Maternal instincts are all wrong

This year the word is that the audiences are smaller. It doesn't always feel that way. Piles of people still queue up in the hope of entry into sold-out screenings. Outside, thousands continue the ritual of jamming a small stretch of the Croisette hoping to see stars make their way up the red carpet. And the pandemonium to get a post-film Nespresso coffee inside the Palais, where most of the press screenings are held, can be dire enough for some people to consider pushing their panic button. (You'll never experience a more jarring disjunction between politesse and viciousness. Don't cross a movie critic who has yet to have his morning coffee.)

Despite concerns of decreased attendance and a constricted international marketplace, this mighty event, which concludes today, still serves 20 films in competition (this year only two from the US) and even more for Un Certain Regard, a contest for younger (relatively), lesser known (also relatively) directors. Both prizes are awarded in a gala ceremony this evening.

Among all these films, themes emerge. In 2009, the movies are bloodier and more brutal, even by the standards of Cannes, where the greatest films can also be the grimmest. At the festival's 2009 edition, that darkness has sprung from a kind of maternal derangement. It's the year of the mother. But there are scarcely any mothers of the year.

Andrea Arnold's "Fish Tank" moves us into an Essex, England, housing project and focuses on a few weeks in the life of a difficult 15-year-old girl whose mother (Kierston Wareing) clings stubbornly to her adolescence. If she's abusive, it's through neglect, hours of the day spent in front of the television and doing drunken partying, while her elder daughter roams the neighborhood in a fit of rebellion that's ultimately an unwitting imitation of her mother. Lee Daniels's "Precious" is about a pregnant Harlem teenager (Gabourey Sidibe) coping with two babies and a nasty mother (Mo'Nique) determined to keep her from any kind of success.

In both movies, maternal love is a toxic force; the mothers themselves are hung up on men who don't really love them. The women playing these mothers predominate. Mo'Nique, especially, creates such an overwhelming blast of contempt that the National Hurricane Center might want to consider classifying her a category 5. But in both movies the daughters overcome these women in their own ways.

"Fish Tank" is nearly as powerful as "Precious," which the international audience went crazy for here as much as Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry have at her Harpo Studios. Arnold's approach to realism doesn't feel entirely natural - you can always see the strings pulling on these characters. But I like one of her final sequences, in which the mother and her two daughters dance to a Nas song without making any physical contact. It's a moving grace note in an often-inelegant movie.

Bong Joon-ho's "Mother" is nonstop elegance - grisly, strange, and sometimes very funny. Bong, a South Korean, is an exciting, completely original director who can also tell a mean story. If you've seen neither his "Memories of Murder" nor "The Host," you'll want to check them out. The same might go for "Mother," in which a middle-age woman (Kim Hye-ja, who's terrific) tries to clear the name of her obtuse adult son, locked up for murder.

The movie has a pair of bombshells (suffice it to say that with this film, "Precious," and Michael Haneke's "The White Ribbon" showing at Cannes, incest is a mini-theme). Mother love here is bound up in fits of guilt and shame. Leaving this movie, I wasn't crazy about it. I was disappointed that the twisting and turning straightened itself out, and worried that Bong was trying on one of Pedro Almodovar's women's films. (Imagine my surprise when "Mother" turned out to be better than "Broken Embraces," the actual Almodovar film that debuted here.)

However, the effect of seeing a movie in the Cannes vacuum can be disorienting. After a few days, I found myself thinking more about the tone in "Mother" than anything in a lot of other films. Its mix of amusement and suspense should be impossible. Bong actually makes it look too easy. Then there is the mother herself, a woman of such dim, kooky perversion that it's easy to overlook the tragic sadness in her eccentric slapstick. Although I don't know, since it's just like the plain-faced clowns Giulietta Masina gave the movies for so many years.

A few days into the festival, I was joking with a couple of colleagues that we should have a mother-off. It would pit those women against each other, along with Imelda Staunton as a penny-pinching Holocaust survivor running a motel in Ang Lee's subversively cute "Taking Woodstock" and Giovanna Mezzogiorno, as Benito Mussolini's hysterical mistress and spurned baby mama in Marco Bellocchio's ferociously entertaining "Vincere," whose last hour turns into the Fascist-era "Changeling." The winner of the mother-off would be crowned Momzilla.

On Sunday night, we annulled the contest. That was the evening Lars von Trier unveiled "Antichrist," in which Charlotte Gainsbourg goes to town on herself and Willem Dafoe. Her break with sanity begins not long after her infant climbs out of a window and falls to his death. While he was doing that, mommy and daddy were making perfume-ad love in the most gorgeous black-and-white and slowest possible motion. The death sends her into a psychosexual tailspin. She comes to loathe sex. She finds her female nature unnatural. And she begins to take it out on Dafoe's genitalia and her own.

In terms of press and PR mania, "Antichrist" was the apex of the festival. All that came close was the clamoring for the stars of Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds" (OK, star: Brad Pitt) and the news conference for Marina de Van's "Don't Look Back," with Sophie Marceau and Monica Bellucci. But it's not the hyperventilating one comes here for. You experience that merely by breathing the air. You come for great movies and great moviegoing experiences. Von Trier certainly delivered the latter. "Antichrist" the movie is cheap and a tad insincere (the end credits mention a misogyny consultant), but it's riveting to watch - even from between your fingers. Still, its emptiness did help me to appreciate the social value of Brillante Mendoza's otherwise vile "Kinatay," from the Philippines, in which a hooker is kidnapped, beaten, and worse.

It seems wrong that von Trier and a discussion about the sad depiction of women and mothers should crop up at Cannes in a year that also brings a new Jane Campion film. The director of "The Piano," "The Portrait of a Lady," and "Holy Smoke!," Campion is a stunning visual storyteller and her approach to feminism can be damning, particu-larly if you're on its receiving end.

But her competition film, "Bright Star," about the sweet, if tepid relationship between a woman named Fanny Brawne and the poet John Keats, is too genteel for a year teeming with so much blistering moviemaking. The film has its admirers, but if you know what Campion is capable of, it's hard to find this more than a decorative disappointment. She's making "Tears in Heaven" when we want "Cocaine." With any luck she'll catch "Antichrist" and come back to Cannes with her answer.

Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com.