Where Art, Sideshow Peacefully Coexist

Even with the perspective more than a decade of attendance provides, it’s hard to know where to begin in getting a grip on the recently concluded 53rd International Festival du Film at Cannes, hard to convey what the experience is like and just how this 12-day annual event both fascinates and frustrates its tens of thousands of attendees. This year, however, Luis Bun~uel is probably a good place to start.

To celebrate the centenary of the birth of the great Spanish director, who won the Palme d’Or with “Viridiana” in 1961, the festival not only named a new screening room after him but mounted a major exhibition of blown-up stills from his films titled “The Secret World of Luis Bun~uel.”

But while the walls were filled with the kinds of images that defined surrealism, from severed hands and razored eyebrows to insects exiting from a hand, few people paid much attention. Because it often seemed that not even these celebrated images were as surreal as the scene visible both within the Festival du Palais and on the streets and beaches outside. Cannes is a circus with an infinite number of rings, where anywhere you turn reveals something you can’t quite believe you’re seeing.

On a day chosen at random, several large TVs in the Palais were broadcasting Brian De Palma’s press conference, where the “Mission to Mars” director was seen lashing out at a questioner who had the temerity to ask about aspects of “hommage” in his work. “It’s that word,” De Palma raged, pointing an accusatory finger at the unsuspecting miscreant. “It’s been attached to me for 40 years, and no one’s been able to define it. What does it mean?”

Escaping De Palma and the Palais, it’s hard to avoid being run over by a roller-skating young woman simultaneously turning in circles and selling newspapers: “Nice-Matin, Nice-Matin,” she screams as the wheels grind. Turning away, your hand is taken by a person in a giant Mickey Mouse costume who then pulls you within camera range of a man with a Polaroid who wants payment for the compromising photo of you and the Mouse he’s about to take. Out of the corner of your eye a black-robed character, his face masked and hooded, nonchalantly walks by wearing a sandwich board advertising “Demonium,” a film few people have heard of and less care about.

You try to move away, but two women from something called Pop.com, a Web site whose ultimate purpose is as darkly mysterious as “Demonium,” hand you a red balloon and a lollipop. On the beach, a crowd is forming, silently watching as a kneeling young woman gets a tattoo etched onto her shoulder. Pause for a moment and two people brush past, both loaded down like Sherpas with dozens of heavy plastic sacks on their shoulders. Each sack turns out to be a press kit for a film called “Dead Babies,” including, for those who have always wanted one, a “Dead Babies” travel toothbrush.

With scenes like this all around, is it any wonder that the appearance of “bad boy Dennis Rodman” to promote a film called “Cutaway” at a party featuring “a laser show, go-go cages, ribaldry, revelry and European and U.S. DJs” causes hardly a ripple?

Getting a Chance at the Spotlight

Though the focus of the films in competition is always art, with directors whose works are often all but unknown even in their home countries getting a shot at the world stage, on the ground the focus is always commerce. Everything you can imagine, and some you can’t, turn out to have a tie-in to some aspect of something. Mouton Cadet may be the official wine of the festival, but Sol and Dos Equis are the official beers of the American Pavilion. While Grey Goose Vodka is a sponsor of the pavilion, that didn’t stop Skyy Vodka from creating the signature drink Skyy Blue Splash (blue curacao adds the color) for eager imbibers at what Skyy tells us are “several high-profile parties.” One product without a visible rival was the Eurocopter 120B Colibri (“available for press flights, on request”), apparently the only helicopter partner the festival has.

This uneasy but vibrant coexistence between the commercial and the artistic is the hallmark of Cannes, and sometimes the two come together in a way that no screenwriter could have concocted. One particular evening, the opening night of the festival in fact, started with an ultra-casual screening of Ken Loach’s “Bread and Roses,” an earnest and passionate film dealing with the hardscrabble 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 film was over, all that was necessary was a quick change from T-shirt to tuxedo to attend the official party for “Vatel,” a film set amid the sumptuous “it’s good to be the king” splendor and never-ending pageantry of the profligate 17th century court of the Roi du Soleil himself, France’s Louis XIV.

Once “Vatel’s” story of a celebrated chef and master of revels ended, the audience walked out the door of the theater and directly into the most elaborate, extravagant and, presumably, 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.

Disbelieving guests in evening clothes walked slowly down corridors that had become the physical duplicates of what they’d just 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, salami and cheeses and an enormous fish were displayed, and a man rushed through the crowd clutching a goose.

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

As most Cannes veterans know, it is this showy, commercial side of the festival, made tangible by the hundreds of pictures showing for buyers from around the world in the parallel film market, that gives this event its vitality. Slipping out of a prestigious but tedious item (no names, please) into the likes of “Yonggary,” a Korean American production about an enormous fire-breathing dinosaur resurrected by sinister aliens, was somehow refreshing, like a palate-cleansing sorbet after a heavy meal. And even though there wasn’t time to catch up with “The Attack of the Giant Moussaka,” it was good to know it was there. As writer-producer Ethan Coen put it, without the market Cannes would be “a little too snooty.”

Trouble Attracting the Best in Film

The official festival, to its credit, knows the value of glamour and glitz, as do French critics and moviegoers. Unfortunately, over the past several years, Cannes has had difficulty attracting the best of the breed. While even the most cultural of French journalists were bemoaning the absence of top-drawer summer items like “Gladiator” and the “Mission: Impossible” sequel, Cannes made do with the distinctly non-blockbuster “Mission to Mars.”

Of course, there are all kinds of solid, real-world reasons of cost and timing that explain why studios don’t like to ship their major films to Cannes, but it is also true that the movies are not exactly a completely rational business, which means that anything is possible. To get the best of Hollywood product, you have to play the Hollywood game, which means trips to Los Angeles to schmooze with and flatter the powers that be, actions the Cannes hierarchy has been reluctant to embrace.

Cannes will always be a festival where the art of film is held in the highest regard, but it can’t be the best version of itself, can’t fully exploit the commercial side of a formula that’s been successful for 50-plus years, without putting out more effort. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.