The first thing to strike visitors to the 52nd Cannes Film Festival is that the prices have skyrocketed - again. The event reportedly generates a massive 600 million francs (IR£75 million) for the local economy in just a fortnight, but some locals want even more. The next most notable feature has been the increased security at the Festival Palais and the newly cordoned-off American Pavilion. A 500g bomb was discovered on one of the town's main arteries, the Boulevard Carnot, on Tuesday morning, the eve of the festival, and was defused by the bomb squad from Nice.
The absence of most of the Hollywood studios from Cannes this year is the most significant difference in the opinion of the American and British trade papers distributed here daily. They are awash with claims that Cannes is becoming irrelevant and that the eyes of the world film industry will not be focused on Cannes next week, but on next Wednesday's US opening of Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace.
Whereas Cannes secured the world premiere of Steven Spielberg's blockbuster, ET, back in 1982, the organisers were refused the Star Wars prequel, along with Stanley Kubrick's swansong, Eyes Wide Shut, and a number of other notable new titles. This is partly because a negative critical reaction at Cannes - which attracts 5,000 press - can destroy a film overnight, as happened unforgettably eight years ago when David Lynch's Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me was booed off the screen.
The other reason is that nobody can predict the views of a Cannes jury, no matter how good a movie is, and the Hollywood studios have unhappy memories of, for example, the fate of LA Confidential two years ago. Widely regarded by the media at Cannes as one of the two outstanding films in competition that year, the film failed to receive even the tiniest acknowledgement from the festival jury, which awarded the Palme d'Or jointly to films from Japan (The Eel) and Iran (The Taste of Cherries), which subsequently failed to make any significant impact on international cinema audiences anywhere.
When this year's festival opened on Wednesday night, the event was much more notable for the gorgeous sunshine - as the guests in tenue de soiree preened their way up the red carpet - than for the movie they were shown when they sat inside the Palais. That film, The Barber of Siberia, was, in a word, dire. Made on a budget of $45 million, it is the most expensive Russian film ever made, and it marks a huge disappointment from its director, Nikita Mikhalov, a worthy winner of a Cannes prize and an Oscar for Burnt By the Sun five years ago.
Running a tortuous three hours long, The Barber of Siberia employs a laboriously contrived flashback device to tell the story of a young American woman, Kate Callahan (played by a infuriating Julia Ormond), who, in 1885, travels from Chicago to Moscow and poses as the daughter of an eccentric inventor, Douglas McCracken (Richard Harris) in order to seduce a Russian general into funding McCracken's elaborate new-fangled machine for cutting down forests.
On her way there she meets a young miltary cadet named Andrei Tolstoy. "Any relation?", asks Kate, pointing to the book she is reading, which just happens to be Anna Karenina. As McCracken takes her through Moscow she points at a building and asks, "What's that?". "That's the Kremlin", he answers. When she meets the Russian general she tells him that her husband was Captain O'Reilly Fitzpatrick McNamara Callahan - honestly, I'm not making this up - and that he died at the battle of Little Big Horn.
Clearly, subtlety is not one of the virtues of Mikhalkov's daft movie, which succeeds only in its orchestration of huge, handsomely-filmed crowd scenes and big set-pieces. Other scenes, however, consist of the most hamfisted slapstick, while the absurdly overacting cast slice the ham in the thickest of chunks. That cast includes Mikhalkov himself as the czar, Alexander III - which may well be a rehearsal for his rumoured aspirations as a presidential candidate in the next Russian elections.
Made for a small fraction of Mikhalkov's budget on The Bar- ber of Siberia, the wholly endearing East is East marks the first notable discovery this year at Cannes, where it has its world premiere today in the non-competitive sidebar, the Director's Fortnight, set up as an alternative to the main festival after les ev enements of May 1968.
A serious comedy of generational and cultural conflicts in early 1970s Manchester, East is East deals with the failing attempts of a strictly traditional Pakistani immigrant (the excellent Om Puri) to force his seven offspring to conform to his values. The crunch comes when he organises arranged marriages for two of his sons, one of whom has so deeply assimilated himself in English youth culture that he declares, "I'm not marrying a fuckin' Paki."
On television Enoch Powell is spouting on about repatriation, while Blue Mink, Jimmy Cliff and McGuinness Flint are booming out on the soundtrack of this ostensibly gentle, but ultimately hard-edged plea for tolerance, which rarely reveals its origins as a stage play.
That this wise, hilarious and touching film juggles conflicting emotions with such ease and skill is greatly to the credit of its young Irish director, Damien O'Donnell, who makes a remarkably assured feature film debut with East is East.
This will not come as a surprise to anyone who has admired O'Donnell's achievements in short films, especially the awards-laden Thirty Five Aside, which, like East is East, is rich in quirky visual ideas. And the period trappings are authentically evoked in the impressive creations of the film's Irish production designer, Tom Conroy, and costume designer, Lorna Marie Mugan.
O'Donnell's film is one of three features of Irish interest showing in the Director's Fortnight; it will be followed on Sunday by Deborah Warner's film of Elizabeth Bowen's The Last September, which closed the Dublin Film Festival last month, and next Friday by the world premiere of Agnes Browne, based on Brendan O'Carroll's The Mammy and directed by and starring Anjelica Huston.
Of the 22 movies selected for the competition at Cannes this year, the only one of Irish interest is Felicia's Journey, based on the William Trevor novel, directed by Atom Egoyan and filmed in Co. Cork and in England. It features the young Irish actress, Elaine Cassidy, as the 17-year-old Felicia who crosses the Irish Sea to find her lover and tell him she is pregnant. The cast also includes Bob Hoskins and Irish actors, Peter McDonald and Brid Brennan.
It may or may not be to Egoyan's advantage that the president of this year's Cannes jury is his friend and fellow Toronto resident, David Cronenberg. Then again, Cronenberg is just one of 10 members on a jury that includes the actors, Holly Hunter, Dominique Blanc and Jeff Goldblum; directors Andre Techine, George Miller, Doris Dorrie and Maurizio Nichetti; the opera singer, Barbara Hendricks; and the playwright, Yasmina Reza, who wrote the award-winning Art.
In this year's auteur-driven Cannes competition, the movies that the jury will be considering for awards at Sunday week's closing ceremony include such attractive propositions as the new works from Pedro Almodovar, Leos Carax, Chen Kaige, Arturo Ripstein, Tim Robbins, Mario Bellocchio, Michael Winterbottom, Takeshi Kitano, Jim Jarmusch, John Sayles, Peter Greenaway, and even David Lynch, who's allowed himself back in the running despite that critical scorching suffered by his Twin Peaks movie in 1991.
Michael Dwyer's next Cannes report will appear on Wednesday
