Real life and fiction echo each other quite closely when it comes to prediction.

You know, sometimes you anticipate a film so much that it acts like a drug. A vague recurring dream; a rumour on the web, two or three years ago; maybe a poster in the street, six months before; a too-short-too-quick teaser, several weeks past. You get closer. TVs start buzzing. Even your neighbour knows about it. It feels like an incoming meteor. A heat wave burns your wings, and the fall is good.

But when the lights turn off and your precious film is about to begin, ready to drink up every drop that falls from the screen you almost feel like you want to go back: back to this wild dream you had, where it was all uncertain, but where you had this increasing tension to breathe with. Because then, what the hell comes afterwards? Fulfilled hope is an emotional dead-end.

Don’t we live for this kind of unending thrill? The dreamy state of projecting oneself into a far-away silken future is maybe what we secretly crave the most. Waiting for holidays, a date or a big happening gives almost equal - if not more - pleasure, than the event itself. Of course pleasure is only a shortcut away from his uncanny sister: pain. Indeed, a familiar psychological conundrum is whether our actions are driven by our thirst for pleasure or by fear of the consequences. Maybe both, but the fear of pain is devastating and, mostly unconsciously, we rearrange our lives in order to avoid everything that can hurt us (physically and emotionally). The truth is: our imagination is a wild horse, leading us wherever he wants, whether it’s over a cloudscape… or under raging storms.

Therefore, we understand why foreshadowing is a powerful writing device. “Foreshadowing”, in screenwriter lingo, is the best way to make you anxious about the outcome of a dilemma, about the destiny of a character or the resolution of a story. It’s when you suddenly raise a powerful thought in the audience’s mind, with very little information. Then, you leave them to do the job. The nasty glance of a character at the end of a scene; an insert of a tentacle getting out of a gully hole, while the heroes are shooting the breeze. Yes, you can call it suspense, because suspense is the black belt of the foreshadowing art. This magicians’ trick is the ABC of the scriptwriter.

Foreshadowing works in the short term - within the unity of a scene - or in the long run. A prophecy told to the hero –will it be fulfilled? A threat spat out by the super villain –will he take action? Usually, promises are held… but in a way which is a light-year away from what we were expecting. And that’s where the pleasure comes in. When surprise bursts out. Now, back to our real-life expectations, surprise is also the benediction of our daily routine. We long for something to happen, for something to be, once in a while, different. It’s that smell of unexpectedness we love in the fictional mist, so where is it around us, in the daylight?

Let’s hope, folks, that Cannes 2010 will bring us a full deck of wonder. Otherwise, we’ll have to seek it… outside the matrix.