'Carnages' at London Film Festival

'Carnages' caused walk outs at various festivals, but it richly deserved to win this year's prize for Best First Feature, says Ryan Gilbey. Well, he would - he was one of th judges

Last night, a young woman named Delphine Gleize took her place in an illustrious roll-call that includes such names as Bertolucci, Rivette, Fassbinder and Greenaway. She walked off with the Sutherland Trophy, a prize awarded by the Regus London Film Festival to the best first feature screened in the preceding fortnight's programme, for her flamboyant and adventurous picture Carnages. "Walked off with", of course, isn't technically correct. She can't employ it as an ostentatious paperweight, or use it to bludgeon critics who don't like her movie, because the trophy will remain in a cabinet at the National Film Theatre (though when Lynne Ramsay won the award for Ratcatcher in 2000, she made off with it in the back of a cab).

As a member of this year's Sutherland jury, I'm pleased as Punch that the prize went to her. Within the movie's first 20 minutes, I had an inkling that I would want her to emerge the winner. My only fear was that the rest of the movie couldn't possibly maintain the level of wit and ingenuity displayed in that opening reel. It did.

Until 1997, first and second features were eligible for the Sutherland Trophy, but the stipulations have, sensibly, been altered, bringing the prize more in line with our cultural inclinations. As consumers, and as human beings, we're susceptible to the scent of romance attached to any dazzling work of art that arrives fresh from the hand of a formerly unheralded talent. The new Citizen Kane is up there with golden tickets to Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory and parking spaces in central London: we're all on the look out for one.

Most debuts, however, are more a case of sending out a signal and broadcasting intentions. They're a calling card, as you realise when you watch something as superficially exciting as Donnie Darko (what a great third or fourth film this director will make). Such works reek of the movies, rather than life. Bertrand Tavernier was advised by his wife to "live more" before making his first feature; he did, and duly produced the splendid The Watchmaker of St Paul. Ang Lee has said of his own debut, Pushing Hands, that it was "a lot of me, me, me".

While it's true that much of Carnages has that self-regarding feel, the film also enthusiastically engages with its audience; as it progresses, Gleize builds a relationship with the viewer so that the humorous touches – the sight of an old woman inching along with her Zimmer frame set to a restless, libidinous flamenco soundtrack – feel like conspiratorial in-jokes from a trusted friend.

I was amazed to discover, after the jury's decision had been finalised, just how unpopular the movie has been in some quarters. I also came across three people who had walked out of Carnages at various festivals, which just proves that one person's breathtaking fantasia is another person's, well, carnage.

All I can tell you is that Gleize's zesty imagery and narrative dexterity are worth a swoon or two. The prize, we were reminded, was to be awarded to the most original and imaginative debut feature from a list of 10. This was whittled down to a shortlist of three, Carnages vying with the very brave Blue Car, about a high-school poet and the proud teacher who urges her into ever more treacherous pastures; and Suddenly, a witty lesbian road movie – that is, it's the road movie that is witty, not the lesbians. On the contrary, the lesbians are taciturn, and given to producing flick-knives whenever their rather rudimentary chat-up lines fail to have the desired effect.

The general consensus was that Carnages most comprehensively met the criteria of originality and imagination. Gleize's film begins with the slaughter of a bull after it gores a handsome young matador. The bull is carved up, and the individual journeys of its various parts – horns, eyes, bones – to consumers across France and Spain provides Gleize with the opportunity to quantify a handful of lives. The multiple narratives here are not boastfully advertised, as you find in pictures such as Short Cuts and Magnolia, but gracefully intertwined, more in the spirit of The Red Squirrel, that wonderful thriller by Julio Medem (himself a Sutherland winner for Vacas), where loose ends and ellipses only enhance our satisfaction.

That synopsis of Carnages, not to mention its threatening title, might suggest a new Gaspar Noe, or another Amores Perros, but that couldn't be further from the truth. While Carnages examines a similar interchange of the human and the bestial, a few of its more elegant images expose the dog-fighting metaphor in Amores Perros for the hackneyed device that it really was. When Gleize cuts from a television image of the majestic black bull passing before the camera, to a shot of a domestic Doberman strolling in front of the TV screen, she keenly evokes the casual trespasses between our world, and the world of those we foolishly regard as our lessers in sophistication. That simple cut, which briefly makes it appear that the bull has climbed out of the TV into the lounge where a twitchy young moppet is curled up on the sofa, sent a chill down my spine. But it lifted my heart too.

The term "pure cinema" has been so overused that it has now lost any purity it once had. Let's just say that Delphine Gleize has cinema in her marrow, and you can't fake that.