Singleton looking for a soul mate, or at least a bit of human warmth. Enjoy dancing, weekend breaks and walking on the beach, but haven’t done so much of that lately. Will settle for anyone, bullies and emotional cripples included. At this year’s Cannes festival, sad tales of desperate lonely hearts abound.

In Expired, an astonishingly passive traffic warden pins her romantic hopes on an insensitive brute. In Parpados Azules, two lost individuals come together for no other reason than that neither of them has anyone else. In The Band’s Visit, a restaurant-owner longs for the husband and family she put off having in her younger days.

These anti-romcoms feature perfectly ordinary-looking characters leading rather dreary, solitary existences. People you might pass in the street every day without noticing. A respite from saccharine romances involving impossibly beautiful people with glamorous jobs who are, against all odds, meant for each other. Here love is not presented as the magic solution to all life’s problems, and happy endings exist only in fairytales.

Loneliness being one of the most universal human conditions, these are stories which cross all geographical and cultural boundaries. At the same time they reflect a particularly modern malaise, an individualist society where family ties are easily broken and relationships often fleeting. A world which has given birth to the TV dinner for one and internet dating. Serving to reassure us by showing characters who are far more lonely, more vulnerable and more desperate than ourselves, these films nevertheless reveal small glimpses of our own lives in their tentative, awkward conversations and hopeful, clumsy embraces. This is perhaps what makes them so funny, and so painfully sad.

Judy Lister