Three women walk along the Croisette during the 58th international Cannes film festival. Photograph: Mark Mainz/Getty Images
Xan Brooks, editor of Guardian Unlimited Film
Day one of the Cannes film festival is a blur of security checks, coloured press passes and disorderly queuing.
Staggering down the steps of the Palais, I'm accosted by a pair of pollsters who want to know my tip for the Palme d'Or. They might as well be asking for my tip for the Christmas number one in Bolivia; so far today I've seen nothing but accreditation forms and security guards. My head is spinning and the sun's in my eyes. I tell them that Lemming will win the Cannes Palme d'Or.
In tipping Lemming, of course, I'm merely acting like one myself.
Dominik Moll's dark domestic thriller is the festival's opening night movie and is naturally on everyone's mind right now. The online betting site bodog.com has duly installed it as the 2/1 favourite, ahead of Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers and David Cronenberg's A History of Violence at 3/1.
This year's jury is headed by that swaggering Bosnian blowhard Emir Kusturica (who's never been shy about his contempt for Hollywood) and the word on the Croisette is that the Palme d'Or is unlikely to go to an American picture. Lemming is French and has a positive buzz about it. All things considered, it seems as safe a bet as any.
And yet the Palme d'Or is only one aspect of the Cannes film festival. Down near the waterfront, we wander through a vast trade fair where production companies from all over the world stand cheek-by-jowl and tout their produce for the passersby (presumably they're expecting Harvey Weinstein to mosey past on his way to the loo). Intriguingly, many of their stalls are decorated with posters for films that don't exist and probably never will - lurid, hand-painted portraits of monster crocodiles and imperilled damsels in the buff. I'd quite like to see these movies. They look brash, energetic and oddly innocent.
Instead I follow the herd and see Lemming, and come away mildly disappointed. I was a big fan of Moll's last film - Harry, He's Here to Help - and this has some great moments too. Lemming unfolds as an icy tale of middle-class despair and the death of love, boasting a pair of flammable performances from Charlotte Gainsbourg and Charlotte Rampling and a dank atmosphere that blends Hitchcock's Vertigo with the first section of David Lynch's Lost Highway. But in the end it doesn't quite work, can't decide where to go next, and the ending just melts into fudge.
Outside the Palais, the pollsters were waiting. This time I tip Lars von Trier's Manderlay.
More about Cannes 2005 on Guardian Unlimited Film.
