Saturday Night Fever

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For a while, everything was so quiet. The first week or so of the 12-day Cannes Film Festival proceeded as sedately as a Riviera quilting bee. Nice little films from odd little countries made some brief impression on the 30,000 assembled producers, distributors and journalists, only to be filed away and forgotten. Celebrities of the high second rank -- France's Isabelle Adjani, Britain's Terence Stamp, China's Gong Li -- stopped by to promote their films and to underline, by their presence, the absence of any world- class megastars except for Clint Eastwood, who was serving as president of this year's festival jury. Even the weather, which brings more folks to this Cote d'Azur playground than cinephiles would care to admit, was only moderately fabulous. It appeared as if the 47th edition of the movie industry's biggest annual deal-fest would tiptoe into history with a sigh and a shrug.

Then BLAM!, the Wild Bunch hit town. On the festival's final Saturday, John Travolta, Bruce Willis, Samuel L. Jackson, Uma Thurman and other performers from the American thriller Pulp Fiction brought some big-time, macho-and- mayhem, Uzi-in-your-gut star quality to Cannes. Quentin Tarantino, who made the sanguinary Reservoir Dogs, wrote the script and directed the film at a hurtling pace, displaying a steely assurance in his storytelling and a gift for placing scary violence at unexpected moments. When the film was shown, it was as if Tarantino were telling Cannes, "O.K., nap time is over. Now, pay attention, and I'll show you how it's done. Here's why they're called moving pictures."

The 10-member jury, which included Catherine Deneuve and Kazuo Ishiguro (author of Remains of the Day), got the message. Happily infected with Saturday-night fever, it awarded Pulp Fiction the Palme d'Or as best among the 23 entries in competition. But the picture threw the international critics into a tizz. They weren't sure they should approve of a work of popular art so enjoyably and cleverly crafted; after a week studying the snail trails of European anomie and Third World angst, watching Pulp Fiction was like sneaking out of a final exam to go on a bender.

The truth is that until Pulp Fiction barged in, Cannes this year had no strong prize contenders. Instead, it presented a roundup of best directors' next-best films. The Chinese master Zhang Yimou sent To Live; the film, which spans 30 years of Maoist hard times, is beautifully observed and performed (the male lead, Ge You, won the Best Actor prize), but lacks the fiery power of Zhang's Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern. Nikita Mikhalkov intended his Burned by the Sun as a Russian Gone With the Wind, a story of country life amid the turmoil of tyranny, but it was meandering and cloying. As for Patrice Chereau's Queen Margot, an epic melodrama set in Huguenot times starring Adjani, it had Hollywood values galore: dark intrigue, plenty of body hacking and bodice ripping, and a budget of $25 million, France's largest ever. But the picture was a mess. That Zhang and Mikhalkov shared the second-place Grand Jury Prize was seen as the jury's amicable nod to two established directors. That Queen Margot won the thanks-for-coming Jury Prize was thought to reflect the clout of the panel's three French members.