Bienvenue, Hollywood

They’ve stopped just short of selecting “Make Nice to America” as an official motto, but there’s little doubt that this year’s 54th Cannes International Film Festival is noticeably friendly to U.S. filmmakers in general and the Hollywood variety in particular.

Some of this is a matter of coincidence. A festival of drum majorettes and pompom girls is being held in the neighboring town of Vallauris this weekend. And next weekend, Cannes’ team in the Football Americain league, the Iron Masks (named not for Leonardo DiCaprio but because the real masked man was held on an island just off shore), will take on the gang from Clermont Ferrand in the French championship semifinals.

Some of this is a matter of degree. Billboards promoting new American films have always had their place along La Croisette’s oceanside promenade, but this year is the first in which none of them have bothered to translate themselves into French. Sharing the prestigious entrance to the Hotel Carlton, next to a small red windmill for “Moulin Rouge,” are “The Mummy Returns” and “Tomb Raider,” a combination that would probably make a great double bill if anyone were still making double bills.

Some of this, however, is a matter of design. Schmoozing the major studios, which had started to seem as much of a lost art as the stained-glass secrets that created the windows at Chartres, has come back into style. Partially this is due to the exertions of Cannes’ new artistic director, Thierry Fremaux, one of a triumvirate (along with president Gilles Jacob and managing director Veronique Cayla) that now runs the event.

Fremaux has paid two visits to the U.S. since his appointment in October, and his enthusiasm was part of the reason Baz Luhrmann’s “Moulin Rouge,” starring Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor, will open the festival tonight, the first heavyweight studio release to do so in some time.

This has proved a boon to France’s magazine community, which has put Kidman on the cover of publications ranging from movie mag Premiere to the gossipy Oh La!, in which the actress apparently “talks about her life after the rupture with Tom Cruise.” Another English-language star, Sean Penn, whose glum “The Pledge” is also in competition, is on the cover of Studio, with his “personal album” promised inside. Even Historia, a magazine that has articles about Napoleon and an 18th century French naturalist on its pages, put a resolute-looking John Wayne on this month’s cover for an article about Hollywood and its “century of politically correct dreams.”

“Moulin Rouge” and “The Pledge” are not the only U.S. films angling for Cannes’ prizes. The gleeful “Shrek,” the first animated film in competition in decades, is joined by David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive” and Ethan and Joel Coen’s “The Man Who Wasn’t There” (starring Billy Bob Thornton), which the brothers have enjoyed describing as about “a barber in Northern California in the late 1940s who doesn’t want to be a barber anymore.”

Destined to be as talked about as those films is one that has been down this road before, Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now,” which won the Palme d’Or when it debuted here in 1979. Working with editor Walter Murch, Coppola has added an astounding 53 minutes to his original cut, making the new version, showing out of competition as “Apocalypse Now Redux,” an impressive 3 hours and 17 minutes.

Coppola’s son Roman, whose childhood “Apocalypse” cameo has been restored in the new version, makes his writing-directing debut with the movie-making-themed “CQ.” Joining that film out of competition are Wayne Wang with his just-released “The Center of the World” and Michel Gondry’s “Human Nature,” written by Charlie Kaufman, the mind behind “Being John Malkovich.”

There’s also been an attempt to put a more individualistic stamp on films selected for the festival’s sidebar event, Un Certain Regard. Aside from Abel Ferrara’s “R-Xmas,” the opening-night film, other American works include Todd Solondz’s “Storytelling,” Hal Hartley’s “No Such Thing,” and “The Anniversary Party,” co-directed by co-stars Jennifer Jason Leigh and Alan Cumming.

The rival Directors Fortnight, the traditional home of edgier films, has ended up focusing on first-time directors. Included in this group are Arliss Howard’s “Big Bad Love,” starring his spouse Debra Winger, and Ethan Hawke’s “Chelsea Walls,” starring his spouse Uma Thurman. Also in the Fortnight is the Tilda Swinton-starrring Sundance hit “The Deep End,” co-directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel.

The festival’s most visible innovation is its first open-air screening, free to the public. The picture chosen, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s romantic “Amelie of Montmartre,” is the French film of the moment that the festival apparently did not act fast enough to secure for the competition.

All this newness doesn’t mean that a lot about the new Cannes doesn’t look just like the old Cannes. The festival enjoys bringing new countries into the fold, and there are films in the various sections from nations that have never been at Cannes before, including Albania (“Slogans”), Bosnia (“No Man’s Land”) and Thailand (“Tears of the Black Tiger”).

The trend toward more visibility for Asian cinema continues, with Japan the focus this time around. Three Japanese films are in competition: “Lukewarm Water Under a Red Bridge” by celebrated veteran Shohei Imamura; “Distance” by Hirokazu Kore-eda, whose last film was the lustrous “After Life”; and “Desert Moon,” by Shinji Aoyama, whose “Eureka” is now in U.S. release.

There are also films from Cannes veterans whose names might never appear in American newspapers were it not for film festivals. These include Portugal’s 90-plus Manoel De Oliveira, Austria’s Michael Haneke, Italy’s Nanni Moretti, Russia’s Alexander Sokurov, Taiwan’s Hou Hsiao-Hsien and France’s Raoul Ruiz.

Festival special events, of which there are many, include a tribute to actress Melanie Griffith, a showing of “My Journey in Italy,” Martin Scorsese’s 4-hour-and-5-minute documentary on his relationship to Italy and Italian film, and a 27-film retrospective tribute to the golden age of American comedy that surely will be greatly appreciated by humor-starved festival-goers.

Always good for an early chuckle, if not more, are at least the titles of films scheduled to be sold to the highest bidder at the marketplace section of Cannes. Let’s hear it for “How Harry Became a Tree,” “This Filthy Earth” and “He Died With a Falafel in His Hand.” Please hold your applause until they’re over.