It's early Sunday morning here in Cannes, the locals are beginning to reclaim their streets from the hordes of festivalgoers, and homemade signs taped to the walls throughout the Palais des Festivals ask: "Going to the airport? Want to share a cab? Call me." For those who remain, there is one thing on their collective minds: the potential prizewinners at tonight's closing ceremony. But in any given year at Cannes, the awards forecasting gets underway well before all the films have been shown. Two of the trade publications that publish special festival dailies, Screen and Le Film Français, each hold annual polls in which a dozen or so major critics are asked to grade the festival films on a four-point scale. The results are then averaged out to determine which titles currently have the most widespread critical support. Meanwhile, the veteran British film critic Derek Malcolm takes things a step further by announcing odds for each of the competition films and running a betting pool over which will end up winning the Palme d'Or. Last I heard, Malcolm had Richard Kelly's Southland Tales pegged as a 5000 to 1 longshot. No doubt, amid reports that competition jury member Lucrecia Martel has said that she and her fellow jurors will be going out on a limb, Malcolm is starting to sweat.

Actually, after holding my own ear to the ground a bit over the last 24 hours, I suspect Malcolm need worry little about seeing Kelly or his artistic team ascending the stairs of the Grand Théâtre Lumière tonight. But the overriding sentiment here in Cannes is that we should expect the unexpected, and what's most surprising about that news is that people seem so surprised by it. For days now, prognosticators like Malcolm have been shifting the Palme's odds in favor of the two Cannes films that received the most uniform support among audiences and critics alike: Pedro Almodovar's femme-centric melodrama Volver (which does seem almost certain to net Penelope Cruz the best actress Palme) and Alejandro González Iñaárritu's multi-character, multi-lingual Babel (which is also generating award buzz for one of its stars, Brad Pitt). But I personally find it hard to imagine that such populist fare will curry much favor with a jury that includes not only Martel — the rigorous Argentinean filmmaker whose films are notable for their claustrophobic intensity — but also Palestinian director Elia Sulieman, whose absurdist political comedy Divine Intervention won the Jury Prize here in 2002; Tim Roth, who has worked as an actor for the likes of Robert Altman, Mike Leigh and Peter Greenaway, and whose own directorial debut, The War Zone, was about as audience-unfriendly as movies come; and this year's jury president, Wong Kar-Wai, who's well known for his own unconventional working methods. When I made that observation to one female colleague, she countered by saying that the rest of this year's jurors are "a bunch of lightweights" — apparently, her euphemistic way of suggesting that the three actresses in the mix (Helena Bonham Carter, Zhang Ziyi and Monica Bellucci) are simpletons or philistines. Me, I wouldn't bet money on that.

There may not have been this much uncertainty about where the Cannes chips will fall since back in 1999, when a jury led by David Cronenberg (and including the Swedish opera singer Barbara Hendricks and the French playwright Yasmina Reza) gave the Palme d'Or to Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne's Rosetta, the Grand Jury Prize (affectionately known as "second place") plus two acting prizes to Bruno Dumont's L'Humanité and a Special Jury Prize (i.e., "third place") to The Letter, by then 91-year-old Portuguese filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira. Almodovar, the popular favorite that year too (for All About My Mother) had to content himself with the best director award, and the knowledge that his was the only one of all the winners likely to make any significant money at the international box-office.

Such is where the lines continue to be drawn in the Cannes sands: not so much between Hollywood and the rest of the world as between those films likely to appeal to a large audience and those that may never play outside of the festival circuit. And that clash of sensibilities is very much what gives Cannes its vitality — the idea that there is room, in the same competition, for an elaborate period fantasy film (Pan's Labyrinth) by genre maestro Guillermo Del Toro, and also for a surreal and austere drama about the denizens of a gutted-out Cape Verde slum, cast entirely with nonprofessional actors and consisting of many long, static shots of two characters playing cards or lying on a bed watching TV. That film is called Colossal Youth and it is the latest work by the Portuguese director Pedro Costa, who many have hailed as one of the best filmmakers currently working in Europe, but who many more have fingered as the pet cause of elitist and/or obscurantist critics and festival programmers.

Before Cannes 2006 had even begun, one staunchly anti-Costa colleague predicted that Colossal Youth was sure to be the subject of the greatest number of audience walkouts in Cannes and the most effusive praise on the part of those still in their seats at the end. He proved to be right, but as it happens the jury members were among those who stayed — and applauded — and now there are rumors that Colossal Youth is the very limb upon which Wong and company are preparing to climb. If Costa's film (about which I will have more to say in nest week's print edition) wins any major award, it will certainly rank among the more radical gestures in Cannes history; but in a way the mere inclusion of the film in the competition is already that, and something for which this critic is most grateful.

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In Fantasma, another film of intermediate length making its Cannes premiere on the same day as Signs, the 31-year-old Argentine filmmaker Lisandro Alonso spends an hour imagining what might happen if Argentino Vargas, the nonprofessional "star" of Alonso's extraordinary 2004 feature Los Muertos, were to get lost inside Buenos Aires' Teatro San Martin theater complex on his way to a screening of the film. (Also on his way to the screening, and similarly lost, is none other Misael Saavedra, who starred in Alsono's 2001 debut feature, La Libertad.)

On my own way to see Fantasma, an Argentine film critic friend advised me, only half-jokingly, that in order to properly understand the film, one must not only be Argentinian, but be familiar with Alonso's previous work and the building plan of the Teatro San Martin — a sprawling complex that houses seven performing arts halls, multiple gallery spaces and the offices of a couple of in-house theater companies. Well, two out of three ain't bad: while I can't claim Argentine citizenship, I have seen Alonso's films and I did spend a great many hours ensconced in the San Martin's tenth-floor Leopoldo Lugones cinema during the 2004 edition of the Buenos Aires Film Festival. So trust me when I say that this is a building in which there are many possibilities for detour, and it's little wonder that so much of Fantasma takes place in stairwells and elevators.

But I would argue that no "insider" knowledge is required to appreciate Fantasma's highly playful study of architecture and space and time, as Vargas and Saavedra, who hail from rural areas far removed from Buenos Aires' bustling center, pass unnoticed through the building's various floors, observing men and machines going about their daily business. Whereas Alonso's first two features (which detailed, respectively, the daily life of a woodcutter and the homeward journey undertaken by a recently released convict) were notable for their church-mouse quiet, Fantasma represents one of the most complex and sophisticated uses of sound in a movie I've heard in years. It is the city as perceived by unaccustomed country ears, full of car alarms, toilet flushes and airplanes passing by, all as if we were hearing them all for the first time. Dialogue, however, is employed as sparingly as if Alonso had to pay a steep tax for each word, and watching Fantasma, I thought about the significant number of directors working in world cinema today (from Alonso to Claire Denis to Sophia Coppola) who have grown tired of storytelling through dialogue, and how many others might be wise to follow their example.

The penultimate joke of Fantasma is that, when Vargas finally arrives at the Los Muertos screening, he is the only one in the audience — a highly plausible happening, given that Alonso's films have been barely distributed on his home turf, let alone elsewhere. Of course, it's one of those ageless ironies that many great artists are not duly recognized in their own lifetimes, either by their own countrymen or by the world at large. But by continuing to present the work of filmmakers like Lisandro Alonso and Eugène Green, Cannes makes a valiant stab at curbing that trend.

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Last year, when the Telluride Film Festival asked me to help organize a tribute to the director Eugène Green, I happily accepted the assignment, even if the task fell to me less because of any special talents I possess than because I was, at that point, one of the few persons in America familiar with Green's work. Not one of his films has been commercially distributed in the U.S., and prior to Telluride, no U.S. festival had endeavored to present a Green retrospective. As Green himself later told me, his own producers had repeatedly assured him that there would be no audience in America for his films, no matter that Green himself is an American, if one who has spent most of his adult life living in Paris.

Even in France, and despite a strong base of critical support, he remains something of a marginal figure, often unable to raise the funds he needs to make a new film. Yet Green has persisted, and since making his feature debut in 2001 with Toutes les Nuits, he has directed two additional features and one short that I take to be among the most breathtakingly original in modern movies. So, it is to be regarded as one of the major achievements of Cannes 2006 that Green (who presented his 2003 feature Le Monde Vivant in the Director's Fortnight sidebar) has ascended to the ranks of the festival's Official Selection with a new 30-minute "mini-film" called Signs, which is being screened as part of a special program that also includes new shorts by Jane Campion, Gaspar Noé and Monte Hellman. Good company indeed.

To describe Green's cinema is no easy feat: baroque music abounds on the soundtrack, the actors deliver their lines while staring directly into the camera (when, that is, we're not seeing a close-up on a hand or a shoe), and the real frequently collides with the mythic. Le Monde Vivant, for example, seemed like nothing short of a remake of Shrek directed by Robert Bresson, with its disarming tale of a brave "knight" (attired in oxford shirt, blue jeans and cardboard sword) who sets out to slay a child-eating ogre with the aid of a fearsome lion that just happened to be played onscreen by a Labrador retriever. But the key themes in Green's work — love and loss, disappearance and return — are both universal and eternal, which is what I suspect made the Telluride retrospective so successful that additional screenings had to be added to the schedule.

In Signs, a mother and her two young sons living in a small fishing village pine for the husband and father who vanished without a trace a decade earlier. Each in turn then encounters a mysterious fisherman (played by Munich and Kings and Queen star Mathieu Amalric), who may or may not be the missing man, and who even if he is has certainly been transformed by his journey. Like all of Green's films, this one is a fable, about a group of characters who find themselves at a crossroads, and how they come to choose which of many possible paths upon which to shine their symbolic candles. "How does one search?" one character asks, only to be answered "By looking at the world." And there are few greater pleasures to be had in Cannes this year than looking at the world through the eyes of Eugène Green.

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This year's Cannes Film Festival has been marked by history-spanning visions of anti-establishment activism and popular revolt. The tone was set early on by British director Ken Loach's The Wind That Shakes the Barley, the first film to screen in the official competition and, as the festival enters its final stretch, still one of the strongest. Set in Ireland in the early 1920s, it's about the struggle for Irish independence from England and the early days of the IRA, as ordinary young men take up arms against the occupying "Black and Tan" forces. The film's central figure is a young medical student (played brilliantly by Cillian Murphy) who puts his career on hold in order to join the fight, only to eventually find himself pitted against his own brother, who begins the film as an idealistic freedom fighter but ends up having his ideals softened by compromise. Loach, of course, is something of an idealist himself, and like all of his best films, this one is awash in scenes of people on opposing sides of an issue arguing their respective cases so passionately that we are left with no choice but to examine where out own loyalties lie. But The Wind That Shakes the Barley is equally a gripping, Melville-like thriller in which bands of men in dark coats and wool caps move stealthily through the grassy highlands, plotting their subversive actions and dispensing with traitors swiftly and mercilessly.

This is the second historical film made by Loach — who's better known for his chronicles of contemporary working-class life — following 1995's masterful Land and Freedom, which told of a Liverpool Communist who goes off to fight in the Spanish Civil War. In both cases, Loach's interest lies less in the past per se than in what we might learn from it, lest we be doomed to repeat it. And to that end, in its discussion of the seeds of terrorism, of centrism at odds with extremism, and of political interests placed ahead of human ones, The Wind That Shakes the Barley may be the most relevant film screening in Cannes in 2006.

In Richard Linklater's Fast Food Nation, the war at home isn't about land rights, but rather our daily bread. Adapted by Linklater and Erich Schlosser from the latter's best-selling non-fiction tome, the film is a muckraking expose of the meatpacking industry that suggests all too little has changed in the 100 years since Upton Sinclair published The Jungle. Greg Kinnear stars as the marketing executive for a barely fictionalized fast-food giant — Mickey's Burgers — whose discovery of fecal content in the company's meat sets him on an investigative odyssey that leads to a Colorado slaughterhouse and a blunt cattle supplier who calmly advises Kinnear that, in life, we all have to eat a little shit. (That said supplier is played by Bruce Willis only furthers the film's connection to the animated Over the Hedge, also screening in Cannes and starring Willis as a wily raccoon who promotes the virtues of junk food over organic.)

To an extent, Fast Food Nation seems the work of a conflicted revolutionary. Like Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock before him, Linklater wants to open Americans' eyes to institutional corruption within our borders, but he's also resigned to the near impossibility of causing widespread change in a society that believes what it doesn't know (or chooses to ignore) can't hurt it. As many have suggested, the movie is also baggy and shapeless, crammed with too many characters jockeying for not enough screen time — watching it, you get the feeling that Fast Food Nation may have begun life as a more sprawling, Altmanesque epic that gradually got whittled down to a conventional length. But what's here is still a duly scabrous portrait of a country moving (and eating) too fast for its own good, and also a Western of sorts, about those vanishing amber waves of grain and the shopping malls and chain stores being erected in their stead.

Ironically, the film in this year's Cannes competition that many expected to be the most politically incendiary turns out to be not so very political at all. Directed by the gifted Italian director Nanni Moretti, The Caiman is the humorous tale of a beleaguered schlock movie producer (the wonderful, hangdog-faced Sylvio Orlando) who pins his comeback hopes on a spec script about a corrupt, charismatic entrepreneur who manages to become Prime Minister of Italy. Only later does the producer realize that the script is actually a thinly-veiled portrait of Sylvio Burlusconi. From there, The Caiman turns into a whirligig farce that may qualify as Moretti's most complex juggling act to date, juxtaposing scenes from the producer's personal and professional lives against scenes from the movie-within-the-movie and actual news footage of Burlusconi at his most absurd (including the infamous incident in which he advised a German parliamentary leader to audition for the role of a kapo in a film about the Holocaust).

Moretti, who has sometimes been called the "Italian Woody Allen," and who won the Palme d'Or in Cannes in 2001 for his melancholic family drama The Son's Room, has been making his contempt for Burlusconi public since at least as far back as his 1998 diary film, Aprile. But given the torrent of Fahrenheit 9/11-style hype that has attended The Caiman since its March opening in Italy — where its release was timed to coincide with the national elections that ultimately ousted Burlusconi from office — the surprising thing about the film is that it's not really very much about Burlusconi at all. Which maybe isn't such a big surprise. Rather, like just about every movie Moretti has made since his aptly-titled shot-on-Super-8 feature-debut, I Am Self-Sufficient, The Caiman is a wry and deeply personal comedy about the struggle to be a good husband, father, artist, citizen and generally well-rounded human being. And at that, The Caiman succeeds so well that it's inexplicable why Moretti, in the final reel, turns up the anti-Burlusconi rhetoric to such a stifling, Moore-like degree that you leave the theater feeling as though someone has been chiseling anarchist propaganda on to your skull.

The counter-cultural sentiments in Cannes have hardly been limited to the movie screens. On the streets, a delegation of Korean filmmakers (including the brilliant actor Choi Min-Sik, who starred in the Cannes award-winning films OldBoy and Chiwhaseon) has been protesting the increasing efforts of the American film industry, via the MPAA, to reduce or eliminate the quota system that currently prevents Hollywood films from completely monopolizing Korean cinemas. In the months since I first wrote about the quote dilemma in my report from the 2005 Pusan International Film Festival, the Korean government caved to U.S. pressures and agreed to reduce the number of calendar days that Korean cinemas must screen locally-produced movies from 146 to 73, prompting MPAA president Dan Glickman to comment: "We look forward to the opportunity to compete on a fairer basis with the growing Korean industry." And as Korea enters into Free Trade talks with the U.S., there are widespread fears in the local film industry that the quota could become further endangered. Evidently, where Hollywood's domination of the global entertainment marketplace is concerned, enough is never enough.

And to think, I haven't yet gotten to the one film in Cannes about a literal revolution: Sophia Coppola's Marie Antoinette. More to come. Stay tuned.

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Although the primary purpose of Cannes is to screen films in their completed form, the festival also serves as a showcase for movies in various stages of production, as well as a launching pad for films that are, for the time being, no more than ideas in their makers' heads (or perchance full-page ads in the pages of Variety.) This year, two major studios (which recently became the same major studio) have come to the festival with 20-minute previews of two high-profile, big-budget releases scheduled to arrive in theaters in the coming months. One is Paramount's World Trade Center, directed by Oliver Stone and starring Nicolas Cage as a New York Port Authority officer who becomes trapped beneath the rubble of the Twin Towers. The other is DreamWorks' Dreamgirls, based on the Tony-winning Broadway show of the same name and the latest in Hollywood's ongoing attempt to breathe new life into the musical genre.

Generally speaking, I'm not much interested in seeing bits and pieces of movies that I'll eventually have to see in their entirety — even less so when, as in the case of the Dreamgirls preview, the footage being screened isn't one uninterrupted section of the film but rather a highlight reel of scenes spanning the length of the film. Still, my curiosity in the Dreamgirls project has been such that, Friday evening, I bit the bullet and attended the preview event — and I'm happy to report that the experience ranks among the highlights of my Cannes experience thus far.

Set during the 1960s and '70s, Dreamgirls tells the story of a Supremes-like trio of black female singers (played in the film by Beyoncé Knowles, former American Idol contender Jennifer Hudson and Tony-winner Anika Noni Rose) from their discovery in a talent competition to their employment as the backup singers for the Jackie Wilson-like soul singer James "Thunder" Early (Eddie Murphy) and their eventual breakout as headliners under the guidance of a svengali-like manager (Jamie Foxx). On Broadway, the show ran for more than 1,500 performances, but as the recent film versions of Rent and Phantom of the Opera ably demonstrated, stage success is no guarantor of cinematic success, either artistically or financially speaking.

Of course, those movies were also saddled with poor source material and directors who didn't seem to have ever seen a musical, let alone know how to direct one. Dreamgirls, conversely, is the work of Bill Condon, who did a superb job at the helm of Gods and Monsters and Kinsey, and who wrote the film version of Chicago — the only recent movie musical to set the box-office ablaze, and one about which it is safe to say that the screenplay was a good deal better than the direction. At the time, Condon was praised for devising a structure by which all of Chicago's musical numbers became fantasy sequences unfolding inside the characters' minds — a salvo to the conventional wisdom that modern moviegoers are unwilling or unable to suspend their disbelief at the sight of screen characters spontaneously bursting into song and dance. But judging from the four complete musical numbers from Dreamgirls presented in Cannes, this time out Condon has said to hell with conventional wisdom and let the characters strike up a tune whenever they feel like it. In other words, he's made a musical that isn't afraid to be a musical.

That's not all: from the first of the sequences — the jivey and exhilarating "Fake Your Way to the Top" — in which a backstage meeting between Early and the Dreams gives way to an energetic montage charting the group's rising popularity, it was clear that this Dreamgirls is a richly cinematic affair, full of extravagantly expressive crane and dolly shots and in-camera set changes. And from the looks of things, this could be Eddie Murphy's best role in years. To say much more would be premature, but let me put it this way: if the other two hours of Dreamgirls are as good as this, the film's December 21 release is something worth looking forward to.

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The calm, hypnotizing rhythms of a film like Hamaca Paraguaya are sometimes lost on critics and audiences alike at a festival like Cannes, where seemingly everyone is rushing to and fro, trying to cram five or six screenings — and maybe one or two parties as well — into what is still but a 24-hour day. For those willing to surrender themselves, however, the effects of such a movie can be akin to hopping in a time machine and suddenly traveling back to some long ago time and forgotten place. So it was that, in the course of a single day in Cannes, I not only visited rural 1930s Paraguay, but also the ancient Australian outback, the latter trip courtesy of Ten Canoes, which also screens in Un Certain Regard and is also something of a historic feat: the first feature-length movie to be produced in an indigenous Australian language.

Directed by the Dutch expatriate filmmaker Rolf de Heer, this sometimes bawdy (remember: "never trust a man with a small prick"), always beguiling work of imagination begins with an unnamed narrator (voiced by the great Aboriginal actor David Gulpilil) promising us: "I am going to tell you a story. It's not your story…it's my story…a story like you never seen before." And what follows hardly disappoints. A group of Aboriginal tribesman set out on an annual goose-hunting expedition, fashioning canoes from tree trunks and sleeping in makeshift camps perched high in trees (the better to avoid being eaten by crocodiles). Along the way, an elder member of the tribe, Minygululu, regales his restless young companion, Dayindi — who happens to covet one of Minygululu's three wives — with a cautionary tale, about another young man smitten by similar desires, the arrival of a mysterious stranger and the hard-gotten wisdom to be careful of what one wishes for. Then this story within the story within the story starts to unfold before our eyes.

If the moral of Ten Canoes is familiar, the getting there is anything but. To watch this movie (shot in breathtaking widescreen by cinematographer Ian Jones) is to enter into a whole new language of symbols and meaning, the likes of which I have rarely encountered in cinema outside of the African tribal films of Ousmane Sembene. And yet, as in Sembene, we are never lost, for as much as anything else, Ten Canoes is a celebration of the art of storytelling, and of the power of stories to transcend all barriers of space and time and language. This is a movie with sheer magic in it.

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Last year in Cannes, I had the honor of serving as a member of the festival's Camera d'Or jury, charged with the task of awarding the best first feature film shown in any of the festival's sections (including the independently-curated Directors Fortnight and Critics Week programs). Then, there were a total of 18 films in the running. This year, it's up to a whopping 29, with almost half of them in the Official Selection (comprising the main competition and the Un Certain Regard sidebar) — a provocative statement that says, after years of being perceived as a haven for new works by world cinema's reigning Old Guard, Cannes is now seriously committed to discovering and promoting the next generation of moviemaking talent.

In his introductory essay in this year's special Camera d'Or program booklet, Cannes artistic director Thierry Frémaux remarks, "This number reassures us: the cinema is alive and bursting with energy." Just how many of those 29 names will still be on the lips of festival-goers by the time of Cannes comes to a clse ten days from now remains to be seen. But on Thursday, things got off to a promising start with the Un Certain Regard screening of Paraguayan director Paz Encina's Hamaca Paraguaya, which unfolds in the mid-1930s in a remote jungle region, where an elderly married couple go about their daily business — washing clothes, gathering wood and often just waiting, feeling the time pass, as they ponder the fate of their son, who has gone off to fight in the Chaco War against Bolivia. As a series of striking, static compositions play across the screen, a voiceover narration that switches from the man to the woman and back again takes us into the characters' shared past, until after scarcely more than an hour of screen time, we're left with a rich sense of these ordinary people and their quiet dignity. Admittedly, not much else happens in Encina's minimalist and exceptionally delicate work, which quickly generated comparisons (not all of them favorable) to everything from Samuel Beckett to the recent films of Gus Van Sant. But the 35-year-old Encina possesses a poetic sensibility that is uniquely her own and which, luck willing, will soon be seen again.

The above description may not immediately call Mozart to mind, and yet Hamaca Paraguaya is in fact the first in an ambitious series of feature and short films commissioned by the acclaimed theater director Peter Sellars and London-based film producers Simon Field and Keith Griffiths, to be presented together this fall in Vienna on the 250^th anniversary of the composer's birth. Grouped under the banner New Crowned Hope and reported about in these pages before, the films are not meant to be directly about Mozart or his work, but rather, per Field and Griffiths, to take up themes common to Mozart's late work (in the case of Hamaca Paraguaya, requiem for the dead) as they apply to the world at the dawn of the 21^st century. In additon, the New Crowned Hope films will all be made by directors from the developing world, and to that end Hamaca Paraguaya is not just the first movie from Paraguay to be shown in Cannes (or any major festival), but also, per the Internet Movie Database, one of less than 100 feature films and shorts ever to hail from the poor South American country. That in itself is a fairly remarkable achievement.

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Not to take sport in the kicking of a dead horse, but I'd be remiss if I didn't add one delicious footnote to my earlier Da Vinci Code discussion. On Wednesday night, about one hour into the film's official, black-tie opening-night screening, a colleague spotted the president of this year's competition jury, Wong Kar-Wai, plus two of his co-jurors, actor Tim Roth and Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman (Divine Intervention), sidling up to a bar near the Palais des Festivals, to down a few while watching the UEFA league final match between Arsenal and Barcelona. Of course, The Da Vinci Code is screening here in a non-competing festival slot, so, technically speaking, Wong and company didn't have to stay all the way through to the end. Still, let it not be said that this year's jury — or at least one-third of them — has thus far shown anything but the most impeccable good taste.

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A few months back, sitting in a West Hollywood screening room, I overheard some animated bits of conversation exchanged between two of those so-called film journalists more affectionately known in our industry as "junket whores," as they pondered to what lengths distributor Sony Pictures might go in promoting its forthcoming film adaptation of The Da Vinci Code. "I bet they do it in Paris," said one, suggesting that the primary setting of author Dan Brown's runaway bestseller would make a logical locale for the junket. "The Paris Hotel in Las Vegas is more like it," quipped his companion, noting how, in our economically leaner times, the heretofore spendthrift Hollywood studios have tightened their purse strings when it comes to publicizing their mega-budgeted "tentpole" movies.

Gone, for the most part, are the "good old days" when reporters were invited by Disney to Honolulu to interview the cast and crew Pearl Harbor, or when Fox flew scads of junketeers across the Atlantic to promote the beleaguered Alien: Resurrection. But then again, with its 40-million-copies-and-counting progenitor, an estimated $125 million budget and a plan to release the film worldwide this Friday on nearly 12,000 screens, The Da Vinci Code is hardly your run-of-the-mill event movie. And sure enough, an avalanche of emails from the Sony publicity department soon confirmed that they had something out of the ordinary in store for the film. Though there would be no traditional junket per se, Sony would do nothing short of commandeering a Eurostar train and rechristening it in honor of the movie, while inviting select journalists to join director Ron Howard and the cast on the ten-hour journey from London's Waterloo Station to France, where The Da Vinci Code had been selected for the opening night of the 59^th Cannes Film Festival. What's more, an official from Guinness would join the clambake in order to certify that the train's 1,400-kilometer trip indeed set a new world's record for the longest non-stop international train journey. And there would even be a special press website where interested parties could receive updates on the action as it unfolded.

All of which is to say that Sony has hardly been mum on the subject of all things Da Vinci, save for one small item: when exactly the studio would show the movie to critics. As recently as a month ago, inquiring minds were assured that screenings would be organized in Los Angeles and New York prior to critics' departures for Cannes. But as the May 19 release date drew nigh, Sony's publicists changed their tune and decreed that Da Vinci would in fact not be shown anywhere in the world prior to its first official Cannes press screening on Tuesday evening, May 16, forcing many reviewers from daily and weekly publications to scamper jet-lagged from the airport to the Palais des Festivals, see the movie and then dash bleary-eyed back to their computers to write their reviews on a very short deadline.

The irony, of course, is that as much as studios like to pretend that the opining of critics has little impact on the box office performance of a given film — and as much as box office numbers time and again prove them right — the relationship between studio publicity departments and critics has, in the early days of the Summer 2006 movie season, reached something of an all-time low. Just two weeks ago, Mission: Impossible III was given similar kid-gloves treatment by Paramount. But the secretiveness surrounding The Da Vinci Code transcends even the usual studio jitters about piracy, early reviews and/or the impact of bad buzz on fragile celebrity egos. In L.A. and New York, most journalists weren't invited to see the film before tonight, while one San Francisco colleague I ran into here in Cannes informed me that the Bay Area press screening had been moved from Wednesday to Thursday, in order to prevent reviews from appearing in the Friday papers.

So, why, you ask, is the movie widely tipped to be one of this summer's bonafide box-office blockbusters being guarded with nearly the same intensity that its characters devote to concealing some long-buried details about the sex life of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene? Well, while I've left the L.A. Weekly's resident Da Vinci expert Greg Burk in charge of official reviewing duties, I will say that, as soon as the movie began to play across the screen of Cannes' Debussy theater at last night's jam-packed screening, the secret was out: no matter the rich movie tradition of literary straw being spun into cinematic gold (The Godfather, The Bridges of Madison County, et al.), The Da Vinci Code is spectacularly awful in ways that I suspect even the most cynical appraisers of Brown's novel couldn't quite have anticipated.

I won't bore you with plot details — after all, the movie does more than enough of that itself — except to note that, for all of The Da Vinci Code's scandal-mongering bluster, I can scarcely remember another cat-and-mouse pursuit thriller in which I cared less about who devoured whom. As Tom Hanks' wrongfully-accused Harvard symbology professor and Audrey Tautou's comely Parisian cryptologist get chased high and low by mad monks, dogged detectives and assorted nefarious Catholic Church officials, the cumulative effect is an overwhelming feeling of "So what?", amplified by the film's dire self-seriousness which, at the Tuesday night press screening, sent waves of unintended guffaws rippling through the theater during a climactic revelation scene. Even when one character, in an uncanny channeling of audience sentiments, exclaims "I'm glad this bullshit is over," alas there's still about 45 minutes of screen time left to go.

The Da Vinci Code has been a literary phenomenon that I will not even try to account for, especially since I could do no better than H.L. Mencken and his enduring words about the taste of the American public. So, a film version was inevitable, and indeed this one does keep you pinned to the edge of your seat — not guessing whodunit, mind you, but trying to solve the considerably greater mystery of why talent the caliber of Hanks and director Ron Howard (coming off of two of his best, if least commercially successful pictures, The Missing and Cinderella Man) were inspired to pimp themselves out for such a sub-pedestrian potboiler (which never begins to simmer, let alone boil). What did these two industry giants — each of whom can more or less make any movie he wants — think they could achieve, especially given a script (by Akiva Goldsman) so repetitive and didactic that it begins to recall one of those special television programs that are narrated for the blind?

Or did the makers of The Da Vinci Code think at all, or were they blinded by the dollar signs that so clearly danced in their eyes? It's a question that cuts straight to the heart of Cannes itself, and it may well be that The Da Vinci Code is actually an ideal curtain-raiser for a festival that has long been torn between challenging "auteur" cinema and more commercial, star-driven (read: Hollywood) fare — longer, in fact, than most people think. As an excellent article appearing in the current issue of weekly Variety, co-authored by industry reporter Ian Mohr and longtime Variety critic Derek Elley, points out, Cannes and Hollywood have gone hand-in-glove since the very beginnings of the festival in the 1950s, with the likes of The Birds, Mary Poppins and Ben-Hur popping up here throughout the 1960s (even as Easy Rider and other films of the "New Hollywood" cinema began to make their presence known). Which is to say nothing of the real engine that drives Cannes: the Marché du Film, or Cannes Market, which takes up the entirety of the cavernous basement (and then some) of the Palais des Festivals and which is where thousands of movies ranging from those screening in Cannes' official sections to the latest Roger Corman-produced monster mash are sold by the pound to international distributors and television broadcasters.

In other words: for all the hand-wringing over the "identity" and "direction" of Cannes — including this week's myopic New York Times editorial suggesting that the festival's top competitive prize, the Palme d'Or, is a kiss of death at the box-office, no matter the slew of solid performers (including Fahrenheit 9/11, The Pianist and Mike Leigh's Secrets & Lies) that have garnered the prize in the last decade alone — the more things seem to change, the more they really stay the same. Hence, later this week, X-Men: The Last Stand will make its world premiere here sandwiched between the latest comedy from master Italian satirist Nanni Moretti and the new film by deadpan Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki. And the day after that, Amores Perros and 21 Grams director Alejandro González Iñárritu's Babel (starring Cate Blanchett and Brad Pitt among others) will be followed by the war movie Flanders, whose director, Bruno Dumont, caused a mini-scandal in Cannes when his earlier L'Humanité won prizes for its nonprofessional leading actors. The goal of Cannes, as I see it, is simply to showcase the art of cinema in all its various incarnations. To which I can only say that The Da Vinci Code is no Mona Lisa.

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