Quality and Hopes Are Up at Palm Springs Film Festival : Movies: Eighty entries from 22 countries are expected to draw more than 45,000 moviegoers. A banquet honors Sophia Loren.

Sonny Bono was clearly befuddled. The ex-mayor of Palm Springs, founder of the 5-year-old Palm Springs International Film Festival, squinted at his notes and gripped the microphone like a man adrift. “Is this thing on?” he croaked.

Those gathered at the Plaza Theater for the festival’s opening-night screening last Thursday of the French hit “Les Visiteurs” fidgeted and giggled when Bono held up a letter from President Clinton but then declined to read it due to political differences. He then went on to encourage the current mayor, Lloyd Maryanov, to “carry on the baton” symbolizing civic progress. Since so many of the Springs’ fabled denizens and their taxes have long since moved to Rancho Mirage, this optimism is evidently based both on the film festival and the legalized gambling ordinance recently passed by the City Council.

After Bono relinquished the podium, the crowd was jarred back into cinematic reality with “Les Visiteurs,” a French production by director Jean-Marie Poire that tells the story of a 12th-Century knight who runs afoul of a witch and finds himself and his squire transported to present times. Here they meet their descendants, stink up everyone’s cars with their medieval hygiene and mock the modern bourgeoisie. It’s a sort of “Monty Python’s Holy Grail Meets Feydeau.”

Later, at a reception in the courtyard where the local Hollywood Old Guard showed true esprit by standing patiently in an unmoving buffet line, one man remarked to another, “I hear this film did huge box office in France.” “Yeah?” replied his friend. “So did ‘The Nutty Professor.’ ”

Even if opening night did not quite reach the stellar heights of previous years, the city’s leaders could take pride in this year’s festival, which has attracted more than 80 entries from 22 countries. Running until through Sunday, the festival is expected to draw more than 45,000 moviegoers.

A more select group gathered Saturday night at a $250-a-plate banquet honoring Sophia Loren for her screen achievements. Those attending included Bob and Delores Hope, Ginger Rogers, Tippi Hedren, Arthur Hiller and ex-Columbia head Leo Jaffe. Loren, accompanied by her son Eduardo Ponti, said she was genuinely touched by the recognition and felt that since leaving her humble origins in Italy, her “life has been one long dream.”

In addition to screenings of Loren’s more memorable works, including “The Countess From Hong Kong” and “Two Women,” the festival has taken on a decidedly Italian accent this year in staging the first full retrospective of Federico Fellini’s work since his death last year. Among the films being shown are “8 1/2,” “Amacord,” “La Dolce Vita” and “Nights of Caribira.”

Indeed, the hottest venues the first few days of the festival were for Italian entries such as Ricky Tognazzi’s taut political thriller, “La Scorta,” about four carbinieri trying to protect a magistrate in violence-prone Sicily; brothers Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s beautifully photographed “Fiorille,” about several generations of a cursed Tuscan clan; and Francesca Archibugi’s “Il Grande Cocomero,” about the relationship between a psychiatrist, his emotionally troubled patient and her overprotective mother. All three films have had overflow crowds.

Although most film festivals, like Cannes, exist as a marketplace for independents seeking distributors, Palm Springs is a festival in the celebratory sense of the word. In fact, 75% of the films here already have distribution deals. There is also a growing feeling among both industry professionals and festival devotees that the quality of foreign independents shown here has risen dramatically. One reason mentioned repeatedly is that international co-productions have dramatically raised the technical and artistic quality of independents. For years, filmmakers have complained that while state subsidies gave them the freedom to pursue non-commercial subjects, such reliance also resulted in small budgets and amateur participation on many levels of the production.

Nowhere is the international co-production more successfully illustrated than in the growing clout of Canadian independents. This year Canada has 10 films in the festival, including “The Boys of St. Vincent,” a three-hour made-for-TV dramatization of a scandal surrounding the sexual abuse of boys by Catholic clergy at an orphanage; “La Florida,” about a Quebecois family’s attempt to run a motel in Florida; and “Le Sexe des Etoiles,” an Oscar submission about a young girl’s struggles with her father’s new identity as a transsexual.

The most eagerly awaited film of the opening weekend, although reactions to it were mixed, was Roman Polanski’s “Bitter Moon,” a tale of psychological and sexual obsession starring Peter Coyote and Emmanuelle Seigner. Coyote’s character, during a Mediterranean cruise, narrates to a young Englishman the history of his obsessive, soul-destroying relationship with his wife. While some in the audience were clearly uncomfortable with the graphic nature of the work, writer Larry Gelbart (“Tootsie”) said that a viewer has to accept the film as “a very personal view of Polanski on the nature of human relationships.”

Abel Ferrara’s remake of “The Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” while having made the festival circuit rounds for a year, also screened this weekend. But both late-night performances were attended by only a smattering of insomniacs.

Among the films coming this week are the late Cyril Collard’s autobiographical “Savage Nights”; Percy Aldon’s “Younger and Younger”; an award-winning Spanish film, “Belle Epoque”; and John Schlesinger’s “The Innocent.”

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