French Prophet heads pack as curtain falls at Cannes

A gripping French prison drama led the pack of contenders for Cannes' coveted Palme d'Or as the Riviera's 12-day film frenzy headed into its finale yesterday.

Tokyo's neon lights provide the setting for the last of 20 films competing for Cannes gold, a love tale about a hit-woman by Spain's Isabel Coixet, screening yesterday along with an arthouse film produced by the Louvre.

But neither work was expected to unseat the top world directors favoured to scoop the trophy awarded at a gala ceremony today closing the world's biggest annual film event.

Bleak prison drama A Prophet by France's Jacques Audiard, a film about a six-year jail sentence for an Arab youth that turns into an education in crime, remained the hottest ticket in Cannes, according to a foreign critics panel.

A win for Audiard would be a triumph for French cinema, a year after high-school docu-fiction The Class became the first French film in more than two decades to pick up the Palme.

But foreign critics also gave a frontrunner slot to Austrian director Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon, a chilling black-and-white portrait of a Protestant German village on the eve of the first world war.

Haneke's stark pre-Nazi drama, which kept critics glued to their seats, ranks second alongside Jane Campion's ode to John Keats, Bright Star according to a critics' panel in trade magazine Screen.

Critics were also impressed by Pedro Almodovar's drama Broken Embraces and Ken Loach's feelgood football comedy Looking for Eric.

French reviewers meanwhile had high hopes for veteran director Alain Resnais for Wild Grass, and Quentin Tarantino's Nazi-slaying caper Inglourious Basterds.

Closing the official competition late yesterday, Spain's Coixet takes viewers on a trip around the Japanese capital, starring Rinko Kikuchi - made famous in the multi-layered drama Babel.

Map of the Sounds of Tokyo is about a young woman's double life as contract-killer and fishmarket worker - and how she falls in love with one of her targets.

Shot against a moody jazz backdrop, it offers a rich portrait of Tokyo, from the slicing of tuna and splash of hoses at the market, to the midday hush of a cemetery, a karaoke bar or a sex hotel in pastiche-Paris style.

But critics were unconvinced by the storyline, and the film earned boos mixed with a smattering of applause at a preview.