Monica is so famous in France &ndash she’s like our national

“Monica is so famous in France – she’s like our national muse. I notice sometimes, in cinemas in Paris, when there’s a group of kids in from the suburbs, they get furious during the rape scene. Maybe they have a thing about Monica – and I wonder whether it’s those who have thought about rape that quit the theatre at that moment.”In Cannes, some critics accused No?f shooting an actual rape He shakes his head in disbelief at the memory. “Maybe if the actors were unknown, then you could imagine that they are porn actors and the sex is for real.

But because they are so famous, surely that makes you very aware that everything is fake, that it is a show.”The suggestion that it was anything other than artifice also made those who appeared to be protecting Bellucci’s honour guilty of patronising her as an actress. In fact, No?tresses, the scene was entirely under her control “She directed herself She decided what the rapist could or couldn’t do. She decided that we should add the digital penis in post-production.” No?auses before adding, emphatically: “Concerning that scene, she was the boss.”‘Irr?rsible’ is released on 31 January. Elia Suleiman’s new film Divine Intervention is a strange, ambiguous and ultimately rather maddening rumination on Arab-Israeli tensions. Subtitled “A Chronicle of Love and Pain”, the first part is set in Nazareth and plays virtually as a silent movie while it pieces together a collage of urban strife: beatings, bombings and shootings are a fact of life, even in the quietest suburbs, yet interspersed with the violence is an irrepressible streak of absurdity. A boy playing keepy-uppy on the street finds his football stabbed by a curmudgeonly neighbour. A woman walks through a roadblock despite being menaced by armed soldiers, and as she crosses over the border the watchtower behind her suddenly collapses.

Is he being romantic, or whimsical, or subversive when he releases a large red balloon emblazoned with Arafat’s face and watches it bob gently over the bemused border guards? Nothing in Suleiman’s impassive gaze tips us the wink. The film is full of such arresting images, though it’s difficult to tell just how seriously it wants us to take them.The coolness of tone is baffling, particularly in the late fantasy sequence where an Israeli firing squad is flamboyantly dispatched by a female Palestinian ninja, and a bizarre allusion to the crucifixion tests the boundaries of the film’s studied neutrality. Divine Intervention offers interpretative challenges that some may feel, by the end, are an unsatisfactory substitute for the staider pleasures of character and narrative development.First seen in 1926, the restored print of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis comes at us with the dire force of a premonition. As a fable of tyranny and idealism it isn’t very sophisticated, but its crowd scenes and monumental city-scapes eerily foreshadow both the Nazi rallies and what Albert Speer’s Berlin might have looked like under the Thousand Year Reich.

The images of slave workers filing along in meek subjection are hideously suggestive of the camps. (Hitler, it’s no surprise to learn, was an admirer of Lang.) Yet its tale of revolution is stirringly optimistic. The tyrant boss who rules Metropolis is scheming with a mad inventor to crush the workers, while the boss’s son and his spitfire girlfriend want to mobilise the downtrodden proletariat: as the intertitles reiterate, the “head” of the ruling classes and the “hands” of the workforce can only be reconciled by the heart’s goodwill. Modern audiences may baulk at the clunkiness of the message, but no one will be unmoved by the stupendous Expressionist design or Lang’s visionary grandeur.It’s been a while since we heard from Dana Carvey, Mike Myers’s geeky Wayne’s World cohort, and after The Master of Disguise it won’t be long enough till we hear from him again. He plays a doltish Italian waiter who inherits the family talent for mimickry – and also, it seems, their unbelievably lame sense of humour. The plot involves Carvey donning one disguise after another in his attempt to bring down a superthief, played by Star Trek android Brent Spiner.