Cannes is not for sissies. Thirteen nonstop days of moviegoing can reduce any film critic to a wraith out of ““Night of the Living Dead.’’ But here I am again. The 50th Cannes Festival has begun with a hugely expensive opening-night party for Luc Besson’s ““The Fifth Element’’ that kept many angry guests waiting 90 minutes just to get in. The rue d’Antibes is lit up like a Christmas tree this year, the critics have lit into Besson’s film (page 78) and Bruce Willis attacked the critics at his press conference. Let the fun begin!
But I can’t resist the place. I love it the way a kid loves a candy store - and the way a masochist loves pain. For any serious movie buff, Cannes is both heaven and hell. Heaven because you get to see the best new films produced around the world fresh off the truck, relatively untainted by advance hype . . . and hell because chances are you are in no shape to appreciate them. Should you chance to stumble upon a masterpiece at the ungodly hour of 8:30 a.m. (when the first press screening is held in the huge, state-of-the-art Grande Salle Lumiere), you’ll have less than an hour to savor it before the next movie begins.
This is no way to treat a movie - or yourself. In Cannes, the wise critic learns to be skeptical of even his own judgments. Exhaustion and overload can lead to mistakes. Back in the real world, six months later, you may see a movie you dismissed in Cannes and realize it was a gem. I know. I did it with British director Mike Leigh’s ““Life Is Sweet.''
I’ve come to Cannes every year since 1990 wearing two hats as NEWSWEEK’S movie critic and reporter and as a member of the selection committee for the New York Film Festival. It’s our job to sniff out the best movies in the world and invite them to New York for the festival in the fall. Every day offers a dizzying menu of choices, for in addition to the official selections and the myriad sidebars there are hundreds of movies playing in the marketplace. In Cannes, if you haven’t seen at least four movies a day you feel like a slacker. The filmmakers and actors you run into have the opposite complaint: they’re so busy doing publicity they never get to see any movies.
From a distance, Cannes seems all black-tie soirees and bare-breasted starlets on the beach. That Cannes still exists, but it is only one of many. This great festival is at once the silliest and most solemn of places: a temple where the art of cinema is worshiped with austere devotion and a bordello where anything that comes on celluloid can be bought and sold. Deep within the bowels of the bunkerlike Palais des Festivals are the booths and corridors of the marche (market), a souk of cinema where vendors from Basel to Burkina Faso hawk their wares. It is about as glamorous as a convention of aluminum-siding salesmen. Buyers sampling the product dart in and out of tiny screening rooms, their attention spans showing no mercy. The Australian distributor realizes after 10 minutes that the folk parable from Mali will never play in Brisbane, and so he decides to go and check out the melodrama about disaffected Taiwanese youth. Pity the poor filmmaker standing outside as the stampede for the exit begins.
Climb back up into the sunlight and the old glamour still lingers, perhaps because no other film festival anachronistically insists that black tie be worn to all the official evening screenings. In the presence of celebrities and expert French cooking, the tired moviegoer gets a miraculous second wind. And there are memorable sights, such as the time, at a party for ““Wild at Heart’’ at the Carlton Hotel, Nicolas Cage exuberantly leaped onto the dinner table and performed an Elvis-inspired dance. Where but in Cannes would one get a glimpse not just of Elizabeth Taylor, appearing at an AmFAR benefit at the hilltop restaurant Moulin a Mougins, but of her Italian doppelganger decoy, who conveniently attracts paparazzi while Liz slips out back doors? Any illusion that the French are constitutionally blase was shattered the year Madonna strode up the stairway of the Palais and revealed herself in Gaultier underwear to a hysterical mass of humanity.
The festival’s relationship with Hollywood has all the ambivalence of a sibling rivalry. The big studios rarely unveil their prestige product in Cannes anymore (assuming they have prestige product), not wanting to risk early press exposure to any Oscar-aspiring fall movies. Instead they tend to offer up films that have already played in the States and need a push for their European openings (like this year’s closing-night selection, Clint Eastwood’s ““Absolute Power’’). More often, it’s the in- dependents that get invited into the competition (like such recent Golden Palm winners as ““Pulp Fiction’’ and ““Barton Fink’’). Hollywood would like to think Cannes is irrelevant, but consider how closely the list of last year’s prize winners - ““Secrets & Lies,’’ ““Fargo,’’ ““Breaking the Waves’’ - foreshadowed the Oscar nominations eight months later.
The French, in turn, are deeply resentful of Hollywood’s global commercial domination, not to mention the various ways in which American culture has muddied the pure waters of la belle France. Last year a McDonald’s actually opened down the street from my hotel. This year there is a new Planet Hollywood. And at the Carlton Hotel, whose entrance is always adorned with a gigantic billboard hyping the star of the moment - from Sean Connery as Agent 007 on up to Arnold Schwarzenegger - well, this year, for the 50th anniversary, we get Beavis and Butt-head.
