The British Arrive (Not via the Chunnel)

As different as the classic chalk and cheese, a pair of completely British films have this at least in common: They’re at the top of everyone’s short list of the sensations of the current festival. More than that, no one is particularly surprised at seeing them causing a fuss.

Director Mike Leigh is familiar with being the talk of Cannes. His last film, “Naked,” debuted here and won the best director award as well as best actor for David Thewlis. Now Leigh is back with another remarkable work, “Secrets and Lies,” filled as expected with moments that exquisitely balance humor and pain without ever tipping over.

Focusing on the emotional stress points of kinship relationships, “Secrets” examines what happens to the lives of a group of Londoners when a young black woman meets her birth mother, who is white, for the first time. Laced with scenes that tear at the heart, this is a film that sees the adventure in what Leigh describes as “discovering who and what we are.”

Though it’s showing out of competition and thus not eligible for a prize, “Trainspotting” is used to causing a sensation. First came Irvine Welsh’s uncompromising novel about junkies and thugs in Edinburgh’s slums (“the voice of punk, grown up, grown wiser and grown eloquent,” said London’s Sunday Times), which started as a cult item and grew until sales approached the John Grisham level.

Then came a play in London’s West End, followed by the terrifically energetic film, filled with awful language and worse actions, a brash and cheeky comedy that is blacker than a thousand nightmares. All style and attitude, with a hip soundtrack thrown in, “Trainspotting” (whose title equates heroin addiction with the pointless hobby of writing down locomotive numbers) cost but $2.3 million and is on its way to becoming the second-highest grossing British film ever (behind “Four Weddings and a Funeral”).

Why has “Trainspotting” caught on so massively in Britain, to the point of being compared to Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange”? “Each decade there’s the chance to make a film that speaks for the decade,” director Danny Boyle says. “For Britain in the ‘80s, it was ‘My Beautiful Laundrette.’ And for some reason our film has connected with what people feel it’s like living in Britain now. When you make a film like that, you run the danger of being fashionable and trendy, but I think that’s a good danger to run.”

Aside from influencing ad campaigns for other products (Cobra shoes apparently tried a “Trainerspotting” slogan), the “Trainspotting” phenomenon has also proved a blessing for British headline writers. Examples include “Needle Work,” “Mainlining to Misery,” “Putting Hype in the Hypodermic” and the irresistible “Too Much Junkie Business.”

The trio behind the film--39-year-old director Boyle, 31-year-old writer John Hodge and 30-year-old producer Andrew Macdonald--are the same men who turned out last year’s “Shallow Grave.” Matey enough to want to handle interviews as a group, they are a bright and affable crew, given to mutual teasing. When producer Macdonald says that the U.K. gross for “Trainspotting” is “the equivalent of $80 [million]-$90 million in America,” Hodge lightly asks: “And will I have a share of that equivalent?”

Macdonald may have inherited his belief in teamwork from his grandfather, screenwriter Emeric Pressburger, who along with director Michael Powell created the Archers, the most celebrated of British film partnerships, responsible for such films as “Stairway to Heaven,” “The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp” and “The Red Shoes.”

“Though I think their films come closest to capturing the British character, they got criticized at the time for not being realistic dramas,” Macdonald says. “We get similarly criticized for taking a different way of getting close to the truth. But for cinema our way works best: I think Preston Sturges gets closer than John Sayles to the American character.”

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In many ways the opposite of realism (“a realistic film about addiction would be slow and boring,” Boyle says), “Trainspotting” does not neglect the lures of heroin: “Take the best orgasm you’ve ever had,” one character boasts, “multiply it by a thousand and you’re still nowhere near.” And it’s been criticized in Britain for glamorizing drug use, a problem the filmmakers anticipated. “When Danny saw the first 10 minutes cut together in London,” Macdonald remembers, “he called and said, ‘We’re going to get banned.’ ”

Though it probably would have spared them grief, the filmmakers and novelist Welsh (who has a cameo in the film) were united in not wanting to give “Trainspotting” the kind of grim social realism approach associated in Britain with director Ken Loach.

“Ken Loach could have made a great film, but he couldn’t have done it without turning the people into victims, which the book insists they’re not,” director Boyle says. “Instead their characters come out of Thatcherism, they’re a twisted, nihilistic response to that emphasis on individualism.”

Being faithful to the tone of Welsh’s novel was the key consideration for the team. “When you read the book you’re struck by the honesty of the emotion,” screenwriter Hodge says. “It’s not cool and clever, like most post-modern novels. It’s almost old-fashioned in that way. What I worried about was losing the humor and losing the spirit.”

Because the film would in large part have to do without “the luxury of internal monologue” that made the book’s more horrific sequences not only palatable but comic, Hodge focused on “providing a visual alternative in scenes that would be too repellent if done straight.”

A breakthrough came in probably “Trainspotting’s” most memorable scene, in which Renton (Ewan McGregor) is forced to grope around in “the filthiest toilet in Scotland” to recover some misplaced opium suppositories. To substitute for the humor of the novel’s voice, Hodge wrote a fantasy scene in which Renton abruptly finds himself swimming in a spectacular underwater paradise.

“When we read what John had done,” producer Macdonald says, “it was the defining moment for the film. We knew then he had it.”

Able to get an R-rating after a few trims, including a needle puncturing the skin and a few seconds of an underage girl’s enthusiastic enjoyment of sex, “Trainspotting” also had a bit of its thick Scottish accents redone (by the original actors) for its American release. That would be July 19, counter-programmed against the Olympics.

“There must be someone,” Macdonald says, “who doesn’t like running.”