Like Only Cannes Can

A full orchestra in evening dress struck up the familiar martial theme. George Lucas and his actors, including a beautifully shaven-haired Natalie Portman, ascended the red-carpeted steps of the Grand Palais. A hosanna rose from the thousands of gawkers held back by police barriers. Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, marking its premiere at the 58th Cannes Film Festival, conquered world cinema as surely as the Jedi knights vanquished their intergalactic foes. American movies have that force, even at a festival determined to celebrate the variety of international film. The planet's largest annual trade show, photo op and schmoozathon, Cannes this year welcomed movies from Cambodia and Korea, Hungary and Kurdish Iraq. Films that will never become Sith-size hits win Cannes' Palme d'Or — as L'Enfant, another dour view of the Belgian underclass by the brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, did at Saturday night's closing ceremony.

But the festival organizers, like the rubberneckers outside the Palais, are smitten by star quality. Sharon Stone, one of the few Hollywood actresses adept at radiating that old-time sexual allure, was seen and photographed everywhere. Chief programmer Thierry Frémaux made a point of inviting small films brandishing major marquee names, like Amos Gitai's Israeli drama Free Zone, with Portman as an American taking a risky trip deep into Jordan. (But her driver in the film, Hanna Laslo, won the Best Actress prize.) And when the creator of the most successful series in movie history says he'd like to show the final episode in Cannes, the festival gives him the key to its heart. The bustling pace and dazzle of Revenge of the Sith might make it an anomaly amid the no-tech, paint-drying minimalism of the international art-film brigade. In other respects, Lucas' film was right in step with the tendencies of the most prominent movies here.

If we see the Star Wars sextet as a single epic, then surely it is the saga of Darth Vader's rivalry with the son he had lost 20 years before. That was precisely the dominant motif of Cannes '05: fathers trying to reconnect with

If we see the Star Wars sextet as a single epic, then surely it is the saga of Darth Vader's rivalry with the son he had lost 20 years before. That was precisely the dominant motif of Cannes '05: fathers trying to reconnect with their sons

their abandoned sons. The need for parental closure drove the characters played by Bill Murray in Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers (which took the runner-up Grand Prix), Sam Shepard in Wim Wenders' Don't Come Knocking, and William Hurt in James Marsh's The King. A similar theme, of past sins haunting and tainting the present, was the preoccupation of several other biggies: ancient murders in David Cronenberg's A History of Violence, boyhood betrayal in Michael Haneke's Hidden, slavery in the American South in Lars Von Trier's Manderlay. The Grand Palais screen was streaked with guilty consciences.

And as Sith ends with its plot conflicts in midair, leading up and back to the original 1977 Star Wars film, so many of the Cannes entries ended opaquely. Instead of a satisfied "Aha!", audiences were left muttering, "Huh?" In Hidden, a Parisian TV host (Daniel Auteuil), his elegant wife (Juliette Binoche) and attractive son are menaced when ominous videotapes and threatening messages drop through their mail slot. Auteuil's lingering unease over a vindictive act he committed as a boy leads him to suspect his old victim had a hand in the current mischief, but the perpetrator is not directly revealed. In A History of Violence, a mild-mannered guy named Tom (Viggo Mortensen) is shocked to find himself accused of having been a big-city hit man 20 years earlier. The film snakes through all manner of twists until the last scene, when Tom returns home and ... now what?