The film festival opened this week with its usual pomp and glitz. But as bignames stay away, is it past its prime, asks Michael Dwyer

It's tough at the top. The Cannes Film Festival, which opened for the 56th time with its traditional mix of pomp and glitz on Wednesday night, presenting the world premiere of Fanfan La Tulipe, a swashbuckling French romp starring Vincent Perez and Penélope Cruz, remains ensconced as the leading showcase of new international cinema.

The numbers speak for themselves. Thousands of distributors, sales agents and producers are back, stomping the hype-festooned Croisette in search of those elusive deals that can make dreams come true. A select group of film-making talents has been chosen to go into competition for the grand prize, the Palme d'Or, to be presented at the closing ceremony, on Sunday week. To observe the festival and its strange melange of art and commerce, hauteur and hoopla are close to 5,000 media people from all over the globe.

But for all its kudos, Cannes hasn't had it easy in recent years, and certainly not this year. In March, as the festival director, Thierry Frémaux, and its president, Gilles Jacob, were finalising the official selection, the shadow of the war on Iraq loomed. Given the newly glacial relationship between the host country and the US, there was avid speculation that they would boycott each other at Cannes.

In its heyday, the Cannes festival was highly politicised, always to the forefront at the battlements, and never more so than during les événements of May 1968, when two gifted young French directors, François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, literally pulled down the curtain on the festival as a gesture of solidarity with protesters on the streets of Paris. The country was immobilised. Nobody could get in or out - just as on Tuesday this week, when a national strike halted planes, trains and buses, preventing thousands of delegates from arriving in Cannes on the eve of the festival.

There has been greater anxiety about SARS, given the substantial number of Asian delegates who come to Cannes every year, constituting a crucial segment of the busy festival market, where dozens of films are screened each day to be bought and sold around the world.

When the official Cannes selection was announced last month, after screenings and discussions had gone on down to the wire, there was an air of relief about the organisers as they dismissed Iraq and SARS as inconsequential hiccups in their great order of things.

Yes, there would be Asian movies in the festival, although significantly fewer than in recent years, and, yes, the Americans would be back, taking three of the 20 competition slots with Clint Eastwood's Mystic River, starring Sean Penn, Tim Robbins and Kevin Bacon, Gus Van Sant's Elephant, featuring a cast of unknowns, and - a likely controversy magnet - the maverick actor and director Vincent Gallo's reputedly sexually candid The Brown Bunny, starring Chloë Sevigny.

Yet again, however, there was a whiff of déjà vu all over again about a Cannes selection that included such regulars from its old-boys network as the directors Lars von Trier, Peter Greenaway, Denys Arcand, Hector Babenco, Raoul Ruiz and Aleksandr Sokurov, not to mention the French film-makers who were given a full quarter of the competition slots, among them André Téchiné, Bertrand Blier and Claude Miller.

The more things change, the more they remain the same, perhaps, but what was most striking - on paper, to be fair at this very early stage - was the absence of such recurring Cannes directors as Jane Campion, Joel and Ethan Coen, Quentin Tarantino, Wong Kar-wai, Emir Kusturica, Theo Angelopoulos and Bernardo Bertolucci, most of them former Palme d'Or winners.

All have films primed for release this year, but all insisted they would not be quite ready for Cannes - which is very good news for the two big autumn festivals, in Venice and Toronto, but also smacks of a suspicion that, having won before, they would be at a disadvantage going back into the Cannes arena.

That inevitably raises the many highly questionable decisions of the Cannes jury process, which in recent years has provoked gasps and boos when results have been announced. Then again, does the Palme d'Or really matter any more when it comes to attracting audiences into cinemas - or even merely to eliciting the respect of critics?

Take the seven films accorded the Palme d'Or over the past six years: The Eel (Shohei Imamura, Japan) and Taste Of Cherry (Abbas Kiarostami, Iran), which tied for the prize in 1997; Eternity And A Day (Theo Angelopoulos, Greece, 1998), Rosetta (Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Belgium, 1999), Dancer In The Dark (Lars von Trier, Denmark, 2000), The Son's Room (Nanni Moretti, Italy, 2001) and The Pianist (Roman Polanski, France/Poland/Germany/UK, 2002).

The two 1997 winners could not even secure a week on release in Ireland, and most of the others were firmly relegated to marginal arthouse releases here and abroad. It has often been said, and rightly so, that the Cannes Film Festival is another planet, as driven and hectic as it is enclosed and insular - and fundamentally removed from reality.

It is a parallel universe, one that treads an exceedingly thin line between celebrating art cinema in its ever-threatening death throes and, bizarrely, celebrating the perceived glamour of Hollywood, as it swerves to turn the spotlight on any and every name or wannabe trotted out by the US studios.

Sifting through the mass of promotional material I have already received at this year's festival, it was most striking that only two of the 20 films in the official competition have been acquired for cinema distribution in the UK (which generally governs Irish distribution) and the US. That, inevitably, will change in time, probably within days in a few cases, as word gets round about the values of the films entered for competition.

At present, however, only Swimming Pool, the first English-language feature from the prolific and versatile French director François Ozon, and Mystic River, which was financed and will be distributed internationally by Warner Bros, have got distribution in the UK and the US.

Despite boasting a cast headed by Nicole Kidman, Dogville, the new movie from the petulant von Trier, has yet to be picked up by a UK or US distributor, even though it has been sold to more than 40 other countries, including France, Spain, Mexico, Macedonia, Taiwan, Paraguay and Turkey.

Similarly, The Mother, a potentially controversial British film from Roger Michell - director of Notting Hill - with a script by Hanif Kureishi that deals with the sexual relationship between a 65-year-old grandmother (Anne Reid) and her daughter's lover (Daniel Craig), has yet to be acquired for UK distribution, even though it has been bought by distributors in Belgium, Germany, Greece, Israel, Portugal and the US.

British distributors are notoriously cautious about acquiring anything labelled arthouse in this multiplex era, and sales agents often demand extortionate prices for a territory as large as the UK. Yet there is a lingering suspicion that, more than ever, Cannes is an endangered species.

Deciding on this year's Palme d'Or is a jury chaired by Patrice Chéreau and made up of directors from the US (Steven Soderbergh), Bosnia (Danis Tanovic) and China (Jiang Wen), actors from India (Aishwarya Rai, no stranger to competition, being a former Miss World), the US (Meg Ryan) and France (Karin Viard and Jean Rochefort) and the Italian writer Erri De Luca. We live in hope that they will choose a worthy winner: one of the strongest attractions of Cannes is the freshness of all that's on show - a succession of world premieres - and those films' capacity to surprise.

Meanwhile, more than 150 delegates have registered at the Irish pavilion, conveniently close to the Palais des Festivalson the Croisette, but yet again there are no Irish feature films in any of the festival's official selections or sidebars. Then again, only four Irish-made films have ever been selected for competition at Cannes: Robert Altman's Images, Pat O'Connor's Cal, Stephen Frears's The Van and John Boorman's The General. Among the many rejected by the Cannes selectors have been My Left Foot, The Crying Game and Dancing At Lughnasa.

Showing in the busy festival market yesterday was a remarkably powerful new Irish film, Song For A Raggy Boy, which got a standing ovation at the Sundance Film Festival in the US in January. Based on the book by Patrick Galvin and directed by Aisling Walsh, this is a powerful companion to The Magdalene Sisters in its unflinching dramatisation of fierce cruelty to boys at a forbidding Christian Brothers institution in late-1930s Cork.

In sharp contrast to the general depiction of nuns as ogres in The Magdalene Sisters, however, Walsh's more balanced film features a single perpetrator of sadism in the ice-cold Brother John (Iain Glen) and surrounds him with men too old or scared to interfere - until an idealistic lay teacher, William Franklin (Aidan Quinn), joins the staff and rocks the boat.

Emotionally scarred from his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, Franklin is an inspirational figure reminiscent of the teacher played by Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society. Walsh's film is much harder edged, plunging you into heartbreaking drama that is mercifully tempered by humanism. This film is a superb achievement, rightly angry and passionate in its exposure of disgraceful exploitation of innocent, vulnerable young lives.

The cast is exemplary, with Quinn giving the most affecting performance of his career; Glen in a truly chilling portrayal of Brother John; Marc Warren, Alan Devlin and Dudley Sutton as Christian Brothers conflicted for different reasons; and some terrific young newcomers, particularly the wonderfully expressive John Travers, as the victims of an appalling system. It is set to arrive at a cinema near you in October.

Michael Dwyer continues his Cannes reports in The Ticket on Thursday