After a two-week season of foreign, art house films I’m looking forward to watching a few dumb American blockbusters. There were some good films at the festival but arty films have their cliches too. The long, long… long… silences… The monologic dialogues… The violence. The love of the grotesque. The silent mental collapse of strait-laced upstanding citizens. The sheer unhappiness of it all.

In my entire life no one has ever told me a childhood story but they do it all the time in art house films. Another cliche – so good it also crops up in mainstream cinema – goes as follows: two characters are having a conversation while engaged in some other activity (say, drinking coffee). One asks the other a question – not small talk about the weather because only people in the real world do that – but an innocent enough question, like, say: “How long have you been a lorry driver?” Before answering, the other character will drop two lumps of sugar into his coffee, stir them in, add milk, pick up the cup, light a cigarette, inhale, drink the coffee, exhale, set down the coffee, look away over to the right, look down at his shoes, take another puff of the cigarette, then fix his eyes on his interlocutor for a few seconds and only then answer the question: “we’re all lorry drivers”.

That is, of course, if you’re lucky enough to get an answer. Characters in art house films rarely engage in anything so mundane as talking to each other. They talk at each other, across, over, against each other, but to each other? No. This is why there are so many understandings between people in such films. It never occurs to anyone to ask for clarification. Apparently a lengthy silence and “when I was six years old my mother died in a car crash” is an entirely satisfactory answer to the question “are you sleeping with Hank?”

One other cliche of art house films is that despite all the weirdness there is never, ever, a WTF moment. Nothing fazes people in arty films. If something so sudden and shocking happens that you, the viewer, leap out of your seat and scream the most that will happen on screen is someone will pace up and down a little. You can see this quite clearly in Hidden.

Consider what Trading Places would have been like as an arty European production. The two old botchers would never have had to explain to Eddie Murphy what was going on. Both he and Dan Akroyd would simply have accepted their changes of circumstances.

At least three of the films I saw at the festival used an artistic device that goes by the technical term of “cheating”. One otherwise good film, for example, started at the end. We clearly see character X die. The rest of the film relates the events leading up to the death of – no, not character X, but of character Y. That’s right: when the opening scenes are replayed at the end of the film a different person dies. I don’t think a Hollywood screenwriter would have gotten away with that.

So I’m looking forward to a film where every line of dialogue is a wisecrack directly related to a preposterous but coherent plot. Yes, realism is what it’s all about.