Sundance to Sarajevo. Kenneth Turan

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СКАЧАТЬ a preexisting monument to Charles de Gaulle. The front of the august Carlton Hotel, a pricey survivor of the Belle Epoque, gets a different commercial makeover every year: once it featured a towering Godzilla, once a regrettably bigger than life Beavis and Butthead complete with the sentence “Huh-Huh, You Said Oui Oui,” once a working Egyptian temple, including bandage wrapped figures and life-size statues of the gods, to promote The Mummy. No wonder a French magazine headlined one year “Trop de Promo Tue le Cinéma,” too much publicity is killing cinema.

      Everywhere as well are the excesses only money and stardom can generate. Celebrity hotel guests, the New York Times reported, have been known to “require 150 hangers for their wardrobes and gallons of mineral water for their baths.” The legendary Hôtel du Cap at Cap d'Antibes, where the German general staff luxuriated during the French occupation and where I watched Burt Lancaster dive off the rocks for an ocean swim in i97i, insists that its superpricey rooms be paid for in cash in advance.

      For people tired of living in hotels, vessels like a luxury barge (“be in the middle of the business, be far from the noise” for $8,500 per day for a royal suite) or the Octopussy (“world famous, 143 foot luxury megayacht” costing $15,000 per day or $80,000 per week) are available. And if a regular taxi from the Nice airport is just too pokey, there are helicopters and chauffeur-driven red BMW 1100 motorcycles to be rented as well.

      For those looking for a way to combine ostentation with good works, the social event of the season is always the $i,000-a-plate Cinema Against AIDS AmFAR benefit at the nearby Moulin de Mougins restaurant. In 1995, benefit chairperson Sharon Stone started the evening with a personal and emotional appeal for more funds for research and ended it by snappily auctioning off model Naomi Campbell's navel ring for $20,000 to a Saudi Arabian prince. As the bizarre bidding went back and forth, a classic Hollywood type with more money than sense wondered aloud if Stone would throw in a pair of her panties. “Anyone who has $7.50,” the actress replied in a bravura Cannes moment, “knows I don't wear any.”

      It was at a quiet breakfast on the pristine terrace of the Hôtel du Cap that Tim Robbins, exhausted after enduring a wild all-night party that had people screaming in the hallway outside his room, succinctly encapsulated the relentless duality that is finally the trademark of this unwieldy, difficult-to-categorize festival.

      “Cannes is a very strange mixture of the art of film and total prostitution of film,” he said. “One of the things I remember from my first year here in i992 is walking into a room and meeting a great actor like Gérard Depardieu and then walking out and seeing this poster of a woman with large breasts holding a machine gun. The film wasn't made yet, but they already had a title and an ad concept.”

      This ability to somehow combine the yin and yang of the film business, to link at the same site the rarefied elite of the world's movie artists and a brazen international marketplace where money is the only language spoken and sex and violence the most convertible currencies, is the logic-defying triumph of Cannes.

      This is a festival where popcorn movies like the Sharon Stone starring Quick and the Dead and Torrente, the Dumb Arm of the Law (advertised in its country of origin with the line “Just When You Thought Spanish Cinema Was Getting Better”) share space with the work of demanding directors like Theo Angelopolous, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, and Abbas Kiarostami. Where festival head Jacob speaks with pride of attracting Madonna as well as cult director Manoel de Oliveira. Where within twenty-four hours in i997 you could have a serious talk about the situation in Sarajevo with “Welcome to Sarajevo” director Michael Winterbottom and share a press lunch with Sylvester Stallone, who displayed an easy manner and surprising charm as he mordantly dissected past fiascoes like Stop or My Mother Will Shoot: “If it was a question of having my spleen removed with a tractor or watching it again, I'd say, ‘Start up the engine.'”

      Stallone also ridiculed the current crop of action films (“If you took the explosions out, 90 percent of them would not have endings; if someone stole the gasoline truck, it would be like an e.e. cummings poem at the end”) and talked of looking forward to the gathering of all the previous Palme d'Or winners that was scheduled for later that week. “I'm gonna meet those people who won't work with me,” he said, amused. “All in one room.”

      This uneasy but animated coexistence between the commercial and the artistic sometimes gets highlighted in a way no screenwriter could have concocted. Opening night of the 2000 festival, for instance, started with a casual screening of Ken Loach's Bread and Roses, an earnest film dealing with the urgent problems of labor organizers attempting to unionize impoverished, often illegal workers who make marginal livings cleaning the office towers of Los Angeles.

      When that socially conscious picture was over, I hurried back to my room in the aptly named Hotel Splendid and changed from a T-shirt to a tuxedo to attend the official opening night party for Vatel, a big-budget French film set amid the “it's good to be the king” splendor of the profligate seventeenth-century court of the Roi du Soleil himself, Louis XIV.

      Once Vatel's story of a celebrated chef and master of revels, played by Gérard Depardieu, had ended, the audience walked out the door of the Lumière theater and directly into the most elaborate, extravagant, and undoubtedly expensive re-creation of the film's world. The entire entrance hall of the Palais had been changed, via billowing red curtains, huge paintings, multiple candles, and artfully faked stone walls, into a vintage French chateau. And that was just the setting.

      I joined the disbelieving guests in evening clothes and walked slowly down corridors that had become the physical duplicates of what had just been seen on screen. Actors dressed in period costumes brought Vatel's kitchens to life: bread was kneaded, fruit was dipped in glazes, ice was sculpted, salamis and cheeses and an enormous fresh fish were displayed, and, adding just the right touch, a man rushed through the crowd clutching a goose.

      At the dinner itself, white-coated waiters poured champagne from a stream of magnums as actors playing the king and his intimates ate on a stage. By the time tabletop fireworks ended the evening, the janitors of Los Angeles seemed to belong to another universe.

      The key element ensuring that the bracing presence of the commercial remains integral to Cannes is the market, officially known as MIF, Marché International du Film. It started in 1959, apparently with one flimsy twenty-seat room jerry-built onto the roof of the old Palais. Now, with its own brand-new building, the 70,000-square-foot Espace Riviera, it attracts approximately 6,000 participants representing some 1,500 companies from more than seventy countries. Many Cannes regulars agree with Ethan Coen, the writer-producer half of the Coen brothers team, that without the market Cannes would be “a little too snooty.”

      Every year, festival regulars keep a watch for market films with titles that go beyond the preposterous. Standouts include Biker Mice from Mars, Teenage Bonnie and Klepto Clyde (“Desperate Kids, Bonded by Passion and Crime”), Headless Body in Topless Bar, Kraa! The Sea Monster (touted as the successor to Zarkorr! The Invader), and the always popular Attack of the Giant Moussaka. One year saw a wave of kickboxing films from Korea with titles like Year of the King Boxer and Kickboxer from Hell while comedies about sumo wrestlers never seem to go out of style: Sumo Do, Sumo Don't was offered in 1992, and in the year 2000 Secret Society showcased the story of an overweight housewife somehow becoming a sumo standout.

      Having these films not only for sale but also available for viewing can be a refreshing change of pace, like a dish of palate-cleansing sorbet after a constant diet of heavier, more ponderous fare. I felt nothing but elation after experiencing Jerzy Hoffman's three-hour-and-three-minute With Fire and Sword, a Polish Gone with the Wind that came complete with a handsome hero, a deranged villain, and a beautiful princess with gold braids that reached almost to the ground. Other diversions included frequent male choral singing, bare-chested Cossacks pounding enormous drums, and a sidekick with the strength of ten who has СКАЧАТЬ