Festivals: Fine Art & Flapdoodle

Eighteen-year-old Brigitte Bardot made her first splash there in a bikini, wiggling her way into the hearts of photographers; Simone Signoret's smoldering stare set the place afire back in 1949; Sophia Loren jumped from bulging starlet to blossoming actress when she made the scene in 1955. Ever since it began, the Cannes Film Festival has been a springboard for victory and vulgarity, for fine art and flapdoodle. This year the festival is 20 years old, but it is still deep in the throes of adolescence: serious and intense one moment, strained and silly the next.

With good reason. The official competition, which ends late this week, involves only 24 full-length pictures this year; but in the back streets marches the Marché du Film (Film Market), where 160 movies compete for the attention of foreign distributors and critics. The competition is stifling, the pressure unbearable. The performers, the publicists, even the audiences feel it, and the antics become even more frantic than before.

Animal Butchery. Jean Genet, France's existential sensualist, joined forces with Director Tony Richardson and Actress Jeanne Moreau, a festival favorite, to produce Mademoiselle, a story of Sodom in the suburbs. It should have been a festival favorite too; instead it got soundly, roundly booed, possibly because Moreau overworks her villainy. The film is rife with animal butchery and exotic sexuality. Sniffed one critic: "Maybe we didn't know that licking the nose of a gentleman in the moonlight constituted eroticism . . . but did we really have to know it?"

Orson Welles, looking puffy, overblown and overweight, exhibited Chimes and Midnight, a lively film that he directed and wrote with the help of William Shakespeare, who supplied the chief character: Falstaff, played by Welles. Through the centuries, most actors have had to stuff padding under their tights to play the renowned clown. Welles, at 51, remains unique; he is probably the first actor in history who appears too fat for the role.

Another talked-about film was Un Homme et Une Femme, a modest story of a simple love affair between a young widow (Anouk Aimée) and a racing-car driver (Jean-Louis Trintignant). New Wave Director Claude Lelouch, 28, shot the picture in four weeks, at one point had himself strapped with his camera to the hood of a speeding car to get realistic footage of the races. The crusty critics even applauded during the showing, rated the film as an homme-dinger, a top contender for the festival's first prize, the Golden Palm.

Hot & Blue Blood. Two films shared the Itching Palm for overpromotion: Alfie and Caroline Chérie. Alfie, the story of a cockney-of-the-walk starring Michael Caine (The Ipcress File), was advertised widely at the airport with signs that read ALFIE is ROCKING, ALFIE IS TERRIFIC, ALFIE IS THE MOST. "It really isn't vulgar, is it?" asked a French critic as he watched the signs walking. "After all, the print is very small." And so it was. In fact, when the models in tight stretch pants sat down, nobody could see their ads at all.