Cannes Do: Cirque du Cannes

Express' Arion Berger is in southern France and sends her first dispatch from the Cannes Film Festival.

IT'S THE 60TH ANNIVERSARY of the Cannes Film Festival, and they have decided that it's not enough to be French this year. Oh no, they are going to be French-Canadian.

The poster for the festival proper, for example, is an ode to jazz-hands mime-love starring the likes of a grinning Danny Glover, Alejandro Inarritu, Gael Garcia Bernal and other formerly dignified people in mid-leap, all bursting out of some bouquet-like formation with vast and discomfiting enthusiasm, like the opening of "Cats" during which the audience is harassed by people in body-tards. Which would be fine, except for the bags we're given with all our schedules and press kits is also a product of the finest, most scampish minds of Montreal: It's shiny black vinyl with multicolored Day-Glo names of great directors (Theo Angelopoulos? Did you have to go there?) emblazoned on it. Fun pastime — Fun pastime — run together last and first names to come up with the lost greats of cinema: Kiarostami Henri! Camus Claude! Tienosuke Kinugasa! May you all get the retrospectives you deserve.

We got in early in the morning after a night of no sleep (well, it's our night now) and hit the Croisette first thing. There's nothing more disorienting than the Croisette, pictured above, on the first day one arrives at the festival. Added to that, various horrible things have happened: The press balcony at the Palais has gotten rid of their superfine coffee and chocolate machines and replaced them with austere watercoolers, they have laid out lovely tables and chairs for the press to relax upon, but pasted up Interdit de Fumer signs all over. (Everyone smokes anyway, especially the Italians, who seem to be in abundance this year.)

Worse, we can see from there that our beloved Ernie's ("It's our place," the restaurant across from the Palais that no one goes into except French people and our little crew, who can find one another there during festival downtime) has upgraded itself into a sleek blue-and-brushed aluminum hot spot, the likes of which would have been in vogue 15 years ago. Ernie's gone; no smoking in the press room; the insidious march of the Canadiens. Where will it end?

The early-morning screening that will be replayed at the 8:30 gala screening of the same day, the one with the red carpet, the stars and the hoo-ha has come and gone, but there is another showing of Wong Kar-Wei's "My Blueberry Nights" at 4 p.m. Wong was the jury president last year, and this wan, trite but ravishing-looking English language road-trip romance must be his revenge for Ken Loach winning the Palme d'Or with the well-meaning "The Wind That Shakes the Barley." You know Wong wanted "Marie Antoinette."

Anyway, Norah Jones stars as a girl who's been dumped. She stumbles into a pastry shop with a sideline in pork chops (don't ask) and the healing of heartbreak, and into the tasty deep dish dessert that is Jude Law, pictured at left with Jones, as the proprietor and chief baker. Of new hearts. Or something.

It's very beautiful, because Wong can't turn his camera on anything without turning it into a compositional master class. Even David Strathairn as a lonely, alcoholic cop looks fantastic in lots of mascara, crying into his whiskey and stabbing a guy with a pool cue. But "My Blueberry Nights" is a throwback in many senses: rather than a progression for the meticulous Wong, it recalls "Chungking Express," with its dreamy, blissed-out shifts in focus and pacing. Almost of the dialogue is ludicrous, from the bad accents ("I'm going to get me a job" says the British Rachel Weisz carefully, as a Memphis hot tamale) to the romantic pronunciamentos (there's a dialogue between Law and surprise indie guest Chan Marshall about doors and keys and locks and love that is aching for parody) to the lamentable facetious repartee between Jones' naive Elizabeth and Law's sassy but heartbroken Jeremy. This may not be a reduction in quality from the dialogue in Wong's earlier films, but who can say? Everything sounds more profound and romantic in Mandarin.

It's a disappointment, but not a bad time at the movies. Wong can't help that he sees beauty everywhere, and his sense of color is scarily smart. The people, the costumes, the settings are gorgeous, and you won't see a better use of deep, saturated blue in everything from tenement walls to cupcake frosting to cloud-rushing skies to goddamn blueberry pie in any film this year.

Weird things I have seen in Cannes: A middle-aged woman with bright orange hair and skin to match toting two shopping bags filled with identical items: a green square box in each bag, a rectangular blue box (blow dryers?), two bunches of carrots. Two idiots dressed as Laurel and Hardy parading down the Croisette, apropos of nothing; "Hardy" has a nasty booze-bloom on his nose and cheeks and looks about five minutes from a quadruple bypass. Various tricked-out vehicles cruising underneath our balcony pounding out crapola Euro disco while writhing, oiled guys and girls exhort the crowd to put their hands in the air as if they ne care pas. What this is in aid of I do not know, but the sight of the guys hanging off the back of a sanitation truck, pounding their fists in disco solidarity, melts my heart.

We dine at Ernie's, of course. The plates are now rectangular and they charge 5 or so more Euros per dish. But they still deep-fry their goat cheese. At this point, it's the little things you hang onto.

Photo by Fred Dufour and Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images