Cannes 2012: Love/Paradise: Love, review Love is in the air at Cannes, although the feeling is far from fuzzy. Two accomplished and very different Austrian directors, the controlled Michael Haneke and the freewheeling Ulrich Seidl, probe the sadder dimensions of our impulse to love and need to be loved in their latest films, both of which have been selected to compete for the Palme D'Or. What character, indeed. Early in the film Anne suffers a stroke, and Haneke shows us Georges going about the increasingly difficult business of caring for his increasingly unwell wife. They have enjoyed a lifetime of happiness together and now it is time to pay the bill, which Georges does with quiet, inspirational resolve. Both Trintignant and Riva are shatteringly good, although the full emotional impact of their performances only hits home once we have had time to reflect: Haneke assidulously avoids obvious emotional cues throughout. The mawkishness of death is amusingly dismissed in a terrific scene in which Georges recounts the details of a cringingly maudlin funeral. Clear-eyed, cool-headed and profoundly humane, Love is the consummate anti-weepie. Ulrich Seidl's Paradise: Love is the first in a trilogy of films about women searching for happiness on holiday, shot in Seidl's trademark improvisatory style. It follows Teresa (Margarethe Tiesel), a middle-aged Austrian woman who travels to Kenya in search of romance and finds it - or so she thinks - with the iron-bodied, silver-tongued studs who sell trinkets on the beach. Of course, these flings are merely one half of a business transaction, but at first Teresa wants to believe they're something more. Thanks to Tiesel's disarming and emotionally exposed performance, so do we. Paradise: Love flits nimbly between humour and sadness, and treats potentially ponderous themes such as sex, race and the rancid legacy of colonialism with a welcome light touch. It is also window-steamingly explicit. As some of the improvised scenes progress, it's hard not to wonder if Seidl's crew are nervously eyeballing one another, silently begging him to shout cut. A word of warning to the prudish: he doesn't.