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Anyone who doubts that the movie industry is still partly a handshake business had only to watch the glad-handing, backslapping and double-cheek air-kissing at the Vanity Fair-Gucci party at the Hôtel du Cap on Saturday night. This is where, some 30 minutes by private car or pricey taxi from Cannes, you could find after midnight the likes of Jeff Skoll, the first president of eBay and the founder of the busy company Participant Media, remeeting and greeting the likes of Michael Barker, who with Tom Bernard runs Sony Pictures Classics and who could later be seen in an intense tête-à -tête with the director Brett Ratner.And what did the director of Rush Hour 3 (Ratner) and the distributor of Michael Haneke's White Ribbon (Barker) have to talk about? "He wanted," Barker said later of Ratner, "to know what the parameters for doing a deal with us on a lower-budget film would be. It's not him as a director, but him as a producer. He's spreading his wings in the film business on a number of projects."The hotel, the onetime playground of the Duke and the Duchess of Windsor, remains a favorite of moguls, models and junketing movie companies, even if their numbers have declined along with those of the news media. No matter how hopeful the headlines, the global economic crisis has already shaped up as one of the defining stories at this year's Cannes Film Festival. Its effects are evident both in empty theatre seats and on-screen with a movie like Inside Job, a documentary about the crisis from Charles Ferguson, another dot-com entrepreneur turned moviemaker.Financed by Sony Pictures Classics, which plans to release it in the fall, Inside Job lays out its essential argument, convincingly, that the 2008 meltdown was avoidable. As Matt Damon's voiceover guides us through the past decade, Ferguson mixes charts, television clips, still photos and newspaper headlines fluidly with star interviews (George Soros, Eliot Spitzer) and some choice words from less familiar faces, including a brothel madam and a therapist who each catered to Wall Street in the bubble years.It's too bad that the outrage that fuels Inside Job is nowhere evident in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, Oliver Stone's limp follow-up to his 1987 film, Wall Street. So far the big-ticket names have failed to impress, with Ridley Scott receiving a thrashing for Robin Hood and Woody Allen not faring any better with You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, his multi-strand trifle about vexed relationships.With few exceptions, the competition, meanwhile, has yet to catch fire, leading critics to wonder if the festival customised a generally mainstream slate for this year's jury, headed by Tim Burton. So far the most enthusiastically embraced competition entry has been Mike Leigh's Another Year. Set in contemporary London, it centres on Tom and Gerri, played by Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen, a happily married couple whose lives are marked by their seasonal visits to their garden.By Sunday evening the strongest competition film, at least for me, was the deceptively straightforward A Screaming Man, from the Chadian-born director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, a self-designated exile living in France. The story turns on a former swimming champion turned hotel pool man, Adam (Youssouf Djaoro), whose world collapses when he loses his job to his only son. The film was greeted warmly on Saturday after its first press screening and might make its way to the United States.The American marketplace is tough even for non-African filmmakers, as Cristi Puiu's critically lauded but commercially unsuccessful The Death of Mr Lazarescu showed a few years ago. On Friday Puiu was back at Cannes, again out of competition in Un Certain Regard, with Aurora, a slow-burning tour de force that transfixed critics for three hours. In Aurora, Puiu builds tension through absence, creating palpable unease through lingering silences and a dearth of heightened drama.
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