Beyond the Multiplex: Cannes

May 18, 2006 | CANNES, France -- When I arrived in Cannes on Tuesday afternoon, the red-carpet area in front of the Palais des Festivals was cordoned off. You expect that, of course; what good would it be otherwise? It also wasn't red yet. The soon-to-be-carpeted pavement was being treated with some kind of fixative, in an especially unattractive dull yellow reminiscent of ... well, never mind what. Yes, that's right; the most fabulous piece of real estate in the international cinema world, where Tom Hanks, Audrey Tautou and Ron Howard would soon ascend for the world premiere of "The Da Vinci Code," was nothing but a field of sticky yellow goo.

There are those who say Cannes isn't really France, but those are the same people who say Las Vegas isn't really America. They're right, in a sort of humorless Protestant way, but they're also missing the point. Yes, more English than French is spoken at the Cannes Film Festival (at least during press conferences and other official events). But the uneasy liaison between Hollywood and Europe that this massive event represents expresses a central ambivalence in the French character, and you might say the same thing about this overgrown Riviera beach town with its palm trees, its rows of piss-elegant hotels and its flotilla of gargantuan yachts lolling in the harbor like so many old, white cats.

Away from the Croisette, the beachfront boulevard where the Palais, the big hotels and the tent city that surrounds them are found, Cannes itself is an ordinary French resort, overbuilt in places and run-down in others. Four blocks from Tom Hanks and the $600 hotel rooms, you can eat a cheese crêpe or a Tunisian sandwich, drink a café au lait, and still get change back from a 5-euro note. If it wasn't host to the international film industry's premier event, Cannes would just be another stop on the train from Nice to Marseille.

For two weeks each spring, Cannes provides the yellow goo that sticks big-budget, mass-market American moviemaking to the increasingly diverse and refracted realm of global cinema, which is essentially a niche art form for soi-disant sophisticates of all continents. Maybe that goo is called glamour, maybe it's called money. Whatever it is, there's plenty of it here, and the louche atmosphere of this region, along with the presence of roughly 4,000 of my media brethren (and some 30,000 or so other well-lubricated film industry professionals), make it seem at least temporarily important.

By the time you read this, the 59th Cannes festival will have launched, with the world premiere of a film almost everyone here has already dubbed irrelevant. (Press screenings of "The Da Vinci Code" began on Tuesday, and the earliest reviews are tepid or worse.) That said, somebody at Cannes decided to open this year's fete with Ron Howard's adaptation of Dan Brown's world-conquering and Catholic-enraging thriller, and that decision does capture the festival's tendency to vacillate wildly between the film world's magnetic poles.

Like the third "X-Men" movie, which also premieres here, "Da Vinci Code" is screening "out of competition," meaning it isn't up for the Palme d'Or (the grand jury prize) or any of Cannes' other awards. By unexpressed mutual consent, Hollywood studios don't usually submit their films in competition here, and festival organizers usually don't invite them. Part of this reflects the fact that while the Palme d'Or winner will attract worldwide media attention, it won't necessarily attract paying customers. Sure, such recent Palme d'Or films as "Pulp Fiction" (1994), "The Pianist" (2002) and "Fahrenheit 9/11" (2004) went on to become hits. But it's become customary to see winners like "Underground" (1995), "The Eel" (1997), "Rosetta" (1999) and last year's "L'Enfant" make almost no impression at the box office, especially in the United States.

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