Still making waves by the fake sea

CANNES

Kieron Corless and Chris Darke

Faber & Faber, £14.99

FOR years I have been trying to change people's opinions about the Cannes Film Festival. I've been going to it for 16 years now, and every time, friends tell me how lucky I am and how glamorous it must be. So fixed in the popular mind is the image of palm trees, bikini beauties, movie stars and champagne receptions that no matter how much I talk about it as an oppressive ordeal, the image remains.

Cannes is an idée fixe and so impervious to truth. The thought of the Cote d'Azur and Hollywood coming together once a year in double-deckered lustre is so sexy and escapist that we don't want to hear that, in fact, it's not really like that.

Get there a day before the festival starts, as I usually do, and you see whole gardens arriving on the back of trucks. To spend 10 days at the festival is to live in the dark of cinema auditoria, not Riviera sunshine. Seeing 40 films in such a period is an intense mental experience, far from the bodily sensuality that many associate with Cannes. The town itself was the creation of the Scots-born Henry Brougham, co-founder of the Edinburgh Review, who bought land in what until that point was a fishing village, in 1834.

My counter-truths are, of course, partial. As the authors of Cannes: Inside The World's Premier Film Festival understand, the reality of Cannes combines glamour and anti-glamour. Corless and Darke capture well the festival's origins, as a counter to Mussolini's film festival in Venice. There was idealism in this founding impulse to express the free optimism of the victorious Allies, but commerce too. The month of May was chosen, after much lobbying of politicians by powerful hoteliers, to extend the tourist season, an issue as relevant to Scottish festivals today as it was in France then.

America helped rescue France economically after the war but insisted, in the Blum-Byrnes Accord signed between the two countries, that in return France removed most of its film quotas, thereby giving the US access to the massive cinephile French movie market. With such agreements in place, Hollywood happily shipped its galaxy of stars to Cannes. Kirk Douglas in his swimming trunks was snapped on the beach outside the famous Carlton Hotel with the young, gorgeous Brigitte Bardot. Robert Mitchum was photographed with a topless starlet. The arranged marriage between Hollywood and the Riviera started to work. The glamour caught the imagination of the world.

Such stories have been told before, but what makes this book stand out is Corless and Darke's determination to assess their significance. They ask whether Cannes matters, and if so, how. They find their answers in detailed accounts of its controversies and changes. They show how the jeers after the screening of Antonioni's L'Avventura (The Adventure) in the 1960s helped create a taste for a new type of cinema. They describe how the festival came to be abandoned in 1968 as a result of the student protests. They reveal how the stooshie caused by the film La Maman Et La Putain (The Mother And The Whore) in 1973 signalled an end to 1960s idealism. They chart with acuity how Cannes has responded to the media age and the darkening of the US-French cinematic love affair in the 1980s and since.

Cannes is directionless at times, like the festival it charts. The authors claim that they have written a "counter history", which they have not. They do not challenge the idea that Cannes is central to world cinema, that it has, over the years, created a canon, anointed auteurs and worshipped stars. Rather, they have done something far more valuable. They have shown how it did these things, and why. Cannes gets as much media coverage as the Oscars, yet its idée fixe is far more interesting because, unlike the Academy Awards, it has consistently defended the idea that cinema is art.

That's why, despite the dog shit, the fake sea, the kitsch and hassle, I go. Cannes sometimes gets things very wrong - insiders tell me that they rejected the German film The Lives Of Others, one of the greatest films of recent years - but as I write, they have just announced this year's line-up. New films by Alexander Sokurov, the Coen brothers, Wong Kar-wai, Fatih Akin, Béla Tarr and Gus Van Sant. How exciting is that? v