RECESSION? WHAT recession? It was business as usual as the 62nd Festival de Cannes opened with all its traditional pomp and ceremony last night.
The red carpet leading up the steps, lined by ballerinas, at the Festival Palais was a fashion show as over 2,000 international guests made their entrance. Formal wear was de rigeur for all, including the photographers, who were corralled in pens for the occasion.
One of the film trade papers pessimistically predicted that this year’s Cannes festival was faced with a perfect storm formed by the swine flu virus and the credit crunch.
However, there wasn’t a face mask to be seen in Cannes yesterday, and the tall palm trees and elegant hotels that line the main thoroughfare, the Croisette, were festooned with lavish promotional campaigns for new and imminent film productions.
Some of those projects seem so dodgy that they may never make it before the cameras, and some others look so hopelessly tacky that they seem doomed to be bypassed by cinemas and destined for the lower shelves of DVD stores.
Global retail and rental figures for DVDs have shown a sharp downturn, but the cinema business is booming with admissions rising steadily around the world, as tends to happen in a recession.
None of the world’s many film festivals blends the extremes of art and commerce quite as cannily as Cannes.
The event opened last night with an animated 3D film for the first time, Disney's enthusiastically received Up, which is expected to be one of the big hits of the year. The hottest ticket of the fortnight is Quentin Tarantino's wartime adventure, Inglourious Basterds, which has its world premiere here next Wednesday night.
Those large-budget Hollywood-funded films are showing side by side with new works from established international directors such as Pedro Almodóvar, Ang Lee and Jane Campion, and serious-minded art movies by emerging filmmakers from Romania, Greece, Israel, Chile and the Philippines.
The star factor remains a crucial element of Cannes and the visitors expected to bring the town to a standstill when they arrive on the red carpet include Brad Pitt, Penelope Cruz, Gerard Depardieu, Monica Bellucci, and two French icons who made their names in other arenas.
Legendary pop star Johnny Hallyday plays a chef tracking down killers in the Hong Kong thriller Vengeance. And former footballer Eric Cantona will attend next Monday night's world premiere of Looking for Eric.
Cantona has an acting role in the film and he collaborated on the screenplay with its director, Ken Loach, who won the Palme d'Or at Cannes three years ago for his Irish War of Independence drama The Wind That Shakes the Barley.
Because the film production process generally takes the best part of a year, the movies showing at Cannes were shot too early to address the global recession, but the programme does include a horror-thriller that is coincidentally timely. Directed by Sam Raimi, who made the Spider-Manpictures, Drag Me to Hellfeatures Alison Lohman as a US bank official inflicted with an evil curse by an elderly woman to whom she refuses an extension on her home loan.