ALL YOU NEED IS HYPE

By RICHARD CORLISS

Was that a pirate ship in the Mediterranean waters near the Cannes Film Festival? No, it was the PRIVATE ship. The word screams in huge red letters on the starboard side of an ocean-liner-size vessel off the Riviera beach. A Swedish porno company is providing a "Floating Erotic Expo '96"--replete with "body painting on the hour" and "go-go dancers on the half-hour"--to festival participants 18 and older. It's a classic coals-to-Newcastle scheme, since visitors to the world's largest moviefest can get all the virtual sex they'd want on the giant screens under a different name: film art.

Cannes has been selling flesh and fantasy for a half-century now. In the 22 feature films competing for the 1996 Palme d'Or, to be awarded early this week by a 10-member jury headed by director Francis Ford Coppola, the flesh was on ample display (and with male nudity for once more evident than female, this was the Festival of Many Penises). But the fantasy this year was darker, more disturbing. One of the prime Palme d'Or contenders, Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves, is a tale of religious and romantic belief, a kind of Song of Bernadette with a goofy, hand-held camera style and a bit of full-frontal. Yet the heroine's ultimate act of faith is to board a ship to be fatally abused by vicious sailors. She might have been seeking her rendezvous with God on a nightmare version of the PRIVATE ship.

With its showy, star-making lead performance by film novice Emily Watson, Breaking the Waves also gave hints that the world's leading festival and much of world cinema were at an identity-crisis point, more than ever lost in Hollywood's long shadow. The film's Danish director, Von Trier, built his reputation on labyrinthine parables (Element of Crime, Zentropa) with much camera dazzle; but to aim for the big movie market, Von Trier set Breaking the Waves in Scotland and made it in English. Meanwhile, Bernardo Bertolucci returned to Italy for his first film at home in 15 years, yet his Stealing Beauty was also an English-language film--and a largely ludicrous one, filled with an international idle-class group of poseurs and gossips, all fawning over 19-year-old Liv Tyler. Her face, with its alluring Ava Gardner eyes and Halloween waxed lips reminiscent of her father's (Aerosmith's Steven Tyler), was plastered on billboards all over Cannes. It gave a clue to the triumph, at the Frenchiest festival around, of America the beautiful and banal.

The festival has always had a healthy sense of its mission--still does, as indicated by three billboards promoting the doomsday summer thriller Independence Day. NO WARNING, announces the first sign; NO NEGOTIATIONS, reads the second, which shows an alien spaceship hovering over the Riviera; finally, as the spaceship obliterates all sunlight, the legend says, NO CANNES. You have to admire a festival that can imagine no worse catastrophe than its own disappearance.

Independence Day is, of course, a blockbuster from Hollywood. It isn't being shown here, yet its promise overwhelms the presence of many intimate films from other countries. France, for example, makes beguiling little conversation pieces, like Ridicule and Comment je me suis dispute (ma vie sexuelle), a three-hour talkathon that plays like six consecutive episodes of a French Friends. Iran, of all places, is the hot new movie culture--Mohsen Makhmalbaf's Gabbeh registered as the festival's most folk-artful charmer--while the once estimable cinemas of Japan, Eastern Europe and Latin America have gone into hibernation.

If Cannes still flourishes, it's because it is supported by Hollywood films and stars. For the world press, a star is by definition American--or in a pinch, English. So everyone ogles at the big parade: Dustin Hoffman, Elizabeth Taylor, Cher, Mick Jagger, Kenneth Branagh, Sandra Bullock and Elton John. None of these worthies were showing completed films; they were on hand simply to bring luster to a festival where voyeurism is a vocation. Gawkers in evening dress could watch La Liz at a lavish dinner to benefit AIDS research, where she auctioned off a Robert Rauschenberg painting with a marine motif. "How about $300,000 for this fish?" she asked, and got $350,000.

Spike Lee and Mike Leigh, Gong Li and Jennifer Jason Leigh were all on the Riviera to peddle their films at dozens of press conferences and at luncheon interviews. Gong Li fared better at a posh dinner for her film Temptress Moon; her tablemate was not some grubby journalist but the genial dauphin of nearby Monaco. It was the first time in nine years that Grace Kelly's son had visited the festival, lured by Temptress Moon's elegant producer Hsu Feng, who thus provided a new answer to the old question: How do you get Prince Albert into Cannes?

Back on the movie screen, some of the big names besides Bertolucci were disappointing their fans. Robert Altman's Kansas City, starring Jennifer Jason Leigh and Miranda Richardson, shrouds the aimless bustle of its plot--kidnapping, murder and political maneuvering set against a 1934 jazz milieu--in an opium haze of dramatic anomie. Stephen Frears' The Van, third in the series that includes The Commitments and The Snapper, is a noisy mess, with shouting in lieu of wit and brawls stunt-doubling for character conflict. But this pub/pug violence was mild next to the atrocities in David Cronenberg's Crash, the festival's mandatory annual outrage. This terminally creepy movie, from the J.G. Ballard novel about people who get sexual thrills from car carnage, could have been a moving meditation on auto-eroticism. The kinks are there but the pace is lethargic, as if the film were moving on Detroit's pokiest assembly line.

The best films came from directors who investigated familiar territory, then headed in exciting new directions. Mike Leigh's Secrets & Lies, a strong contender for a top prize, rounds up a family of working-class Londoners for traumatic revelations managed with comic brio; Brenda Blethyn, as the bubbly hysteric in the group, is a special delight. Chen Caige's Temptress Moon, like his Farewell My Concubine, is a period piece about the deepest betrayal. Its story is more opaque than Concubine's, but the visual style has a daring, elliptical chic--you won't see a more intelligently beautiful film this year--and screen idol Leslie Cheung is a plotter of the suavest menace.

The festival's one unqualified critical and popular hit was the Scottish phenomenon Trainspotting, written by John Hodge and directed by Danny Boyle from Irvine Welsh's best seller about drug addicts in Edinburgh. A kind of Hard Day's Night on heroin, the film has a vivacious wit that glamorizes without romanticizing the outlaw appeal of the addict's life. Bizarrely, the festival kept Trainspotting out of competition, so the liveliest film on view was denied a chance to win prizes.

In the middle of Trainspotting, the antihero Renton gives a bitter speech that, with minor alterations, could summarize the dodgy state of world cinema as it begins its second century. "Some people hate the English," this Scottish junkie says, "but I don't. They're just wankers. We, on the other hand, are colonized by wankers. We can't even pick a decent culture to be colonized by." Well, Hollywood is the prevailing movie culture, and nearly all the other filmmaking nations are its colonies. On the evidence of this provocative, ultimately frustrating year at Cannes, some of those outposts have disappeared, some hold desperately onto their charming folkways and the rest have gone--gone Hollywood.

--Reported by Jeffrey Ressner/Cannes

With reporting by JEFFREY RESSNER/CANNES