is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year. Indeed, in many ways a sense of class warfare still pervades the Croisette, where high-rollers get invited to moshing-room-only beach parties, while all others watch longingly from the street above.

According to veterans, screening access has markedly improved this year this year—although attendance at the Competition film Waltz with Bashir last night was demonstrably low. Evidently some Cannesgoers learned that this Israeli animated film would not be a crowd-pleaser à la last year’s Persepolis, but would, in fact, be a documentary about divergent memories of a massacre during the Lebanon War. Earnest, serviceably animated and not unadmirable, the movie seems addressed specifically to Israeli audiences—a little too much so.

More universally accessible, Pablo Trapero’s Leonera tells the story of a pregnant woman (the terrific Martina Gusman) jailed for murder—possibly unjustly, though the circumstances of the initial crime are kept vague. Mainly, Trapero focuses and the life she forges for herself and her child in jail. I wasn’t crazy about Trapero’s El Bonarense and Rolling Family, but his blank narrative style—key plot material elided; leaps forward in time often pulled off in a single cut, with no pretense of giving viewers their bearings—works markedly better when applied to pure character study.

But the power of Leonera was nothing compared to that of Un Certain Regard’s opening night film, Hunger, directed by artist (as opposed to action icon) Steve McQueen. Structurally divided into three movements—action, talk, action—the movie patiently and often wordlessly recounts a real-life 1981 protest by IRA inmates denied status as political prisoners. The film envisions a visceral hell of rebellion and reprisals, following each humiliation with retaliation and visually mirroring the prisoners’ shit-stain splatter paintings with the guards’ mop marks on the floor. In the middle section, McQueen pulls off a stunning long take of one of the prisoners’ leaders talking to a priest, both lit from the clerestory. Suggesting a parallel between Margaret Thatcher’s detetention policies and those of George W. Bush, this first feature has more to say about the nature of fanaticism than any recent film on the subject. And if it were in Competition, it might be the film to beat so far.

TOC at Cannes image: Nadine Nakanishi