Clouds over Cannes

Storm clouds were gathering over the 53rd Cannes Film Festival well before the event opened to thunder storms and downpours on Wednesday night. The Italian film industry is up in arms at being shut out of competition this year. German producers are furious that their country has not been allowed into competition for seven years in a row. The Spanish are said to be accepting their exclusion this year with quiet dignity.

The festival is taking more flak because the Hollywood studios are more conspicuously absent than they have been for decades, although that decision was taken by the studios themselves, fed up after years of entering quality movies such as LA Confidential which were being sent home empty-handed by high-minded festival juries.

Meanwhile, the festival's outgoing director, Gilles Jacob, who is on his 23rd and final year as programmer of the event, has become involved in an unseemly public spat with Olivier Barrot, his heir apparent who claims his functions were "brutally and unilaterally brought to an end for reasons that have not been brought to my knowledge". And there is a general outcry in Cannes at the mayor's insistence that the nightly beach parties end promptly at 12.30 a.m. - which is around the time when many of them begin.

Cannes and controversy go hand in hand, of course, and we can expect more between now and prize-giving night on Sunday week, especially if the jury follows the recent tradition of ignoring most of the critically acclaimed movies in competition. This year's jury is chaired by the French director, Luc Besson, whose distaste for critics and the French intellectual establishment is well-known. He is joined on the panel by actors Kristin Scott Thomas, Jeremy Irons, Aitana Sanchez-Gijon and Barbara Sukowa, directors Jonathan Demme, Nicole Garcia and Mario Martone, and writers Patrick Modiano and Arundhati Roy.

There is a distinct air of deja vu about the competition programme selected for them and us to view over the 12 days of Cannes, with Jacob rounding up usual suspects such as Lars von Trier, James Ivory, Ken Loach, Joel Coen, Arnaud Descheplin and Wong Kar-wai. What's new is the emphasis on Asian cinema which takes seven of the 23 slots in competition this year.

The festival opened on Wednesday with the world premiere, screening out-of-competition, of Vatel, the new film from Roland Joffe, who won the Palme d'Or for The Mission in 1986 and whose last movie, Goodbye Lover went straight to video in Ireland after its Cannes launch in 1998.

A handsomely mounted production financed in France and filmed in English, Vatel is a period drama which recalls a superior recent Cannes opener, Patrice Leconte's Ridicule, in its acerbic social satire. Vatel is set in 1671, when King Louis XIV (played by Julian Sands) accepts an invitation to spend three days at the Chantilly chateau of the ambitious but debt-laden and gout-ridden Prince de Conde (Julian Glover).

The prince is saved by the remarkable resourcefulness of his anagramatically named valet, Vatel (Gerard Depardieu), whose organisational capability is matched only by his culinary brilliance. Vatel also has to cope with the decadence, arrogance, greed and Machiavellian machinations of the vast royal entourage.

Contemporary references are resonant in Joffe's jagged portrait of a world that's at least as mercenary as today, where everyone and everything is treated as an available commodity by those with power and money. The only one who cannot be bought is Vatel himself, a man who has never forgotten his own humble origins and whose pure nobility is embodied in Depardieu's dignified and effectively low-key performance.

The exploitation of the marginalised in society is tackled with characteristic directness and narrative economy by the socialist English director, Ken Loach, in his first North American film, Bread and Roses, the first of the competition entries to screen at Cannes this year. It opens with the smuggling of Mexican immigrants over the border into Los Angeles, and its focus is on one of them, the spirited young Maya (Pilar Padilla) whose older sister Rose (Elpidia Carrillo) has been working as an office cleaner in the city for 15 years.

Rose gets Maya a job in a bar, which one would imagine pays better. Presumably because of a hint of sexual harassment when Maya jokes with two Guatemalan drinkers that they are gay, she seeks work as a cleaner. She's in the job barely a few days when she meets a union organiser (Adrien Brody) who delivers the statistics that the cleaners' wages have dropped by almost half in two decades, with the removal of all benefits.

Loach's factually inspired film clearly has a case to make and his heart is indisputably in the right place, but his approach is disappointingly didactic. Unusually, he allows many of the cast (the mannered Brody, in particular) to overact, and most of the film is devoid of the dramatic tension and power which charged Loach's most arresting British pictures. In one of the many ironies of Cannes, evening dress was de rigueur to attend last night's world premiere of this socially concerned film.

The official Cannes sidebar, Un Certain Regard, opened yesterday with Things You Can Tell Just By Looking At Her, the first feature written and directed by lighting cameraman Rodrigo Garcia, the son of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. This ensemble piece is structured as five stories, all dealing with women, some of whom feature as overlapping characters, and tenuously connected by brief, recurring appearances by a suicidal woman played by Elpidia Carrillo from Bread and Roses.

Garcia's film sets itself an agenda that spans abortion, death, lesbianism, blindness, homelessness, middle-aged sexual desire and frustrations, and teenage precocity. In the process he seriously over-reaches himself, his underdeveloped screenplay abruptly dispensing with the various vignettes just as they are exerting a hold on the viewer, and the result is far from being as cohesive or compelling as genre companions such as Short Cuts or Magnolia.

This is all the more regrettable given the quality of the cast he has assembled - especially Glenn Close, Cameron Diaz, Calista Flockhart and Kathy Baker - and it is the conviction which they bring to their roles which holds the film together and sustains interest in its stories against the odds.

Michael Dwyer's reports from Cannes continue on Tuesday.