It told us nothing about the culture of celebrity that we didn't already know

It told us nothing about the culture of celebrity that we didn't already know. Drably shot, bland and ingratiating, its main selling point was that it was co-produced by Mira Sorvino, who inevitably ended up eclipsing the film's nominal stars when the photocalls began.Most interesting failureWhat does it take for a repressed, truculent young Jewish girl working in an East End sweatshop to become an actress? This was the question posed by Arnaud Desplechin's hugely ambitious Esther Kahn, a version of a story by 19th-century writer, Arthur Symons. Early on, the film seemed to be shaping up as one of those stultifying costume dramas in which the cast wander up and down cobbled streets looking like overdressed mannequins.Desplechin cites Truffaut's L'Enfant Sauvage as a key influence. "Our film, like Truffaut's, is the story of a wild child who becomes human not by learning to talk but by learning to act." Esther (spikily played by Summer Phoenix) is not an easy character to like, but in the course of the film, as she takes to the stage under the tutelage of an old actor (Ian Holm), she becomes more open to experience.

Esther Kahn (a French-British co-production) may be overlong and occasionally ponderous, but it has a warmth and intelligence not often found in the hide-bound literary adaptations Brits have made for so long.Biggest oddityEasily the most bizarre film in this year's competition was Roy Andersson's Songs From The Second Floor (which boasts music from old Abba stalwart, Benny Andersson) Andersson's story is as strange as the movie he has made. He retired from feature films 25 years ago when his second film, Giliap, was lambasted by the critics. Since then, he has been making adverts for the likes of Air France and Volvo, and trying to save up enough money for his big screen comeback."He makes the best commercials in the world," his fellow-Swede Ingmar Bergman has written of him Songs From The Second Floor has only 45 cuts. It is set in a grey European city where traffic has come to a standstill and office workers all fear for their jobs.Each immaculately framed scene is like a mini-film in its own right. In one tableau, we see a magician accidentally sawing through a subject's stomach.

In another, one hand of a model of Jesus becomes unstuck and he's left swinging from the cross like a monkey. The absurdist, deadpan humour is in the vein of Kafka or Ionesco. It was one of the few films that had a clear message - "Beloved are those who sit down".Most difficult birthDowntown 81, one of the hits of the Directors' Fortnight, took two decades to finish. A New York "beat" film starring artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, it was shot in 1980-81, but only finally edited late last year. Producer (and old Warhol acolyte) Glenn O'Brien touts it as an important corrective to Julian Schnabel's Basquiat, which he dismisses as an attempt to "make Jean-Michel into a bumbling fool with Julian as his mentor."The film, featuring music from (among others) The Plastics, Suicide and Kid Creole, offers a snapshot of an era in New York history never documented on film.

"We wanted to show what Jean-Michel was really like but also to show these incredible bands and artists," says O'Brien, who describes the film as "a magical encapsulation of what our world was like."Most Unfair DecisionTrolosa may have been directed by Liv Ullmann, but the Prospero-like figure pulling the strings behind the scenes was Ingmar Bergman. The subject matter, about the disintegration of a marriage, is pure Bergman. Marianne (Lena Endre), married to a successful composer, cheats on him with his best friend, David. What seems at first like a small indiscretion ends up causing untold misery to all concerned...Endre, of course, lost out to Björk, star of Dancer in the Dark, for the Best Actress prize. Trolosa's producer Kaj Larsen is philosophical about a decision which struck much of the press as perverse in the extreme "That's the jury. It has happened so many times before, that newcomers or children get Best Actor. It's no fun that people who've been working as actors for years, who've really trained, can be beaten by kids."'Dancer in the Dark' is being released by FilmFour in the Autumn.

'Trolosa' and 'In The Mood For Love' will be released by Metro Tartan in late Autumn. If proof were needed of Jacqueline Susann's status as a camp cultural icon (and it's a big if), the choice of Bette Midler as her cinematic embodiment in the forthcoming Isn't She Great? will more than do. In recent years, more evidence could be found at New York screenings of the 1968 film of Valley Of The Dolls, adapted from a book that was once the biggest-selling novel of all time and earned Jacqueline Susann a place in the Guinness Book of Records. These events attract an audience of male Susann clones, who all but verify the Truman Capote claim that she herself looked like "a truck driver in drag". At a Susann convention in 1997, Courtney Love turned up in an outfit once owned by the author. Camille Paglia once described Susann as "our Uranian Aphrodite and our Diotima - goddess, priestess, Muse!" If proof were needed of Jacqueline Susann's status as a camp cultural icon (and it's a big if), the choice of Bette Midler as her cinematic embodiment in the forthcoming Isn't She Great? will more than do. In recent years, more evidence could be found at New York screenings of the 1968 film of Valley Of The Dolls, adapted from a book that was once the biggest-selling novel of all time and earned Jacqueline Susann a place in the Guinness Book of Records.