The dark stuff: a still from Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days.
If one word is synonymous with Cannes, it is "glamour". The parties, the formal wear, the red carpet - all conspire to create what is known as the "Cannes experience", as fantastic and as unreal as Disneyland. Yet this year reality, knotty and distressing, keeps breaking in - both onscreen and off.
Just as literary critics noted the uniformly sombre tone of authors on Granta's recent Best of Young American Novelists list, the films in competition this year are an almost unrelievedly depressing lot. Cristian Mungiu's drama Four Months, Three Weeks And Two Days, by common consensus the finest competition entry (and thus far, the favourite for the Palme d'Or), offers not only an appropriately dismal snapshot of the final days of Ceausescu-era Romania, but depicts a purgatory where two girls, college roommates, must sell their bodies in order to secure one of them an abortion; we even get to see the terminated foetus. And Import Export, the latest feature from Austrian filmmaker Ulrich Seidel, amounted to little more than a meticulously composed, 135-minute reminder that not only is life unremittingly shit, but when you die, it's usually while wearing a nappy.
In bringing such determined downers to Cannes, directors like Seidel assume - by default, as it were - a lofty moral eminence, becoming in effect a kind of scold, aloof from (and by implication, superior to) the petty distractions of the Croisette. The tuxedo-clad wastrels on their yachts, the cocaine-addled Beautiful People behind the velvet ropes ... indeed, the whole dollars-and-cents thing that drives the industry. One can claim for oneself the principled stance of the artist - even as one's producers and sales agents shop for distribution deals with the ruthless hunger of car salesmen.
And all the while, underlining this is the fate of missing British infant Madeline McCann, news of whose plight has spread to the Cote d'Azur. Walking through the noise and clamour of the Market, one could glimpse, at odd, surprising moments, the child's face, staring out from one of the handbills that have littered the festival, stuck up on a pole or pinned to the side of a stand. ("Maybe they're advertising the movie," one friend quipped grimly.) There was even a flyer asking for the public's assistance, tipped into the pages of one of the major trade magazines.
And then, just when she seemed inescapable, last night saw the press screening of Secret Sunshine, the Competition entry by South Korea's Lee Chang-dong, in which a recently widowed woman turns to religion, following the kidnapping and murder of her young son.
It makes for a profoundly discomfiting experience, at least for those either sober or alert enough to notice it. A great deal of contemporary art gets its sizzle from the friction between the invented world and the real one, and film is no exception. But the gulf in this particular instance - between A-list cocktail parties on luxury cruisers and films about dead kids, between wannabe starlets tottering up the red carpet in borrowed Blahniks, and the face of a missing and possibly murdered three-year-old little girl - is proving altogether too strange and sad to ignore.
