And then, the party. Following a posh dinner overlooking the moonlit Mediterranean, the masses followed Kidman and her costars to the “Moulin Rouge” fete, held in a tent nearby that was done up like a postmodern cabaret. There, after months of quiet restraint in the face of her publicly aired marital problems, the flame-haired Kidman finally let loose. In a black corseted Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche gown and soaring stilettos, smack dab in the middle of a 1,000-plus crowd, the Aussie actress laughed and danced, even spinning music for a while alongside famed DJ Fatboy Slim. Many grooved into the middle of the night. It was a rarity, even in party-drenched Cannes, where glasses clink and beats thump nightly at every beach club, hotel ballroom and hilltop villa from cocktail hour to well after midnight.
While films may be the primary business at hand in Cannes-and we’ll get to those-it’s the parties that make the festival fly. But since the spectacular “Moulin Rouge” soiree, most others have felt meek and muted. On Saturday night, MTV hosted its annual do, with 1,400 revelers gabbing and dancing at French designer Pierre Cardin’s mod, futuristic villa tucked up in the hills overlooking the Riviera. Though the setting was stunning, the star-wattage was low-low-low: Cardin, Jade Jagger, her beau Dan Donovan-and that’s about it. On Sunday evening, Vanity Fair threw a staid, studio-executive-laden affair next to the pool of the Eden Roc in Antibes. Down at the Carlton Hotel Beach, the Coppola family sumptuously celebrated son Roman’s new movie, “CQ.” On hand were its stars, Elodie Bouchez and Gerard Depardieu, his girlfriend Carole Bouquet, fashion photographer Mario Testino and model Kate Moss. Not exactly Nicole and cancan dancers. Yawn.
Even the folks behind “The Lord of the Rings”-the most anticipated film of the year, though not due in theaters until December-couldn’t get it together. New Line Cinema rented an old chateau outside of town, shipped in “Lord of the Rings” sets from its New Zealand location and hired actors do recreate the story’s characters, including dwarves as hobbits. Unfortunately, by the time guests were bused up to the hilltop castle, hiked another half-mile in the dark, and teetered up some broken stone steps, they were in no mood to party. Though the movie’s stars-Liv Tyler, Ian McKellen and Christopher Lee-were milling about, most guests dismissed the extravaganza as a Renaissance Faire without much flair.
And, oh, yeah, in between all the affairs, there were a few films screened. The favorite of the festival so far has been Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now Redux,” a newly expanded version of the Vietnam War epic that wowed audiences-and won the festival’s top prize, the Palme d’Or-when it premiered here in 1979.
“When we first edited it back then, we were very much under the gun and didn’t want it to be a flop like everyone else said it was going to be,” Coppola said over lunch at the Martinez hotel on Sunday. “We were thinking of what audiences had been conditioned to expect.” So he cut it to a little more than two hours and held his breath. While it was lauded critically at the time, it wasn’t a huge commercial success.
Now, 22 years later, he has his definitive version: a 3-hour-and-23-minute-long film that includes additional footage of one its stars, Marlon Brando, and a half-hour long French-plantation scene that explains the political history of the conflict. As a result, Coppola says, “the end works better because it answers the questions, it deals with the hypocrisy and lies more clearly.” And Miramax, which is releasing the new version in American theaters in August, is hoping it will finally pull in the crowds.
The other American films that have debuted during the first half of the two-week festival, which closes May 20, have for the most part been entertaining if not always terribly deep. Joel and Ethan Coen’s latest effort, “The Man Who Wasn’t There,” starring Billy Bob Thornton and Frances McDormand, is a black-and-white spoof of ’40s film-noir movies that is so dry, critics cracked it was “the film that wasn’t there.” Hal Hartley’s “No Such Thing,” a sleek “Beauty and the Beast” yarn about a boozy, foul-mouthed monster and his rock-and-roll-girl savior, amusingly mocks the news media and society’s increasingly complacent acceptance of outrageous crimes and crises. “CQ,” the first film by Coppola’s 35-year-old son Roman, is a giddy spin on the struggling-auteur-filmmaker-in-1960s-Paris story. None of these movies has won over audiences. (About the only movie besides “Apocalypse Now Redux” that’s received universal acclaim here is one everyone knows is going to be a huge hit back home: “Shrek,” which opens in the States on May 18.)
And then there’s David Lynch. The American director who won the Palme d’Or in 1990 for “Wild at Heart” is back in competition with his latest work, “Mulholland Drive,” a movie that was originally created as a television pilot for ABC but then scuttled by the network. A film producer saw it and proposed that Lynch turn it into a feature. “And for a couple of weeks, I was in a panic. I didn’t have any ideas on how to close it,” Lynch said. “Then one night I sat in my chair and the ideas unraveled like a ball of string, and it came together.”
Well, sort of. Inspired by the winding hilltop road that overlooks Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley, the film traces the adventures of a small-town girl who arrives in Hollywood with dreams of becoming a movie star. But then the whole thing turns wildly abstract. As the picture came to a close during the press screening Tuesday night, the crowd broke simultaneously into applause and boos. No one is quite sure what to make of it. As Lynch himself said, “I’m hoping that people’s intuition kicks in-that machine we have that allows us to sense things without being able to articulate them.”
Better keep hoping, Mr. Lynch. And next time, try putting a little thought into a party, too.
