Arriving at the Festival Palais for the Cannes gala screening of the Australian competition entry, Dance Me To My Song, we were stopped and politely asked to wait while the film's key ensemble posed for the photographers at the foot of the Palais steps. When they made their way up those red-carpeted steps, one of the actors, Heather Rose, was carried by another, John Brumpton, in his arms.

Heather Rose, like her pivotal character in the film, for which she came up with the story for its screenplay, has severe cerebral palsy, and she communicates through a voice synthesiser attached to her wheelchair.

The opening scenes chart the daily realities of life for her fictional character, Julia. Cutting between the early morning rituals of Julia and her paid carer, Madelaine (Joey Kennedy), it contrasts Julia's struggling to move on her bed with Madelaine's complete freedom of movement as she admires her face and body in the bathroom mirror.

The selfish Madelaine's patience is easily stretched by Julia's recurring demands, and she responds with threats and intimidation whenever the job gets too much for her, which is regularly. When Madelaine brings a boyfriend around to Julia's home and Julia seeks her attention, Madelaine's solution is to wheel Julia into the bedroom to watch them having sex.

But that experience only serves to heighten Julia's awareness of her own need to be loved - emotionally and sexually. Bored one afternoon, she wheels herself onto the path of Eddie (John Brumpton), a good-looking, friendly passer-by. As he visits her more and more often, brightening up her days, Julia sets about seducing him. So, too, does the jealous Madelaine, leading to traumatic consequences.

Dance Me To My Song is a bold, risk-taking and intense drama which signals a wholly uncompromising approach to its subject matter early on - when Julia is shown naked in a sequence sufficiently extended to allow the viewer time to react, and to contemplate that reaction. The film is as direct in its exploration of the sexual desires of a woman with cerebral palsy as in its depiction of the psychological and physical cruelty inflicted on her by an uncaring carer.

This riveting film is directed with compassion and sensitivity by Rolf de Heer, who introduced Heather Rose to film-making when he cast her in a tiny role five years ago in Bad Boy Bubby. His new film falters only in its final stages, when it dips over into misguided melodrama and pat resolution. But it is the journey taken by the film-makers - and the audience - to that point which makes Dance Me To My Song such a thoughtful and moving yet resolutely unsentimental experience.

The audience at the Cannes gala screening responded with a sustained standing ovation, during which the only one seated was Heather Rose, who nodded and smiled to acknowledge the cheers and applause as she sat in her red wheelchair with flowers in her arms.

On the opening day of this, the 51st Cannes Film Festival, when the jury met the media, the jury president, Martin Scorsese, asked how they would judge the 24 films in competition, replied: "I think you have to go with your heart, really." A Cannes jury voting with its heart cannot fail to acknowledge Dance Me To My Song when the awards are presented next Sunday night.

NOR can they ignore the characteristically big heart which throbs throughout the new Ken Loach film, My Name Is Joe. The title is the first half of a sentence which finishes in "and I am an alcoholic" - nine words finally uttered by the unemployed Glaswegian, Joe Kavanagh (played by Peter Mullan), after taking years to summon up the courage and willpower to speak those words at an AA meeting.

Ken Loach is one of the last loud and eloquent voices of diehard socialism in British cinema today and My Name is Joe, scripted by Paul Laverty, who wrote Carla's Song for Loach, goes on to chart familiar Loach territory - a rundown and socially deprived urban area where unemployment and poverty are rife, as is the drugs epidemic which Loach tackles head-on for the first time here. Regardless of its ostensible familiarity, the drama subtly kicks in with Loach's trademark apparently effortless skill.

Joe (Peter Mullan), off the drink for almost a year, is 37 and feels he has achieved nothing else in life, beyond the surrogate family of inept amateur footballers whom he coaches. Then he meets Sarah (Louise Goodall), a health visitor dedicated to her work, and he awkwardly, tentatively becomes involved with her. And he feels compelled to take direct action when one of his young footballers, an ex-junkie, and his drug-addicted girlfriend, become the helpless prey of unscrupulous dealers.

As the pressures mount, Joe has to deal with another, personal one - his determination to avoid alcohol as a balm - in this gripping, angry and accomplished social drama which builds and builds in dramatic power and is charged by the vivid, naturalistic performances of a fine cast, and Peter Mullan in particular.

Contrary to the view of some commentators at Cannes, the film's problem lies not in some perceived notions of deja vu but in its thick, often impenetrable Scottish accents which made the usually intrusive French sub-titles at Cannes all the more welcome to me, for one.

THE first of the French entries in competition at Cannes, Patrice Cherreau's Cieux Qui M'Aiment Prendront Le Train, was, perhaps inevitably, most enthusiastically received by the French critics, who revere Chereau's prodigious work as a director of theatre, opera and film. While it would be difficult to share the passion of those members of the critics' panel in the French trade paper, Le Film Francais, who loved the movie a la folie, there is much to admire about Chereau's seventh feature, his first since the 1994 La Reine Margot.

Literally translated as Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train, the title of Chereau's involved and involving new movie is the final edict of a domineering, abrasive and bisexual painter who demands his family, friends and lovers take the four-hour journey from Paris to Limoges for his funeral.

Almost all of the film's first half takes place aboard the rapid-transport SNCF train as disparate characters from the dead man's past are thrown together and forced to confront their relationships with him and with each other. The tense, enclosed atmosphere is heightened immeasurably by Eric Gautier's dexterous hand-held, wide-screen camerawork within such tight confines.

The second, even more discursive half of the film details the funeral, and a long night of the soul as the protagonists are thrown together for emotionally fraught confrontations, only a few of which are resolved. Chereau's consistently compelling film assembles an exemplary cast which notably includes Charles Berling, Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi, Pascal Gregory and newcomer Sylvain Jacques, along with the magisterial veteran, Jean-Louis Trintignant (in a dual role) and Vincent Perez, startlingly explicitly shown at one point as a transsexual in the making.

A former assistant to the great Francois Truffaut, Claude Miller is in competition at Cannes with the handsomely composed and initially very intriguing La Classe de Neige, which follows a nervy, insular boy on a school skiing trip while his over-protective - and strangely sinister - father hovers in the background. Most of the thought which clearly went into such a promising scenario was squandered in its limply reductive feebly predictable resolution.

The nadir of the Cannes competition to date has been Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a lurid, heavy-handed and tiresomely over-extended screen treatment of gonzo journo Hunter S. Thompson's wild and crazy psychedelic excursion recounted in a classic Rolling Stone article and spin-off book.

The febrile imagination of Terry Gilliam, who took over as director shortly before shooting when Alex Cox was fired, is rarely in evidence in this brashly over-the-top, scatterershot remembrance of things past purveyed with the sledge-hammer subtlety of Oliver Stone and the sheer naivete of a post-1960s hippie apologist.

As it drags along it fails to engage despite the most valiant efforts of Johnny Depp, admirably deadpan with his teeth almost permanently clamped on a cigarette-holder, and Benicio Del Toro, shirt open to exhibit the beer belly he so assiduously grew for the movie. As it flounders into its fourth and final half-hour, it merely evokes that boring feeling of detachment one feels at a party where everyone else is chemically altered to feel like they're on another planet.

More from Planet Cannes on Friday.