Emma's greeted by boos

Emma Thompson's return to the screen has been booed and jeered at the Venice Film Festival.

Several members of the audience left early during last night's showing of Imagining Argentina, Thompson's first leading big screen role since Primary Colors in 1998. The movie, one of only two British films in the main competition, was directed by playwright Christopher Hampton. Thompson also made an uncredited contribution to the screenplay.

Set in Buenos Aires in 1976, the film stars Antonio Banderas as the director of a children's theatre whose journalist wife (Thompson) writes a provocative article about the disappearances of people judged to be critics of the military junta in power.

When she is herself spirited away by the secret police and suffers rape and torture in a clandestine prison her husband discovers he is gifted with a form of second sight that allows him to "see" the fate of those who have disappeared.

This fanciful conceit might have worked had the execution not been so progressively risible.

Lack of logic and a gloating fascination with torture undermine an already fragile concept and by the time Banderas started strumming his guitar while his wife and daughter were suffering nameless horrors the audience collapsed into fits of derisive laughter.

Unable to withstand the film's absurdities, several members of the audience headed for the exit long before the end. Those who stayed were rewarded with a concluding onscreen slogan in Spanish which translated as "Never Again!" Ironically, it was a sentiment with which most critics concurred. "Turkey" was the word most used to describe the film following the screening.

Banderas, who had been in Venice earlier to promote Once Upon A Time in Mexico, wisely left the festival before the screening of Imagining Argentina, leaving Hampton and Thompson to run the gauntlet of a doubtless hostile press conference later today. One can only hope that the remaining British film in the main competition, Michael Winterbottom's Code 46, proves a more worthy contender.

There was some good news for the British, however, with the debut screening of Bernardo Bertolucci's controversial movie The Dreamers.

Produced by Briton Jeremy Thomas, the film deals with the sexual exploration between three young people - a brother and sister and an American boy - during the Sorbonne Riots in Paris in 1968.

Astonishingly graphic and sexually claustrophobic, the film, which was written by cineaste Gilbert Adair, is both a love letter to the cinema itself as well as a comingofage tale of sex and politics.

Punctuated by references to scores of movies and film-makers from Jean Cocteau to Samuel Fuller and featuring clips of Garbo, Dietrich and Buster Keaton, it is guaranteed to delight movie buffs while sending shivers of erotic frisson up the spine.

The cheers that greeted Bertolucci's bold and pictorially superb film were a marked contrast and showed a return to form for the celebrated Italian director whom many critics had written off as a spent force.

While the film may contain moments to offend the faint of heart - such as the lovemaking on a kitchen floor while the girl's brother watches - the sense of era and attitude, the period reconstruction of Paris and a soundtrack featuring Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Bob Dylan and The Doors are additional reasons to celebrate this provocative, pertinent film.