Movie Marathon at Cannes

By RICHARD CORLISS

Two political films win prizes, but E.T. gets the cheers

The Indians," says a character in I Werner Herzog's epic movie Fitz-carraldo, "believe that the waking world is a fantasy from which we escape into our real life -- our dream life." Herzog should know: he was one of 35,000 dreamers at the 35th Cannes Film Festival. For 13 days on the cool but sunny Cote d'Azur, fantasies of art and avarice were spun with blithe disregard for events in the waking world outside. On the fac,ade of the town's posh Carlton Hotel, an electronic ticker tape mixed bulletins from the Malouines (Falklands) with screening schedules for the night's new films. While two movies about political prisoners --Costa-Gavras' Missing and a Turkish production, Yilmaz Gueney's Yol -- were winning the festival's top prize, the restaurants were abuzz with the latest news from Sophia Loren's pink-walled prison in Caserta near Naples. Comedy, melodrama, illusion 24 times per second. That's the name of the game in Cannes, on and off the screen.

The festival is one of the world's largest international gatherings. It is too large to satisfy the restless crowds and their hopes for great movies, big bucks or an invitation to the right party. And so there are three coexisting subfestivals. On the one hand, Cannes is a glutton's banquet of world cinema: some 350 movies unspooling at all hours in more than a dozen theaters. On the other, it is a showplace and marketplace for the industry's producers, distributors and exhibitors, from Hollywood moguls to Hong Kong porn merchants. And on the third hand -- the one in your pocket: Cannes also attracts Europe's most expert pickpockets -- the festival is a gilded airstrip for the jet set. The three groups can busy themselves 20 hours a day and rarely cross paths or interests.

In the 2,500-seat theater of the Palais des Festivals, where the two dozen official selections are shown, film buffs file in at 1 in the morning for Hans-Juergen Syberberg's rendering of Wagner's Parsifal. Nearly five hours later they stagger out into the dawn's hazy light, exhausted and exhilarated. In midafternoon, Menahem Golan, the Israeli producer who now heads his own distribution company, sits on a teeming Carlton terrace flanked by Stalin-era-size posters of his stars: Faye Dunaway, Robert Mitchum, Brooke Shields, Lou Ferrigno. "I have sold a million dollars in film rights each day at Cannes," Golan purrs, but "I did better last month at the American Film Market in Los Angeles." Night falls, and for the assiduous epicure, hopes rise: before long he may be amid sparkling silverware and sleek brown shoulders at a dinner party Harold Robbins is throwing for Pia Zadora, the star of a new movie made from his novel Lonely Lady--and one of the year's show-off starlets for photographers. The experiences of one party provide conversational fodder for the next. "Loved Inchon," said one professional gadfly the day after the $45 million movie financed by Sun Myung Moon premiered to near unanimous pans. "Inchon the movie?" asked an incredulous colleague. "No," the gadfly replied. "Inchon the dinner."

Where does that leave Cannes the movie festival? Still exciting after all these years. Fitzcarraldo, which stars Klaus Kinski as an Irish rubber baron who leaves his mistress, played by Claudia Cardinale, is a mystical trek through the Peruvian jungle that took four calamitous years out of Director Herzog's life and won him the best director prize. The official competition also boasted new films from Michelangelo Antonioni, Jerzy Sko-limowski and Jean-Luc Godard. Antonioni's Identification of a Woman is hypnotic and erotic, and it earned him the festival's special 35th-anniversary citation. The screenplay prize went to Skoli-mowski for Moonlighting, about four Poles in London building a new home for their boss back in Poland. With the help of Jeremy Irons as the foreman, Moonlighting proved how deft and poignant a Polish joke could be. Godard's film, Passion, turned out to have everything but. It focused on living tableaux of old paintings as the cast members of an imaginary film agitated for Polish Solidarity.

The co-winners of the Palme d'Or satisfied the byzantine demands of this United Nations of Cinema. Missing was made by a Greek director on location in Mexico for a major Hollywood studio, and as one caustic observer put it, "The film couldn't miss in Cannes: it was both American and anti-American." As for Yol, this slow, powerful study of six Turkish prisoners on a short leave to visit their families was "directed" by its author, Yilmaz Gueney, while he was being held in a Turkish jail on a murder charge that his supporters believe was politically motivated.

After the awards ceremony on closing night, the huge movie screen filled with the letters E.T., and 2,500 merchants and moviemakers became dreamers again. Steven Spielberg had brought his sci-fi romance to Cannes for its world premiere, and throughout the day he had loped down the Carlton corridors dodging the dozens of would-be interviewers, photographers and starlets, all cadging for a moment with the world's most successful director. In the Palais des Festivals he heard applause erupt throughout the screening and watched an audience of grim professionals laugh and cry after two weeks of wheeling and dealing. During the last minute of the film, the applause kept growing until the fadeout, when an exaltation of bravos enveloped Spielberg as if Pavarotti and not a 3-ft. 6-in. spaceman were ascending into the heavens. The Cannes elite, happy to see its convention end on a note of triumph, seemed ready to elect Spielberg President of France. --By Richard Corliss

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