Father-son bond is a big Cannes theme

CANNES, France — Though unlikely to be remembered as a year of great world-class films, the 2005 Cannes Film Festival, which drew to a close last weekend, featured a surprising number of films with overlapping subjects and themes.

The winner of this year's Palme d'or — "The Child" from Belgium's always fascinating Dardenne brothers — is a case in point.

The film taps into one of this year's most ubiquitous themes — the father-son relationship — yet takes it in a rather offbeat and surprising direction. The plot here involves a young man who makes his living on the street, stealing and reselling various items, but his life suddenly takes a turn when he learns his girlfriend has just given birth to his baby.

The girl immediately experiences far more maternal instincts than expected, but the boy is far less connected and involved. In fact, when he is asked to watch the new baby boy in its buggy while she stands in line at city hall to register the child's name, he takes the infant to an undercover agent who buys and sells children to a place handling illegal adoptions.

For what could have been essentially just a small domestic movie, "The Child" quickly takes on much of the intensity and anxiety of an action/thriller. Increasingly involving, this little Belgian film holds our interest from beginning to end, and though it was my own pick of the festival competition, it surprised us all when it walked away with the grand prize (and it certainly surprised oddsmakers who had given it a 12 to one chance of winning).

The parent/child dynamic proved to be a driving theme of this year's festival.

• The new Wim Wenders film, "Don't Come Knocking," which reunites real-life couple Sam Shepard and Jessica Lange onscreen (their fourth film together), has a cowboy actor (Shepherd) walking off a movie set in Moab, Utah, to take off across the desert for Elko, Nev., and then Butte, Mont. He's trying to recapture the past he abandoned 30 years earlier and find out about a son he supposedly had by an old flame (Lange).

• Likewise, in Jim Jarmusch's "Broken Flowers," which won the Grand Jury prize, Bill Murray receives an unsigned pink letter in a pink envelope from someone he supposedly had an affair with many years earlier. The letter says this mysterious woman gave birth to a baby boy, and that now the young man is determined to seek out the father he never knew.