Cannes Do: Shiny Happy People

ONE WOULD THINK the last thing Cannes needs is more star power, but after looking at the sweaty backs of critics' heads for seven hours a day, the sight of some scrubbed, upright, nice-smelling (if one can get that close) pretty people would be as welcome as an elusive breath of fresh air.

During his very first Cannes, my Award Winning Film Critic Companion had a classic sighting: Paris Hilton, posing skankily for a circle of photographers. Of course, she couldn't make it this year. (Paris confinee!, one headline screamed. "It's like Camus," muttered a friend. "The senseless cruelty of an absurd universe — that's hot.") We did see Leonardo DiCaprio coming out of a press conference for his universally loathed/ignored "The 11th Hour," and he's the very last thing I expected him to be: tall. I mean, he's not going to dunk more baskets than Tim Robbins, but dude's a six-footer. Catherine Deneuve, whom I'd seen before, is tiny, with the requisite movie-star big head — Leo's is almost football-shaped. She was at the screening of "Persepolis," but French screen legend Danielle Darrieux, who voices the main character's grandmother, was not, helas.

On our last full day, we hung around the exit of a press conference for Chang-Dong Lee's "Secret Sunshine" in order to get a glimpse of South Korean movie star Kang-ho Song, whose work is a current obsession. He's tall, too, and was rocking carelessly spiky hair, and he smiled and waved vaguely into the crowd near me. Good enough. We walked away beaming. "We actually saw him!"

So the book-making on the winners is heating up; everyone has an opinion. Almost the same opinion. The lead was pretty much tied between "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days" (the Romanian abortion movie — sorry, but it's faster) and the Coen brothers' "No Country for Old Men." Then Tuesday dawned, and Julian Schnabel queered the deal with his luminous, painterly, unsentimental "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly." It's an adaptation of the book by former French Elle editor Jean-Dominique Bauby, who suffered a massive stroke and was left completely lucid but physically frozen. He dictated the memoir by blinking his left eyelid, and this process is presented as both poetic and tedious. Bauby died 10 days after the book's publication, but Schnabel pays him even-handed homage by presenting the roguish, healthy Bauby as rather a selfish jerk who pleased neither his wife nor his mistress and thought such a trauma could not happen to him because he was too cool for it.

He's no suffering hero, either, stuck in the sarcophagus of his own skin, making by turns wry, foolish, self-pitying, randy remarks in his head while a battalion of lovely women eases his final work of art to fruition. As for Schnabel's own latest work of art, the film is beautifully situated to take home the Palme d'Or — its subject is serious, the director American but well-regarded, and the movie is in French and set in France in a year very light on French entries.

» UPSIDE-DOWN AND INSIDE-OUT:
The French still like Abel Ferrara, and I still don't, so we have a nice free morning until the screening of Harmony Korine's "Mister Lonely." The premise is so unbelievably annoying, the possibility of a decent film emerging is vanishingly small: A Michael Jackson impersonator (Diego Luna) down and out in Paris meets a Marilyn Monroe impersonator (Samantha Morton), who tells him about a retreat in the Scottish Highlands, where he can feel normal. He goes there with her and meets her French bully of a husband, who "lives as" Charlie Chaplin, their daughter, Shirley Temple, a Sammy Davis Jr., a foulmouthed Abe Lincoln, the Three Stooges, Little Red Riding Hood. Mm-hm; there's more. Intercut with this story is a lyrical fantasia about nuns leaping out of an airplane, aloft on faith alone. Werner Herzog is involved. This all seems normal while it's happening.

OK, so it's Korine's rehab parable, and I'm glad for his health's sake that he's renounced hanging out with freaks and hiding behind a mask and indulging in a pastime both riveting and pointless and whatever other metaphors his script conjures. And I'm glad his directorial bad-boyisms have withered as well, because "Mister Lonely" is a very sweet-natured movie — tolerant and generous and bristling with pretty good jokes. The climax is an inversion of Tod Browning's "Freaks" as effective as, if more sentimental than, the original. It's not for everyone, but it's for someone, which is more than anyone can say for the wretched "Gummo," and if that boy stays right, he might grow up and make a movie someday.

The next day, entirely by accident, is perfect. For reasons I no longer have mental access to, we skip the new film by Fatih Akin, which makes me grumpy when I realize he's the director of the raved-about "Head On." We line up for "Persepolis," the animated film of Marjane Satrapi's graphic novel about growing up in Tehran in a family of sophisticates during the Iran-Iraq war. We are shut out of that screening — the second one! Why didn't you jerks see it yesterday?! God! — and realize we can just make it to the Lumiere, the big, red-carpet theater, in time for a public screening of Bela Tarr's "The Man From London." And that's when my day got good.

Adapted from a Georges Simenon story, "The Man From London" is like "No Country for Old Men" turned upside-down and shaken until all the change falls out of its pockets. It has an action-movie premise (man witnesses a murder, finds a suitcase full of money), an action-movie cast of characters (creepy, dogged detective; willful daughter; skulking murderer) and no action. It's all drama — 2-plus hours of it in meltingly gorgeous long takes that invite you at first to look, then to see, then to enter into the almost-still image on the screen, to hear the concerto or the waves on the beach, to sear your retinas with the play of light and dark, to admire a window, a chair, the bow of a boat, steam in the night sky, a man dancing with a billiard ball on his forehead. Yes, it sounds like the kind of "foreign movie" that got mocked in the '70s, but it feels like a slow, revelatory walk across the surface of the moon. Tarr's "Satantango" is seven hours long; I can't wait to rent it when I get home.

"Persepolis" is less edgy than expected, but beautifully animated in flowing, cinematic manner it doesn't feel like a cartoon. It tracks the entire sequence of Satrapi's memoirs, from her childhood in Iran to her teenage rebellion in Vienna, where she grows guilty and nostalgic and heads home, assuming the veil once again. Finally, she exiles herself to Paris where she feels free, in the Western sense, and at the same time tugged mightily by the line cast directly into her heart by her home country. Lovely, charming, occasionally harrowing, "Persepolis" is a valuable step forward in validating the animated film for festivals such as Cannes, where "The Triplets of Belleville" caused such a well-deserved splash in 2003.

The workday ends with Lee's "Secret Sunshine," and we, hardcore and vocal Kang-ho Song fans well aware of Lee's reputation (for the gangster flick "Green Fish" and the time-travel flick "Peppermint Candy") imagine will attract a rabid, shoving crowd. But the end of the festival is nearing, and even directors from South Korea, where the future of film lies waiting, don't get the kind of buzz something like "Ocean's 13" does. Tant pis, because this nearly two-and-a-half-hour movie does not contain one extraneous minute in its contemplation of one of the screen's most complicated characters: young mother and piano teacher Shin-ae Lee (Do-yeon Jeon) who moves to the crummy third-tier city of Miryang after her husband's death. It's hard to explain what happens next: she meets a kindly mechanic (Song), who follows her around like a spaniel, loses something unbelievably precious to her, gets religion, makes a spectacle of herself and even harder to convey the matter-of-fact tone, the humor and weariness and pain in this extraordinary film.

One more day: Oh God I don't ever want to do this again. I mean, Oh God please let me come back next year.

Photo by M.J. Kim/Getty Images and Anne-Christine Poujoulat/Getty Images