Sundance to Sarajevo. Kenneth Turan

the pornographers, critics, hangers-on, the year's heroes, the year's failures.” It's where you need a press pass to get your press pass, and where those passes come in five hierarchical (and color-coded) levels of importance. Its official name is Festival International du Film, the International Film Festival, as if there were only one, so it's no surprise that, more than anything else, Cannes is big.

      Normally a city of 70,000, Cannes sees its population increase by 50 percent during the twelve days it functions as the stand-alone epicenter of the international film world. Producer David Puttnam calls it “one- 14 / Festivals with Business Agendas stop shopping,” the place where business and creative types and the people who write about them congregate. “I'm quite enjoying it,” Booker Prize-winning novelist A. S. Byatt told me on her first visit in 1995. “I'm a workaholic, and everyone here is too. It's a city full of them, frantically busy. Like the ant heap.”

      In a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, then, everyone is here from everywhere because everyone else is here as well, and where else are you going to run into all those people? The French pornography industry schedules its annual Hot d'Or awards to coincide with the festival, and a group of more than a hundred French railway workers/cinema enthusiasts show up annually to award the wonderfully named Rail d'Or to a deserving film. To take advantage of all this, the festival has become the world's largest yearly media event, a round-the-clock cinematic billboard that in 1999 attracted 3,893 journalists, 221 TV crews, and 118 radio stations representing 81 countries all told. And then there are the films. Don't ask about the films.

      For unlike most festivals, Cannes has a film market officially attached, where international buyers swoop in to view and possibly purchase the rights to something like six hundred films displayed in thousands of screenings in nearly thirty rooms. When you add in the nearly hundred films shown at the festival proper (which is actually more like three separate festivals competing against each other), what results is a cinematic triathlon so strenuous it even exhausts the man who put it together for twenty-three years, Gilles Jacob. When the festival is over, Jacob told me once, “I go home to Paris, and I talk to no one. Not my wife, not my children. No one.”

      But even saying all this doesn't truly capture Cannes, an experience Variety's Timothy M. Gray once characterized as not only impossible to describe to someone who's never been there but also “nearly impossible to describe to someone who has been there.” Because the halls of the headquarters Palais du Festival and the streets and beaches surrounding it are a circus with an infinite number of rings, anywhere you turn reveals something you can't quite believe you're seeing.

      On a day chosen at random near the end of the 2000 festival, several large TVs in the Palais were broadcasting Brian De Palma's press conference, where the Mission to Mars director was seen lashing out at a questioner who had the temerity to ask about aspects of “hommage” in his work. “It's that word again,” De Palma raged, literally pointing an accusatory finger at the unsuspecting miscreant. “It's been attached to me for forty years, and no one's been able to define it. What does it mean?”

      Escaping De Palma and the Palais, you nearly get run over by a roller-skating young woman simultaneously turning in circles and selling newspapers: “Nice-Matin, Nice-Matin,” she yells as the wheels grind. Turning away, you find your hand taken by a person in a giant Mickey Mouse costume who then pulls you within camera range of a man with a Polaroid who wants to be paid for the compromising photo of you and the Mouse he's about to take. Out of the corner of your eye you see a black-robed character, his face masked and hooded, nonchalantly walk by wearing a sandwich board advertising Demonium, a film few people have heard of and less care about.

      You try and move away, but two women from something called Pop.com, a Web site whose ultimate purpose is as darkly mysterious as Demonium, hand you a red balloon and a lollipop. On the beach, a crowd is forming, silently watching as a kneeling young woman gets a tattoo etched onto her shoulder. Pause for a moment to watch and two people brush past, loaded down like Sherpas with dozens of heavy plastic sacks on their shoulders. Each sack turns out to be a press kit for a film called Dead Babies, including, for those who've always wanted one, a Dead Babies travel toothbrush.

      With scenes like this all around, is it any wonder that the appearance of “bad boy Dennis Rodman” to promote a film called Cutaway at a party featuring “a laser show, go-go cages, ribaldry, revelry and European and U.S. DJs” causes hardly a ripple?

      For many film people, a first trip to Cannes is kind of a grail, a culmination that tells you, whether you're a journalist with a computer or a filmmaker walking up the celebrated red carpet to the Palais du Festival for an evening-dress only screening, that you've arrived. For me, paradoxically, it was a beginning, the first dizzying, tantalizing glimpse of a chaotic world I wanted to be part of but wasn't sure had room for me.

      Cannes was celebrating its twenty-fifth festival when I first covered it in 1971 as a not-much-older reporter for the Washington Post. Though the event had strayed from its stated goal of being “a festival of cinematographic art, from which all extracinematic preoccupations would be excluded,” it was even then a terribly exciting place to be.

      Hardly any Americans made the trip in those days, and I was rewarded with a room in a smart hotel called the Gonnet located on the Boulevard de la Croisette, the city's trademark oceanfront promenade, filled even then with crowds and crowd-pleasing eccentrics, like the elderly gentleman who pounded a cowbell and exclaimed in French, “Always the same films, always the same circus. Pollution, mental and physical pollution. Nothing, nothing, nothing.”

      The old festival Palais was a classic white building, small but elegant, and patrolled by a vigilant cadre of tuxedoed guards determined to evict gate crashers. I got my first taste of how surreal Cannes can be as I watched a well-dressed French interloper being almost choked to death as he was literally dragged out of the Palais by a pair of tuxedos. Yet he didn't lack the presence of mind to insist, as loudly as that chokehold would allow, “Un peu de politesse, s'il vous plait” — a bit of politeness, if you don't mind.

      Because U.S. reporters, even young ones, were a rare commodity, setting up interviews was easy and casual. I spent a rainy afternoon with Jack Nicholson, listening to him defend his directorial debut, Drive, He Said, which had been screened the night before to a wave of boos. And I talked to the great Italian director Luchino Visconti, who chuckled as he told me that his visa for an upcoming American visit didn't allow him to leave New York.

      “I don't know why they think I'm dangerous — maybe they think I want to kill Nixon,” he said puckishly. “I have no intention of doing any subversive actions. I don't want to kill Nixon, or even Mrs. Nixon. I just want to see the rest of the country. Write this in Washington; perhaps the president will read it.” I did; he didn't.

      I didn't get back to Cannes until 1976, and the crowds had not abated. It was at a late-night debut of Nagisa Oshima's In the Realm of the Senses, whose lurid story of mutual sexual obsession leading to castration had created a ferocious want-to-see, that I got the closest I've ever been to being crushed against a wall by a surging, expectant overflow crowd. Even Oshima's images seemed tame after that.

      That was also the year Taxi Driver won the Palme d'Or, and I watched, as surprised as he was, as youthful director Martin Scorcese got his first taste of how disconcertingly political European film journalism can be. Midway through the Taxi Driver press conference, a French journalist rose and referred to a scene between Robert De Niro's Travis Bickle and Jodie Foster's Iris where Travis talks about getting away from the city and spending some quiet time in the country.

      “Mr. Scorcese,” the journalist asked, “should we interpret that scene as Travis turning his back on bankrupt Western industrial capitalism and insisting on a more communal, socialist model for life in the future?” Scorcese looked truly, deeply baffled. “No,” he said finally. “Travis just wants to spend some time in the country.”

      That festival also gave me an insight into the thought patterns of actors, even actors turned director. Roman Polanski was in attendance with The Tenant, adapted from a novel by Roland Topor, which tells the story of a man who