Reeling in the Years

CANNES, France —  For the 50th time, the lights will go out in Cannes this week and out of the darkness will come surprise, delight, joy and sorrow. And perhaps a hit or two.

Cannes calls itself an “international film festival,” but “film frenzy” would now seem closer to the mark. For a dozen days, a strip of Mediterranean beachfront property 300 yards wide and a mile long will become the most photographed, most videotaped, most recorded patch of real estate in the world.

Four thousand photographers, TV crew members and journalists are expected this year--more, local tourism officials predict, than for any other event in history, including the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.

“It’s going to be two weeks of insanity,” grimaces photographer Gilles Traverso, 38, a fourth-generation member of a local family renowned for its pictures of the festival.

By yacht, jet, train and automobile, another 4,000 producers, agents and wheeler-dealers--double the figure only two years ago--will be arriving to set up shop in palatial, wedding-cake hotels along the shorefront boulevard called La Croisette. In their luggage will be more than 1,000 new movies for sale.

The population of this quiet French Riviera town, now 70,000, should almost triple, and its narrow, sun-washed streets will be clogged with Ferraris and Rolls-Royces, rubber-neckers and would-be starlets hoping against hope to catch somebody’s eye.

For the 114 hotels, 800 restaurants and 3,500 shops and boutiques, it will once again be Christmas in May.

“Cannes is the place where you meet absolutely everybody from world cinema, whether it’s business people, on-screen talent, technicians,” festival organizer Gilles Jacob said in an interview. “For two weeks, they talk nothing but movies. There can be a war or anything else. But people at Cannes will remain totally obsessed with the movies.”

In the seaside Palace of Festivals, projectionists will be busy from 6 a.m. to 3 a.m. Last year, at the festival and concurrent International Film Market, more than 2,000 miles of celluloid were screened.

The impact of all this frenzied activity on the world’s fantasy life finds its quintessential expression at a dingy set of concrete steps, flanked by metal banisters, leading from La Croisette into the Palace, an edifice with no more beauty than many university libraries in America.

By the festival’s opening night, these otherwise unremarkable stairs will be swathed in red carpeting and flanked by two 80-foot-high glittering palm fronds, symbols and namesakes of Cannes’ highest honor, the Palme d’Or, or Golden Palm.

To ascend these steps in black tie or evening gown, under the artificial lightning of photographers’ strobes, has become the rite of passage for the international movie star. Sophia Loren, perhaps the most popular actress ever at Cannes, once recalled with emotion what it was like to climb the stairs for the first time. That magic moment for her came in 1954, when she was a little-known 20-year-old starlet clad in a white lace robe with a plunging neckline.

“When I saw those stairs loaded with photographers, all pointing their flashes at me, a poor little girl, down there at the bottom, seized with fear, I thought, ‘My God! My dress! My decollete! Just let it not be too deep!’ ” Sophia Loren said. Somehow, she made it to the top--”and suddenly I found myself in the firmament of stars.”

Art and mart, film showcase and never-ending photo op, Cannes as it hits 50 has become all of these. This is a singular destiny for an event first held in 1946, in a France exhausted and devastated by war, for an audience of around 700 spectators gathered in the resort’s casino.

“Cannes? A star and a whore,” Isabelle Giordano, one of France’s most celebrated film critics, has summarized.

Francois Russo, Cannes bureau chief for the largest local newspaper, Nice Matin, observes of this event: “People come here now not to have fun, but to work. It’s a market--a market of films, of producers, of people and of countries. It’s become an exchange for people with something to buy or sell.”

In its tastes, the critical side of Cannes has been nothing if not all-embracing. Over the decades, “Dumbo” and the Coen brothers, “E.T.” and Federico Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita,” Sharon Stone and Sally Field, the French “Nouvelle Vague” and Elizabeth Taylor, the epics of Japan’s Akira Kurosawa and the pounding disco music from “Car Wash” have all found favor with jurors, audiences and the throngs of ordinary folk who show up yearning for a glimpse of their screen idols.

For struggling or little-known cinemas in Africa, Latin America, Asia and Eastern Europe, to be included in the festival selection--a total of 28 films have been so honored this year, along with other movies to be viewed in separate short-subject and noncompetitive “Un Certain Regard” categories--is to make filmdom’s major leagues.

As for a prize from the Cannes jury, it is dreamed-of recognition from one’s peers that can also become the ticket to a global box office.

“Cannes is the last place on this planet that assures us of a place on the world’s cultural map,” Emir Kusturica, the Yugoslav director who won the Golden Palm in 1985 and 1995, has said in gratitude.

With some justification, Cannes can claim to have “discovered” or been a milestone in the careers of movie-makers as diverse as Quentin Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh, Jane Campion and Francois Truffaut.

Truffaut’s best director prize for “The 400 Blows” in 1959 was a watershed in transforming Cannes from an event obsessed with keeping all entrants happy, especially the feuding Americans and Soviets, to one where the movie and its message mattered most. This year could be the turn of Burkina Faso’s Idrissa Ouedraogo, Taiwan’s Ang Lee or Australia’s Samantha Lang, all of whose films have been selected for viewing.

Fiercely nationalistic in its cultural policies, France has put itself in the vanguard of Europe’s efforts to block further saturation of the Continent’s movie and TV screens by Hollywood. Not surprisingly, the Cannes festival, which is getting nearly three-quarters of this year’s $5.9-million budget from the government and the local municipality, is an element in that policy.

“This is an occasion to show that French cinema is second in the world,” behind Hollywood alone, Culture Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy said in an interview.

But on the whole, the festival is America-friendly, for both artistic and commercial reasons. “The French know that without the Americans, the festival would look like the Festival of European Films, with an African movie or two thrown in for good measure,” said Pierre Billard, former editor-in-chief of L’Express and one-time member of the Cannes jury.

In fact, one might think that Cannes in recent years has set out to defend American movie-making from the Hollywood Majors. This year, six U.S. movies--more than from any other country, and that includes France--have been chosen for screening, and the festival will be closed May 18 by “Absolute Power,” a production of Cannes favorite Clint Eastwood.

“We are here to save great American cineastes that the Americans don’t like,” Serge Toubiana, editor-in-chief of the Paris-based Cahiers du Cinema and a former Cannes juror, said only half-jokingly.

That, in part, may be because most big U.S. productions no longer come to La Croisette. The festival’s mid-May dates, after the Oscars and too early to launch a would-be summer blockbuster, don’t suit most U.S. studios. And why risk a critical flop here that might be picked up and amplified by the American press?

As magnanimous as it can be toward fledgling directors (a special award, the Golden Camera, was begun in 1978 to honor them), Cannes can be rough on the pretentious or unorthodox--including innovators too far ahead of their time.

The French get no favors. In 1973, “La Grande Bouffe,” a French-financed movie about middle-class men eating themselves to death, was hooted down in the movie hall. Ten years ago, when France’s Maurice Pialat won the Golden Palm for “Under the Sun of Satan,” the audience erupted in boos and whistles.

“If you don’t like me, I can tell you I don’t like you either,” the French director informed the audience, brandishing his fist.

“Cannes is not friendly,” Billard said. “Cannes is either enthusiastic or mean.”

Jacob, who has supreme authority to choose the films for screening, has sometimes explained that he has dropped a movie he liked from the list “to defend it.”

Given the generally sour mood of the French these days and because a parliamentary election is now scheduled for May 25 and June 1, Cannes’ birthday party could be disrupted by strikes, Deputy Mayor Gilles Cima has warned. French President Jacques Chirac had planned to attend the 50th anniversary celebrations on May 11, but the election campaign has left his plans uncertain.

Though Cannes will be throwing itself a glittering party, replete with movie-theme dance routines, an ascent of the celebrated staircase by an army of stars and a special award for director Ingmar Bergman of Sweden, who has never managed to win a Golden Palm, many purists fret about the direction the event is taking.

Is the Cannes Film Festival, they ask, still about films?

One revealing event took place six festivals ago, when pop queen Madonna showed up in a series of eye-popping outfits to plug her documentary, “Truth or Dare” (called “In Bed With Madonna” in Europe). The photos went round the world. That the Coen brothers’ “Barton Fink” scored an unprecedented hat-trick of Cannes prizes that same year may live on only as a Trivial Pursuit question.

Same thing in 1992: Sharon Stone electrified Cannes with the dangerous sexiness of her ice-pick-wielding role in “Basic Instinct’ and the dazzling smile and elegance of her public appearances. Who recalls that the best actress award went to Pernilla August in the Swedish film “The Best Intentions”?

“You’ve got to manufacture events, and at the same time, what lingers in the memory is often the trace of this event, while the film has ceased to exist,” Toubiana said. Cannes at age 50 has become the “World Bank of Images,” the French critic believes. Pull off a successful publicity stun, and there is a chance the entire planet will hear about it. The movie is no longer the message.

Paradoxically, the saturation media coverage here also has made movie stars far less accessible to the tens of thousands of people who will flock to Cannes during the festival. Gone are the days when celebrities could stroll the Croisette, as Gene Kelly did, or sip a coffee on a cafe terrace, as Jack Nicholson did, without being mobbed.

“Now the stars dash out of their hotel, jump into their limousines, without even a sign to the public, or even a wave,” said Naick Lazreug, public relations chief at the Hotel Martinez.

Longtime festival-goers complain that the glamour and elegance of yesteryear are gone. It used to be that actors and actresses--like Gina Lollabrigida, who once came with 14 baby Chihuahuas--would attend festivities from start to finish.

“Now the stars only come for a night, to be photographed, then they leave,” said Jean Andrietti, 60, chief doorman at the Carlton Inter-Continental, who is retiring this year after working 45 festivals.

Nevertheless, when the lights go out and the first film starts to roll at Cannes next week, Toubiana and many others who share his passion for films will be here. With all the competing festivals in the world from Telluride to Berlin, the French critic contends, there is still nothing like Cannes, with its broad selection, passionate belief that films matter and mix of art and business.

For others, coming to Cannes is just part of the increasingly competitive job of selling movies.

A French reporter, on the prowl for spicy details about high-living film moguls and their stars, came away disappointed. One Cannes restaurateur told him: “Now when festival-goers have a drink, they want a receipt so they can get reimbursed.”