Cannes of Film Visionaries Now More of a Tourist Trap : Movies: There are 40% fewer buyers and sellers this year, as Cannes is upstaged by other markets, including L.A.’s.

In the opening scene of “Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams,” the first film shown during this year’s Cannes Film Festival, a confused child is shown wandering through a driving rain on a bright, sunny day.

Whatever Kurosawa had in mind, the image of rain coming from a cloudless sky has become a metaphor for the festival itself. Despite a nearly perfect Mediterranean May, the gloom has set in for many of those on hand for the world’s busiest festival of art.

Art is part of the problem. There’s not much of it here. This former stomping ground of film visionaries has become a tourist trap, a Club Med for film nerds. Cannes, a resort community whose mile-long beachfront provides the setting for the annual festival, is like a spit-shined 18th-Century village--there is a post-card quality to the balcony buildings that drop down the steep hill toward the beach and the old port. A genuine 12th-Century fort sits atop the highest hill on the west end of town overlooking the whole thing.

From a perch where the fort’s lookouts once scanned the horizon for enemy ships, a pair of store-bought binoculars will now bring into view covies of bare-breasted women sunning themselves on the beach. Many years ago, a topless starlet threw her arms around a startled young Robert Mitchum, their picture was taken, and bare breasts have been the symbol of Cannes ever since.

Like Pamplona, the Spanish city where bullfight rituals were made famous in the novel of Ernest Hemingway, Cannes has become more a destination point for travelers than a film festival. There are plenty of films here--more than 600 will be shown during the festival’s 12 days--but the ratio of tourists to filmmakers, of journalists to film, has turned Cannes into a parody of itself.

Cannes reached its peak as the world’s great film festival and market at the end of the ‘70s, then outgrew itself. A new four-story, salmon-colored concrete muffin was built on the sand on the west end of town in 1983 and instantly shifted the balance of this town’s nature.

The new Palais, dubbed “The Bunker” by the French press, is a cold, formal convention center that now houses all the important screenings of films and the festival’s shriveling market. It is where topless days turn into tuxedo nights. Each evening, throngs of VIPs in tuxedos and gowns funnel up the red carpeted stairway of the Palais, past a gauntlet of cameras and a French Army Archerd who tries to stop the celebrities.

The number of buyers and sellers in Cannes is reportedly down 40% this year from last and has been on the decline ever since the successful business-only American Film Market was established in Los Angeles nearly 10 years ago. Everywhere, people are saying the festival is sluggish, that there are fewer serious buyers and sellers in town and that the quality of films in competition is remarkable only for its collective creative poverty.

But the sun shines through the rain and things appear as they always were. Street musicians by the dozen compete for the loose change in the pockets of amused or irritated passers-by. A contortionist with a whistle in his mouth wrenches his body into a crab-like shape and hops across tables and chairs on his hands.

Much of the scene continues after the festival ends but for those who have come before or stayed after, the town is transformed by the festival. Half a dozen publications--specially done during the festival--are delivered to the hotels daily. The Los Angeles-based Hollywood Reporter and Daily Variety has special editions here, reporting news and reviews from the festival.

Despite the vulgarization of Cannes, more journalists converge each year. This season’s class of rookies includes the Chicago Tribune’s Gene Siskel, the New York Times’ Janet Maslin and the Atlanta Constitution’s Elinor Ringle.

Siskel and his longtime TV companion Roger Ebert are here doing a one-hour film special that CBS-TV will air on Monday. The two are known not to be good friends off camera, and they couldn’t have maintained much greater distance here. Ebert is staying at a modestly priced hotel in Cannes; Siskel is in the luxurious Du Cap in neighboring Cap d’Antibes, where daily room rates start at about $500.

It was at the Du Cap last weekend that Carolco Pictures threw what some people say is the most extravagant party in festival history. The company flew both Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone in from Los Angeles to promote their upcoming movies, “Terminator 2” and “Rocky V,” and threw a party for foreign buyers that sources said cost Corolco between $750,000 and $1 million.

The appearance of Stallone, Schwarzenegger and Clint Eastwood--who was here for the premiere of his upcoming film “White Hunter, Black Heart”--caused massive shoving matches among swarms of camera crews. A few years ago, images from Cannes were relayed to the rest of the world mostly by still photographers. Now, it’s a television event.

So we walk through the sunshine and are pelted by rain. There aren’t many stars to see--so Armand Assante passed us on the street the other night. A few other recognizable faces in town promoting films in or out of competition: Stacy Keach, Rachel Ward, Martin Sheen, Marissa Berenson, Dennis Quaid, Michael Douglas, Timothy Dalton and Frances McDormand.

But there aren’t many great movies.

The American film industry turns up its collective nose at Cannes. Winning here can still launch films in Europe, but in the United States, the Gold Palm award is about as important as an honorary doctorate.

The organizers have boasted that Cannes is the first festival since the liberation of Eastern Europe, and, sure enough, there are a lot of Eastern films with slate-gray, life-under-oppression moods being shown. But the announcement displays an arrogance of pride more than power; the Berlin Film Festival was in fact the first post-liberation festival to show off Iron Curtain movies, and the festival held in Los Angeles recently by the American Film Institute had as much to brag about.

Many critics are saying that the best film here is Michael Verhoven’s “The Nasty Girl,” which wasn’t considered for competition in Cannes because it had already won the top prize at Berlin.

Competition, market and hoopla: These are the ingredients of a full-service film festival, and, considering all three, Cannes is still up front. But the films in competition are not the best films in the world. Business in the market has been eclipsed elsewhere, and, unless you would confuse a fireworks show promoting the next movies of Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger with the 4th of July, the hoopla is a little lame too.