Cannes Film Festival 2011: How Hollywood invaded

　　It’s the showcase for serious cinema – yet the festival is also in thrall to America’s most populist schlock .

　　Cannes has been the world’s greatest film festival for 64 years – and one reason it continues to flourish is its willingness to accommodate the glamour and glitz of the movie world alongside cerebral films made by serious-minded directors from all over the world.

　　The organisers of Cannes understand the allure of star power: of ravishing actresses in stunning frocks and handsome actors in bespoke tuxedos strolling along a red carpet to a world premiere. Stars somehow look even more gorgeous in Cannes – maybe it’s the Mediterranean light – and it’s mostly their images that will be photographed or beamed across the world, reinforcing the festival’s glamour.

　　This is why each year at Cannes the normal proceedings of an otherwise high-minded film festival suddenly come to a halt, as the promotional machines for mega-budget Hollywood movies hit town and briefly take it over. Crucially, these films receive “special screenings” and stay firmly out of competition for the Palme d’Or.

　　At this year’s festival (which starts next Wednesday), Johnny Depp and Penlope Cruz will monopolise the public gaze as stars of Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, the fourth film in this hugely successful franchise. Jodie Foster and Mel Gibson will be there as co-stars of The Beaver (which Foster also directed), about a depressed executive who communicates via a glove puppet.

　　Word on The Beaver is favourable, though it doesn’t seem an obvious festival film. As for Pirates 4, few releases this year would be less likely to make it to Cannes on purely artistic merit. That’s missing the point, of course. Cannes receives an enormous publicity boost from the presence of these global stars, while the distributors of their films use the festival as a glittering launch pad.

　　Still, it’s notable that so many American films that have “invaded” Cannes in recent years have been so ropey. They arrive with a huge fanfare but often disappoint.

　　Last year was a good example. Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood, starring Russell Crowe, was not only welcomed to Cannes, but opened the entire festival. It’s safe to say the film was no one’s finest hour. The other American invader was Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, and, while leading man Michael Douglas swanned around town looking every inch a major movie star, this Wall Street sequel won little affection or respect.

　　But then the pattern was set a few years previously. It’s often remembered that in 2007 Jerry Seinfeld, promoting his animated Bee Movie, dressed up as a bee and abseiled down the front of the Carlton Hotel in Cannes. It’s harder to recall much about the movie itself.

　　In 2006, The Da Vinci Code opened Cannes to widespread scorn; most of the audience at the press screening were too dispirited even to boo. As its star Tom Hanks admitted later: “The reception couldn’t have been worse. ”

　　Visiting critics’ eyes had collectively rolled the previous year, when Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith blew into town – thankfully the last of the series. Indeed, there’s a tendency for franchises past their artistic sell-by date to use Cannes as a springboard: it happened in 2007 with Ocean’s 13 and the next year with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Pirates 4 continues that tradition.

　　Two years ago, Disney took over the Carlton Hotel to promote A Christmas Carol 3D, starring Jim Carrey and Colin Firth. The hotel’s imposing frontage was covered with fake snow, creating a winter wonderland in the middle of May; part of its ground floor became a wintry grotto leading to a vast press conference hall. That year, the Palme d’Or went to Michael Haneke’s brilliant Austrian film The White Ribbon; its entire production probably cost less than Disney’s snowy extravaganza.

　　It would be amusing to report that the festival’s high-minded French cineaste organisers take a dim view of these shenanigans. But it wouldn’t be remotely true. They understand perfectly that Cannes can be both a refuge for rigorous, arthouse filmmaking and an ideal theme park for the glitz, vulgarity and showmanship of mainstream movies.

　　In terms of the major Cannes competition, America has had a lean time of it recently. This year, of 19 Palme d’Or entries, only The Tree of Life, by the legendary US filmmaker Terrence Malick, feels purely American. Another entry, Drive, was financed and shot in the States, but its director Nicolas Winding Refn is Danish.

　　Last year, the political thriller Fair Game, starring Sean Penn and Naomi Watts (a baffling choice) was the sole American Palme d’Or contender. It has been eight years since an American film ( Fahrenheit 9/11) won the competition.

　　Yet Cannes – indeed France in general – loves Hollywood. Remember how much in thrall its New Wave directors Godard, Truffaut and Chabrol were to American genre films? And Hollywood movies and their stars have traditionally received a warm welcome on the Croisette. Over the years actors ranging from Elizabeth Taylor, Faye Dunaway, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have happily strolled around town .

　　Cannes’s love affair with the Yanks continues this year. Woody Allen directed this year’s opener, Midnight in Paris, and this year’s jury chairman is Robert De Niro, who first visited Cannes in 1976, to promote Taxi Driver.

　　With him then was his 13-year-old co-star, Jodie Foster. Now she’s back in town with The Beaver. Cannes and Hollywood: it’s a long-term romance.