Cannes 2002; Intense Drama and Sexual Scandal Grip

An intense psychological drama about a carpenter and his apprentice kicked off a day of French-language film at Cannes Thursday and a sexually explicit movie was later expected to scandalize audiences

 "Le Fils" ("The Son"), from Belgium brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, is an engrossing examination of the relationship between Olivier, a carpenter, and a teenage boy he has every reason to hate but is inextricably drawn to.

The boy, Francis, strangled Olivier's son during a botched robbery five years earlier, but after serving time in prison is apprenticed to Olivier's carpentry center as part of his rehabilitation.

While Olivier knows who Francis is, the boy has no idea and the film explores how the crime that separates and connects them warps Olivier's behavior and governs the interaction between them.

"Olivier doesn't know why he is behaving the way he is, but we sense that there is something lurking there," Jean-Pierre Dardenne told a press conference after the screening, where the film was warmly received by critics.

"We watch how a human being manages not to commit murder despite all the subjective reasons he might have for doing so," he said of the film, one of 22 competing in the main competition at the world's most famous film festival.

The Dardennes are previous winners at Cannes, taking home the Palme d'Or in 1999 for "Rosetta," and critics talked animatedly about them as hot contenders again this year with "Le Fils."

Part of what makes the film absorbing is the way it is shot, with the camera nearly always shooting from behind or the side with a shaky, urgent intensity.

Olivier's face, neck and hands are constantly in tight focus, with his body appearing squeezed into the frame and uncomfortable with the close physical distance between him and Francis.

The tension between the two was alive off screen as well as on, said Belgian actor Olivier Gourmet, who turns in a stunning performance as Olivier. "From the beginning I didn't want to see him," he said.

"I wanted to create this mystery between us. I didn't say hello to him on set...one time I even pushed him away and he hit a coffee machine -- It was something like a game to keep the relationship at a distance."

SEX AND SCANDAL While "Le Fils" may make waves with its emotional intensity, "Irreversible," from Franco-Argentine director Gaspar Noe, is likely to send shock waves through audiences when it screens later Thursday.

Billed as the "film a scandale" of the festival, it stars sultry Italian actress Monica Bellucci as a woman fighting to deal with the animal-like impulses of a lover, played by her real-life husband Vincent Cassel.

With sequences of shocking violence and explicit sex, including an already notorious nine-minute rape scene, Noe is expected to get critics' blood boiling if nothing else.

Raven-haired Bellucci, 33, who made a big impact at the Berlin film festival last year in "Malena," playing a woman whose beauty stirs an entire town's male population into sexual agitation, is sure "Irreversible" will alarm.

"It's an explosive blend of violence and ecstasy, of monstrosity and poetry," she said in an interview with the Italian press ahead of the festival.

"'Irreversible' has been made to sow discord, to divide audiences. It's halfway between 'A Clockwork Orange' and Pier Paolo Pasolini's 'Salo'. It will divide the festival."