Beyond the Multiplex

As soon as tonight's screening (and the ensuing all-night parties) are over, insider conversations in the press room will switch back to this year's Palme d'Or chase, which features a wide-open field with several promising entries still to come. (The festival concludes on Sunday night.) There are at least three leading contenders: Julian Schnabel's remarkable "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," about a paralyzed man's personal metamorphosis (my personal favorite); Joel and Ethan Coen's existential crime thriller "No Country for Old Men"; and Romanian director Cristian Mungiu's abortion drama "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days." There's an unlikely prospect sneaking up on the outside, and it's bound for sleeper-hit status all over the world: the charming black-and-white animated version of Marjane Satrapi's best-selling graphic novel "Persepolis."

There are things every visitor to Cannes needs to see at least once. A would-be starlet in a leather minidress, sprawled out on the sidewalk of the Croisette with a broken stiletto heel, a bad case of dehydration and a possible head injury. A toadlike man in his 60s, stuffed into a tuxedo and accompanied by an alarmingly tan Scandinavian model a foot taller than himself. Moderately famous people you don't immediately recognize because they're ordering oysters or reading the paper. You need to see Catherine Deneuve.

Well, I had my Catherine Deneuve moment in spades. It's one thing to understand that the 63-year-old goddess of French cinema has been to Cannes, as she says, "at least 25 times, more than I can count, really," and that she must know the hotels and restaurants of this town the way some of us know the food court at the mall on Route 138. It's another thing when she walks into the restaurant where you are, sets her pack of Philip Morris Slims on your table, and sits down right next to you.

She was dressed in impeccable upper-class Parisian style, in a sheer brown chemise and a dark knee-length skirt, and she carried a large black handbag. (You somehow don't consider the fact that Catherine Deneuve needs to haul around Kleenex and eye drops and some really, really expensive cosmetics.) And of course she has that Continental thing going on: She looks exactly her age, no younger. If she's had any surgery, it's been very subtle. She has visible wrinkles on her face, and age spots on her arms. She has gained a little weight. But she's still Catherine Deneuve, and the crowded, raucous restaurant silently parted, Red Sea-style, as she moved through it.

"You don't mind if I smoke," she said after she had seated herself. It struck me as a declarative sentence, not a question. (If my wife wants to know why my clothes smell of cigarettes, I'll have the best ever response.) Deneuve was actually sitting at my table to discuss her voice-over role as the heroine's mother in "Persepolis," which follows the young Satrapi from her Westernized girlhood in Iran through an awkward and painful adolescence at boarding school in Vienna to a paradoxically Iranian womanhood that has mostly been spent in Europe.

While the version of "Persepolis" that premiered here on Wednesday is voiced in French, Deneuve will repeat her role for an English-language version that will also feature Satrapi as herself and Gena Rowlands as her memorable grandmother (a role wonderfully handled by Danielle Darrieux in French). I only hope Satrapi can sing "Eye of the Tiger" in as dazzlingly atonal a fashion as Chiara Mastroianni does in the French version. For many Cannes viewers, the hilarious Iranian-aerobics dance segment in which that happens is going to be the most treasured screen moment they bring home.

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