May 16, 2003

Cannes, Where Palms Are Made of Gold

ANNES, France, May 15 — By late yesterday morning, the most dedicated local stargazers had set up their parasols and folding chairs behind the steel barricades outside the bulky glass-and-concrete Palais des Festivals in anticipation of the evening's red-carpet promenade. And by dusk, when the chauffeured Mercedes-Benzes and giant Renaults began to disgorge their cargo of directors, movie stars, money men and trophy dates, a respectable throng had gathered, necks craning, to catch some flashbulb dazzle from the opening of the 56th Cannes International Film Festival.

For most of yesterday and today, though, the atmosphere on the Croisette has been curiously tranquil. The loudspeakers affixed to nearly every lamppost still play the lulling airs that can make you feel as if you're strolling through the opening credits of a bad movie; the scruffy buskers still strum their tired tributes to Bob Dylan and Bob Marley; the mimes and the human statues still give you the creeps. Cannes, as the popular saying goes, is Cannes. But the quiet this year is unmistakable.

The biggest tumult so far came just before the "Matrix Reloaded" news conference as journalists shoved and jostled one another at the foot of a narrow staircase leading to one of the Palais's upstairs rooms and were confronted with traditional crowd-control techniques of the festival's security staff: shout "Don't push!" in French and then inspect each badge with painstaking thoroughness, as if looking for the encoded secrets of "The Matrix" itself.

The loudest buzz, meanwhile, has come from the crowd of demonstrators who marched to the perimeter of the Palais complex this morning, their signs and chanted slogans protesting the French government's proposal to reform the nation's pension system for public employees. By lunchtime, though, the protesters were gone, and the only reminders of their presence were a few officers of the national police force lounging beside the red carpet for tonight's "Matrix Reloaded" screening.

The general strike the demonstrators were supporting may be one reason the streets and restaurants here are less packed than usual at this time of year. The strike, which began on Tuesday and has twice been extended in Paris beyond its planned 24-hour duration, has slowed down the country's transportation system and has made getting to the festival somewhat difficult. One American critic told me she had managed, on Tuesday, to make it as far as Barcelona, where, resourceful New Yorker that she is, she hailed a taxi for the six-and-a-half hour ride to Cannes.

The usual contingent of English-speaking journalists is here. But "The Matrix Reloaded" notwithstanding, the American film industry, which exports a large annual quota of Hollywood glamour and aggressiveness to this quintessentially French event, is keeping a relatively low profile this year. There are three American films in the main competition — Clint Eastwood's "Mystic River," Gus Van Sant's "Elephant" and Vincent Gallo's "Brown Bunny" — and a few scattered through the festival's other programs.

The competition slate is dominated by young and middle-generation French filmmakers like André Téchiné, François Ozon and Claude Miller, and by perennials like Alexander Sokurov and Raoul Ruiz. Was the sparse American representation a reflection of the poor state of relations between the French and American governments? This question, ritualistically invoked at news conferences, is typically answered with exemplary diplomacy (unless the moderator suppresses it altogether). As Keanu Reeves put it at the "Matrix Reloaded" event, a film festival should be a place to come together to celebrate art and humanity.

Quite so. And despite global and domestic politics, travel difficulties and SARS, the opening ceremonies, in which the festival celebrates its own powers of celebration, came off with considerable gaiety. While the programs over the next eight days promise, as ever, a large proportion of challenging, tough-minded, serious films, the spirit of the opening is decidedly lighthearted. It is, indeed, unmatched as a showcase for an indescribably, deliciously French form of show-business tackiness as the haute cuisine of international cinema is served up with a heaping side order of cheese — or as they say hereabouts, fromage.

Or, if you prefer, formaggio, since this year's festival, whose official posters read "Viva il Cinema!" in bright magenta, is dedicated to the memory of Federico Fellini. Accordingly, the mistress of ceremonies on Wednesday night was the Italian actress Monica Bellucci, who appears in "The Matrix Reloaded" as the most voluptuous computer program ever to spring from a code-writer's fevered brain. On Wednesday, she embraced her flesh-and-blood ceremonial duties in good humor. "How could I turn down the opportunity to make mistakes in French in front of an audience of millions?" she said. I suspect that much of the audience, watching her move across the stage in her creamy satin gown, was inclined to forgive any lapses in grammar or pronunciation.

The obligatory dance performance, in which two women wrapped in white paper smeared paint on themselves while the men behind them struck movie-star poses, was less forgivable, but it was at least brief. It was followed by the introduction of the competition jury, which is, as is customary, composed largely of directors (all men) and movie stars (mostly women), reflecting a film culture devoted to the veneration of auteurs and the worship of actresses.

This year's chairman is Patrice Chéreau, whose films include "Queen Margot" and `'Intimacy." The other members are Stephen Soderbergh, who won the festival's top prize in 1989 for "Sex, Lies and Videotape"; Meg Ryan; the French actress Karin Viard; her countryman Jean Rochefort (currently in Patrice Leconte's "Man on the Train"); the Indian actress Aishwarya Rai; the Italian screenwriter Erri De Luca; the Chinese director Jiang Wen, whose "Devils on the Doorstep" won the Grand Prix in 2000; and Danis Tanovic, the Bosnian filmmaker who won the best screenplay prize here two years ago.

Then Penélope Cruz and Vincent Perez declared the festival open and reappeared onscreen in the opening-night feature, Gérard Krawczyk's "Fanfan la Tulipe." A remake of Christian-Jaque's 1952 film starring Gina Lollobrigida and Gérard Philippe (which won the Palme d'Or and was itself a remake), "Fanfan" is the kind of movie that begs to be described as a boisterous romp, and begs so hard that it quickly becomes a thunderous bore. The opening credits are written with a feather, which sets a tone of costumed high silliness that gets old in a hurry, as the hero, an 18th-century roustabout (Mr. Perez) who does a lot of fighting and seducing, eventually falls in love with a hot-blooded Gypsy (Ms. Cruz).

Oh, well. One of the charms of Cannes has always been its mixture of pomp and absurdity. It may, with a hint of defensiveness, proclaim itself the premier film festival in all the world, but it is happily not above a little self-mockery. The highlight of the opening night was surely "Les Marches," the second installment of the festival director Gilles Jacob's cinematic scrapbook of festival history.

Described as a musical comedy, "Les Marches" (whose title refers to the red-carpet ritual that had concluded half an hour earlier), presents, in no particular order, newsreel and video snippets of festivals past, including a montage of red-carpet mishaps, a close study of the history of movie-star décolletage, manglings of the French language that make Ms. Bellucci sound like Voltaire himself, and sundry other high points and embarrassing moments. Since the 1930's, there have been riots, rainstorms, episodes of individual and collective public drunkenness, resistance from the locals and bulldozers on the city's beaches. (And also, unmentioned in Mr. Jacob's film, the suspension of the festival during World War II, and again in May 1968). But Cannes, then and still, is Cannes.