Cannes, Sweet And Sour

Sublime, Ridiculous Come Together at Cinema's Head Table

CANNES, France

The world's most zuper-fabulous film festival began with an apocalyptic bummer of a movie about blind people -- being brutally degraded-- and then quickly moved on to cartoon pandas and Angelina Jolie, who is heavy with twins.

So it was sweet and sour. Angie? She positively glowed in a green Grecian-style gown, like a ripe pea pod on the red carpet for the world premiere of DreamWorks' animated "Kung Fu Panda," mugging first with a quickly tiresome Jack Black in full-tilt promotion mode beside a plushy costumed panda mascot with devil eyes. Then Jolie returned to the valet line to retrieve her real-life life-partner and to stroll/pose/waddle up the grand stairs in her Nike-soled flats. And there it was: He. The sexiest man alive. Her. The sexiest woman alive. Obviously. Been. Making. Babies. The paparazzi, they go wild, documenting . . . the evidence.

Earlier at a bizarre press conference that somehow managed to combine questions about the victims of the Burmese cyclone, childhood obesity and kung fu, Jolie, who is eight months pregnant, confirmed she was eating for three, and she delighted the locals by saying that she and Brad may linger in France and deliver the twins here (vs. Namibia the last time), which would make the babies . . . sorta French. (The couple are currently bunking at zillionaire Microsoft founder Paul Allen's Villa Maryland at nearby Cap Ferrat).

So this is the Cannes International Film Festival: an elegant pregnant lady in low-cut evening gown strolling through a Riviera Coney Island as French hicks gnaw on their baguettes, begging for freebie tickets for the latest in Hungarian cinema. The high-low thing? Somehow it just works. The genius is that the most blatantly commercial blockbusters, such as "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull," which premieres here Sunday, can coexist with a film such as "Leonera" from Argentine director Pablo Trapero, which screened Thursday. It is about female felons in prison (with their toddlers behind bars). It is not a comedy.

The jury that will select the winner of the Palme d'Or prize from all this is led by Sean Penn, who was praised by the festival's Artistic Director Thierry Fremaux as a representative of "a different voice from an America that has been in the headlines for the last 10 years," meaning, basically, that he isn't George W. Bush, whose approval ratings here hover in the low single digits.

At his press conference, the middle-age rebel Penn complained, naturally, about Bush and then went off on France's new smoking ban -- and then fired one up -- and said he thought it would be difficult for Barack Obama to live up to expectations. "I hope that he will understand, if he is the nominee, the degree of disillusionment that will happen if he doesn't become a greater man than he will ever be," said Penn in a cloud of smoke.

Oh, but what about cinema? you ask. The film "Blindness" opened the festival, from the Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles, based on the novel of the same name from the Portuguese Nobel Prize winner José Saramago, starring Julianne Moore, Gael García Bernal, Danny Glover and Mark Ruffalo. The film depicts a world in which people suddenly go blind with "the white sickness," and humanity quickly reverts to extremo barbarism. The helpless blind are rounded up and forced to live in abandoned sanitariums, where they stumble around half-naked, starving, filthy, the weak preyed upon (and gang raped) by sightless thugs. "I don't think the film is very different from what would happen" if such a disease were real, Meirelles says.

It is a very grim fairy tale. Apparently, though, not as grim as it could have been. Meirelles said he showed an earlier "very hard" version of "Blindness" to focus groups, and 45 out of 500 people walked out. "It was almost unbearable," said Meirelles, whose film contains the message: We have eyes, but do we see? "It is a fable," Moore explains at the press luncheon. "It poses the 'what if' question for everyone." Bernal said they rehearsed by wearing blindfolds. Glover asked for some fresh-squeezed orange juice, not the kind made from concentrate. "The difference is night and day," he said.

After the premiere of "Blindness," guests strolled from the Palais (a.k.a. convention center) down the Croisette (a.k.a. street) to a party on the Carlton Hotel's pier. They entered the tent though a glowing white tunnel, filled with dense milky fog, creating the illusion of temporary blindness, before emerging to a tables laden with salmon mousse and flutes of champagne. It was only awkward if you thought about it. The patrons nibbled canapes and discussed the blind rape scene.

The buzz for the coming week? Very fluid. Many of the American films are being finished as this is typed. Woody Allen is back at Cannes with "Vicky Cristina Barcelona," starring Javier Bardem and Scarlett Johansson, who decided (last minute) not to come to Cannes. This is a pity. Cannes is made for an actress of Johansson's talents. Clint Eastwood is bringing "Changeling," with Angelina Jolie and John Malkovich, set in 1928 Los Angeles, about a disappeared kid. There's that little Indiana Jones thing. Posters of a sadly ageless Harrison Ford hang from every wall. Madonna is on her way here, to promote her Malawi AIDS documentary. Good for ole Madge. Sporting legends Diego Maradona and Mike Tyson are expected to show to support documentaries about their sporting legends.

The selectively reclusive screenwriter Charlie Kaufman is coming with his directorial debut called "Synecdoche, New York," starring Philip Seymour Hoffman in the role of a small theater director with, according to film notes, "a mysterious condition systematically shutting down each of his body's autonomic functions." Debate has mostly centered on what are autonomic functions and how to pronounce the title (think "Schenectady") and how weird the Kaufman project might possibly be -- word is: weirder than his "Being John Malkovich," which could be great. Unless not. Seasoned Canners say the film, which has not yet sold to a U.S. distributor, is screening at the very end of the festival, which is never a good sign.

Speaking of mysteries, Steven Soderbergh arrives here in a rush with his opus "Che," starring Benicio Del Toro as the iconic leader of the Cuban revolution. The film is being shown as two separate movies -- at a total of 4 hours 28 minutes. Did we mention it is in Spanish?

At the "Kung Fu Panda" press conference yesterday, Dustin Hoffman was asked, wasn't there, umm, a big leap in his career, from the early heights of "The Graduate" to his playing Master Shifu, the cartoon character?

Hoffman deadpanned, "It's a decline in culture." The international entertainment press corps laughed. Then Hoffman stuck in the knife: "But it's also reached your profession. We're all here, in the same bag together."