It's a Lovely Day in Cannes And Life Is Rotten

The rumors at the 56th cannes Film Festival were so much more entertaining than the stuff on the Grand Palais screen, they deserve their own prizes. So here are our Kick-the-Cannes Awards.

Best Pre-Festival Disaster Scenario: The Hell-no-we-won't-go rumor. After Gulf War II, journalists speculated that big American stars and producers would boycott Cannes in solidarity with the U.S. government's cold-shouldering of France. This notion of Cannes as a family picnic, where the feudin' cousins stay home, ignores what the festival really is: a place where movies are seen and sold. Hollywood will go anywhere to sell its product, and so will its grand old icons. Who came to Cannes? Just Clint Eastwood — he practically is America. And Arnold Schwarzenegger — he practically owns it.

Best Post-Festival Conspiracy Theory: The gay-Mafia rumor. Though Lars Von Trier's Dogville was deemed front-runner for the Palme d'Or, Gus Van Sant's Elephant took the prize. So the festival did end with the an openly homosexual French director (jury president Patrice Chéreau) presenting the award to an openly homosexual American director (Van Sant). But Chéreau was just one of nine jury members, all with their own wills and constituencies. If Dogville had won, theorists might have seen sinister connections between its star, Nicole Kidman, and jury member Meg Ryan, who stars later this year in the Kidman-produced In the Cut.

Best Goofy Diversion from a Dreadful Slate of Films: The mystery of the purloined penis. An American indie movie, Vincent Gallo's stupefyingly inept The Brown Bunny, let loose such a torrent of critical contumely that the director-writer-star-cameraman-editor apologized publicly for his film. Bunny's only selling point was the promise of an explicit scene of fellatio between Gallo and Chloë Sevigny. One hour and 47 minutes into the ordeal, there it came, and went. We later learned that Gallo had used a phallic prosthesis he'd taken from the set of Claire Denis' French film Trouble Every Day (shown at Cannes in 2001) and that Denis was still miffed about the missing member. Her exact quote is missing too, but wags paraphrased it as: "Vincent Gallo stole my penis."

The Brown Bunny has already entered movie lore as the worst film ever shown at a major festival. Cannes '03 may achieve a similar distinction. No one could recall a soggier batch of movies in the competition. The lures of the beach, lush weather and gorgeous people were never so seductive.

As beautiful as it was outside the Palais, that's how depressing it was inside. Good movies, bad ones — and a huge batch of pictures that could be called ambitious mediocrities — all had the tone of apocalyptic despair. Brazilian director Hector Babenco ended his Carandiru with the slaughter of innocents in a São Paulo jail. Austrian Michael Haneke depicted the moral chaos attending an unspecified disaster in his testy The Time of the Wolf. Even Denys Arcand's genial The Barbarian Invasions, a French-Canadian billet-doux to a dear, dying scoundrel, featured a jarring clip of a hijacked plane crashing into the World Trade Center. And the two main Palme d'Or contenders showed how the world could end in America: with a bang.

Dogville — like Von Trier's best-known films, Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark — is a parable of inner beauty defiled, except that, this time, the heroine gets to kill all her attackers. The film was also labeled anti-American, because that's today's fragrance. But Von Trier is mainly a cinema experimentalist, and Dogville is another of his clever ideas stretched to the breaking point. He resolved to make a movie with no sets, just the floor outline of the town's homes and stores, with empty door frames that slam after people have walked through them. It's a great notion for about 10 minutes, but not for the movie's current running (ambling) time of three hours. Despite the devout exertions of Kidman and a fine cast, Dogville plays like the read-through of a potentially fascinating play. Now Von Trier should go ahead and make the movie.

Elephant is a loose remake of Alan Clarke's 1989 bbc film about gunmen in Belfast. Van Sant takes the notion of civilians as target practice and transposes it to America. Most of the film describes, with no special urgency, a typical day at a generic high school: a blond boy arriving late because he has been caring for his alcoholic father; an athlete and his pretty girlfriend planning their social calendar; two other lads arming themselves for their own private Armageddon.

And then the shooting starts — a replay of the 1999 Columbine High School massacre in the U.S. The film's lyrical pseudo documentary style now lurches into horror-movie mode. The two killers stalk their prey down the bright corridors as efficiently and implacably as any Jason or Freddy. They are monsters of the id — our worst nightmare. Not America's: humanity's.