Acid House, glam rock, the beautiful and the damned

by JOANNE LATIMER

At Cannes, you're either with the Blues Brothers or you're a Trainspotting mate. The competing aesthetic around the Croisette is a laughable clash of Swinging London and Animal House. While B.B. King played "Let the Good Times Roll" to a riotous crowd at the Palm Beach blowout for Dan Aykroyd and John Goodman, stylish folks with shaggy hair mugged outside the screening of the latest Irvine Welsh adaptation, The Acid House, talking about how DJ Goldie is starring in a gangster film that is shooting on the Isle of Man this summer.

Like Trainspotting, The Acid House has Ewen Bremner on board and a critical eye for the mean streets of Scotland. The soundtrack--with Oasis, The Verve, the Chemical Brothers and Nick Cave can't be ignored, like the requisite commingling of football loyalties and religion. The other Ewan--Ewan McGregor--has painted his nails and dyed his hair for Velvet Goldmine, an anthem to 1970s glam rock in the U.K. Todd Haynes (Safe) directs this competition entry. Haynes' story sends a New York reporter (who else?) abroad to write about the anniversary of the staged assassination of a fallen glam king.

As Scottish and football-centric as The Acid House is Ken Loach's My Name Is Joe--a front-runner for the Palme d'Or. And Peter Mullan is in the lead for Best Actor playing Joe, a reformed alcoholic who gets wrapped up with his old gang while repaying a favour. In his kilt, a ball cap and white dinner jacket, Mullan isn't afraid of a few pints at the British Pavillion. "Lass, I'm only [at Cannes] to see if anyone has tickets to the Scotland­Brazil game," he deadpanned, avoiding an easy plug for his own Glaswegian film at Cannes, titled Orphans. "Football fills a space in people's lives. There's a class of people who lost out with the victory of the so-called New Labour Party. It created a cosmetic hope. And there's absolutely no 'official' talk about unemployment effecting the drug issue."

Aside from the government's interest in pumping up the film community, can Tony Blair really change the economy? "Finally, a humorous question!" teased Loach, relaxed and professorial. "He has announced that his party is the party for business interests. The huge disparity between the rich and poor that existed under Thatcher will remain. Now there's a vacuum on the left."

Don't get Loach started on Blair, or Mike Leigh. They're good friends, but he's sick of being confused with Leigh along the Croisette. "I don't get it," said Loach. "He's a dear colleague, but we work in very different ways. He is known for improvisation. My actors get the script only one day at a time." Another famous flub around town this year is the Nanni Moretti­Roberto Benigni confusion. Both Italian funnymen have films up for the Palme d'Or.

There the similarity ends. Moretti's latest instalment in his cinematic diary is called April, a neurotic tale of joy about the birth of his first son. Don't expect to see much of the mother, and you'll like it fine. Benigni's film is, believe it or not, about the Holocaust. The poster calls Life Is Beautiful a fable, defensively, and a journalist at the press conference stood up and said he was scandalised by the clownery in Benigni's film.

"It's not a comic film," explained the visibly shaken director/actor. "I'm a comic making a tragic film. This is not a farce about concentration camps. I avoided parody, but comedy and tragedy can reach the same heights. I'm not a Jew--I don't have that honour--but I think I understand tragedy." I'll say. Life Is Beautiful, with Benigni-regular and wife Nicoletta Braschi, earned applause, laughs and tears, as Benigni's character used his imagination to distract his son from the horrors of camp life. Life has a romantic scene in the rain that shames all others.

While we're in the domain of shame, Cannes has acquired none in the last 51 years. A 600-square-foot billboard for Armageddon ticks down the minutes until its release, and some robot-like animals are grazing on the hotel lawns in aid of Dr. Dolittle. The Croisette is blanketed with 40,000 long-stemmed roses from Colombia--the country, that is--to promote its first film in competition, and a 50-foot banner for Godzilla is swathed across the Carlton Hotel. Raw desperation surrounds the acquisition of party tickets, and excitement mounts over anything to do with Bruce Willis and Johnny Depp.

"Jaaw-nee, Jaaaw-nee," chanted the mob waiting for Mr. Depp to ascend the famous staircase into the Palais for a screening of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a tedious film taking up space in the official competition. He showed 25 minutes late and had to stumble for his seat in the dark.

Depp was chatty and distracted by his moustache during the press conference. In jeans and a black T-shirt, tattoos showing, he recalled his first meeting with Hunter S. Thompson: "It was Christmas and I was in Aspen with my girl in '95, waiting for Hunter in a bar. He came in, with an electric cattle prod--it was on. He was swinging it and hit me in the head. Then we went to his house, and we built a bomb in the kitchen. Then we took it outside and I fired at it with a shotgun. BAM! There was a 15-foot fireball. Bill Murray called to warn me about Hunter." Depp moved into Thompson's basement for five days, and was alarmed to find that he was sleeping, and smoking, next to a keg of gunpowder.

Co-star Benicio Del Toro, trim again after pigging out for his part, was agitated and wiping his nose maniacally while Depp spoke. Noticing, Depp looked over and said, "On set we called him the Great Puerto Rican Buddha!"

Expectations were dashed by Paul Auster's constipated film, Lulu on the Bridge, and by John Boorman's The General, a sentimental ode to a gangster that stars every member of the new Irish Brat Pack. Bets for the Palme d'Or are now shifting to Manoel de Oliveira's Inquietude, but hushed tones of deferential preference are still reserved for Lars Von Trier's Les Idiots. The poster calls it a film "About idiots, by idiots, for idiots." Von Trier, terrified of flying, is visiting Cannes this year, and the scramble for screening tickets is obscene. The only thing more single-minded is the speculation over the arrival of Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon--either of whom will be thrown the keys to the Palais.