Behind all the glamour, the buying and selling of movies is tougher than normal this year because of the credit crunch and the weakness of the dollar, writes MICHAEL DWYER.
THERE ARE OVER 13,000 international film industry delegates at Cannes, mostly producers, financiers, distributors and sales agents, and they are easily identifiable. These are the Crackberries, the people wired to their smart, compact communications devices illuminated on restaurant tables where they are now as commonplace as knives and forks. These folk might be enjoying some of the finest Provencal cuisine, but if the Blackberry rings, they are racing on to the streets in search of a clearer signal.
The buying and selling of movies is a tough, competitive business at the best of times, but even more stressful at Cannes this year because of the credit crunch and the relative weakness of the US dollar. A cursory glance over the reams of advertising in the trade papers distributed free at Cannes every day offers another reason to be fretful. Frankly, an awful lot of rubbish is being peddled in the festival market, and most of these movies will be very lucky to find a place on the lower shelves of DVD outlets.
Away from the market, it's a different story in the rarefied environment of the official festival programme where there are expectations of high art from the films selected to compete for the most prestigious prize at Cannes, the Palme d'Or. This is where we will find avowedly serious pictures on themes from human trafficking and exploitation to alienation and displacement to kidnapping and corruption.
Adept as ever at juggling art and commerce, the festival is lacing the nightly red carpet arrivals with Hollywood and French star power. Clint Eastwood, Angelina Jolie, Dustin Hoffman, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Deneuve, Jack Black, Benicio Del Toro and the busiest actor in Europe, Mathieu Amalric, who features in two new movies at Cannes and plays the villain in the next James Bond adventure.
To add more glitter to the Croisette, Cannes has scooped Indiana Jones et le Royaume du Crane de Cristalfor its world premiere on Sunday with Steven Spielberg, Harrison Ford, Shia LaBeouf and Cate Blanchett all expected..
Woody Allen arrives tomorrow with Scarlett Johansson, Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz, the stars of his new movie, Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Sporting legends Diego Maradonna and Mike Tyson are due for the screenings of documentaries about them, although their presence here suggests they're happy with how their past controversies are treated in those films.
THE 61ST FESTIVAL de Cannes opened on Wednesday night with Blindness, the third feature from Fernando Meirelles, the Brazilian director of City of Godand The Constant Gardener. It's one of 22 movies eligible for the Palme d'Or, but for all its musings on the end of civilisation as we know it, it's hardly a serious contender for that award.
Based on a novel by Noble Prize-winning Portuguese author Jose Saramango, the screenplay is by Candian actor-writer-director Don McKellar, whose 1998 film Last Nightmined generally similar territory. Blindness is set in an unnamed city where people go blind in an instant. The first is a man who is driving home at the time, followed by his wife, the doctor who treats him, and his patients.
The condition is described as "white blindness", or as one victim puts it, it's like "swimming in milk". The doctor's wife is among the minority immune to the contagion, but she pretends to be blind so that she can care for him when the government places victims under quarantine at a squalid, disused sanatorium. The building has an emergency phone, but calls are never answered, and the inmates are treated as society's rejects. The film is most effective in observing the erosion of moral codes and the primal behaviour to which the victims resort in their desperation for personal survival. One young inmate dictates that the others must pay, with their belongings or sexual services, for their inadequate food supplies. He is played by an under-used Gael Garcia Bernal, who tastelessly bursts into song on I Just Called to Say I Love You, a hit for Stevie Wonder.
As the doctor, Ruffalo turns in a performance that is curiously remote, rather like the film itself and its lack of dramatic tension and emotional engagement. Moore's characteristically committed portrayal goes some way towards sustaining the drama as she catches her character's resilience against all the odds.
THE ONLY ANIMATED feature selected for competition at Cannes this year is Ari Folman's Israeli film, Waltz With Bashir. The title refers to the movement of a soldier firing off a machine gun while standing under portraits of Bashir Gemayel, whose short-lived reign as president of Lebanon ended when he was killed in 1982.
Later that day, Israeli troops surrounded the West Beirut refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, which were mostly populated by Palestinian refugees. Phalangist troops entered the camps that night and over three days massacred 3,000 people, mostly women, children and the elderly.
"Can't films be therapeutic?" a director named Ari is asked early in the film. Ari Folman made Waltz With Bashiras a form of therapy to confront his own blocked memories of service with the Israeli forces in the early 1980s. Animated in bold strokes and haunting imagery, and accompanied by an adrenalin-pumping soundtrack, his film bristles with energy in its first half before turning more loquacious and taking on the form of an animated documentary in the second, finally turning to archival material taken after the massacres.
Mainstream animation was well represented at Cannes last night with the world premiere of Kung Fu Pandafrom the DreamWorks studio that brought us the Shrekfranchise. The animation is much more attractive in the new film, which happily jettisons the jaded movie references abundant in the Shrekseries. Jack Black provides the voice of Po, an obese panda in the mythical Valley of Peace in ancient China - when most people had American accents. Po dreams of being a kung fu master and expectedly gets his chance to study the art with the Furious Five: a tiger, a viper, a mantis, a crane and a monkey. Kung fu master Shiftu reluctantly takes on Po as a pupil just as a treacherous snow leopard plots his escape from a mountain prison.
Po makes for a most unlikely action hero, but the movie is rooted in the philosophy of self-belief and the wonders it can do. That's almost beside the point in this breezy, good-humoured comedy, which proceeds at a jaunty pace and features several vigorously staged action sequences. It probably will take more money this summer than all the movies in competition at Cannes this year. That should make the Crackberries even more anxious.
More from Michael Dwyer in Cannes in Reel News inThe Ticket today and in The Arts page on Tuesday
