Stars glitter on the path d'Or

THIS year the first thing that strikes one on arriving at the vast, oddly- shaped, five-storey Palais which houses the Cannes Film Festival is the enormous painting which looms over the Lumiere, the main auditorium. Dominated by the number 50, and by huge palms, it depicts a dozen people in evening dress posing on the red-carpeted steps, and it hangs a few metres above the red-carpeted steps which lead to the Lumiere.

The second thing one notes is the considerably tighter security which surrounds the festival this year. For the first time, security guards are using metal detectors on everyone who enters the Palais. It's like going through an airport several times a day.

This is the film festival's 50th anniversary and the organisers hope to field a glittering line-up of stars and auteurs to mark the celebrations this weekend. It's also election month in France, which means that a number of politicians from President Chirac downwards will be turning up to bask in the reflected glory.

Tensions have been heightened by last week's stabbing of the French culture minister, Philippe Douste-Blazy - an outspoken defender of European film and television - while campaigning in Lourdes, where he is the mayor.

Security problems are compounded by the imminent arrival of the ultra-paranoid Michael Jackson - doubtless donning a yashmak, as ever, as protection from the atmosphere - for a midnight screening of Stan Winston's 40-minute Ghosts, in which the whiter-than-white singer plays The Maestro, a recluse in a hilltop mansion where he is confronted by a mob of angry parents from a place named Normal Valley because he entertains children in a reputedly frightening fashion. Really? As if the festival didn't have enough problems already.

Ingmar Bergman, the great Swedish director who is now 78, was unaminously voted the winner of the festival's 50th anniversary Palme of Palmes, voted by former winners of the event's major trophy, the Palme d'Or, from a long list of former entrants who had not won it. Bergman has embarrassed the festival by refusing to travel from his island refuge where he says he is much too busy writing to get away for a day.

Furthermore, Clint Eastwood, the star and director of the Absolute Power, the closing film on Sunday week, has told the festival that he is absolutely powerless to get away from the US set of his new movie In The Garden Of Good And Evil to attend the closing night.

AND under pressure from the Chinese authorities, the Chinese director, Zhang Yimou, a Palme d'Or winner for Farewell My Concubine four years ago, has pulled out, and the festival has had to pull his new movie, Keep Cool - an ironic title under the circumstances - from competition. The Chinese are reportedly hot under the collar about the festival's commitment to screen Zhang Yuen's East Palace, West Palace - the title refers to the slang for gay pick-up toilets in Tiananmen Square.

Cannes and controversy have gone hand in hand for decades, of course, and there's even more on the way this year - maybe - to follow on from the clash about Crash last year. Regarding Michael Haneke's Austrian entry, Funny Games - which deals with the kidnapping of a married couple and their young son - journalists have been advised: Due to the extremely disturbing nature of this film, festival director Gilles Jacob is issuing a special warning in connection with its screening and is insisting that it is not shown anywhere prior to its May 14th premiere at Cannes." We will see.

Quite what the festival jury will make of it all remains to be seen at awards night on Sunday week. What everyone else makes of the jury is another story. Certainly, its composition suggests that anything is possible chaired by Isabelle Adjani, it features actors Mira Sorvino and Gong Li, directors Mike Leigh, Tim Burton Nanni Moretti and Luc Bondy, authors Michael Ondaatje and Paul Auster, and ballet dancer Patrick Dupond.

GIVEN that it's the 50th anniversary of Cannes, it might have been safe to assume that a more conventional jury, as it were, would have given the Palme d'Or to the host country. However, the last thing anyone could accuse the Cannes organisers of being guilty of is jingoistic pressure. Since Claude Lelouch's A Man and a Woman won the Palme d'Or in 1966 - and even then it shared it with the Italian Signore E Signori

France has only taken the premier prize once, for Maurice Pialat's Under Satan's Sun in 1987, and then the predominantly French audience loudly booed and hissed Pialat - live on Eurovision. Pialat responded by booing them back.

This year the most likely French entry to take the Palme d'Or is Assassin(s), the third feature film from the truly versatile enfant terrible, Mathieu Kassovitz (29), the actor, director, screenwriter and film editor, who made La Haine. His most formidable opponents for the Pa line, word has it, are the British director, Michael Winterbottom, whose credits include Roddy Doyle's Family and Thomas Hardy's Jude, for the topical Welcome To Sarajevo; the gifted Canadian film-maker, Atom Egoyan, for his Russell Banks adaptation, The Sweet Hereafter; and the Taiwanese film-maker, Ang Lee (whose previous film was Sense and Sensibility) for The Ice Storm, a post 1960s US drama starring Sigourney Weaver and Kevin Kline.

It is most unlikely the jury would have been over-excited by the first competition entry shown yesterday, Italian director Marco Bellocchio's adaptation of Heinrich von Kleist's classical tragedy, The Prince of Homburg in which the eponymous hero is a general who ignores his orders and launches his cavalry into battle ahead of time. Despite the victory won by his courage, he is condemned to death. Structured as a series of mostly elongated night-time sequences, Bellocchio's film is essentially flaccid and soporific and probably would be better suited to television.

Fortunately for the jury, Cannes director Gilles Jacob decided, after some prevarication, that Luc Besson's The Fifth Element, which had its world premiere as the festival's opening film on Wednesday night, was designated out-of-competition. Not that it could have been deemed a realistic contender in the first place.

This very expensive new movie from Besson - the director of Subway, The Big Blue, Nikita and Leon - is a bloated and naive futuristic yarn which, following a relatively promising prologue set in Egypt in 1914 - moves forward in time 300 years to New York City as our planet is threatened by a supreme evil force.

The fifth element - after earth, wind, fire and water - is, in Besson's belief, life itself.

Enter salvation in the truly unlikely form of a stubbly New York cab driver, played by Bruce Willis, swapping his dirty Die Hard" T-shirt for a pristine orange one designed, like the rest of the costumes, by Jean-Paul Gautier. He is propelled in his quest by the genetically engineered young woman (model Milla Jovovivh dressed in a bandages ensemble) who just happens to land in his taxi.

For all its amusing futuristic asides - New York's skyscraper skyline choked by busy flying car traffic; little robots which clean up the household mess - The Fifth Element is ultimately rooted in the culture of the present, and that's its downfall. One entire sequence redundantly echoes Paul Verhoeven's far superior Total Recall. And the final, heavy-handed message that love conquers all, accompanied by Eric Serra's bombastic score, is as trite and simplistic an anti-war message as we have ever seen on the screen.

It's very early days yet, and to echo Tony Blair's election theme tune, things can only can get better.