Glamour, politics and a geeky movie as Cannes film fest returns

The Cannes film festival opens later Tuesday and is already stirring up its usual heady mix of glamour, politics and controversy, with an eccentric opening movie to boot.

The world's biggest film festival fell victim to the pandemic in 2020, and although stars will be allowed to go maskless on the red carpet this year, a health pass is required to enter, and there will be fewer glitzy parties.

"Covid is still there, but being here in the opening film ... it's a huge sense of relief and excitement," US actor Adam Driver told AFP.

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Driver kickstarts the festival co-starring with French actress Marion Cotillard in Annette, a musical directed by cult favourite Leos Carax.

The main jury is headed for the first time by a black person, US director Spike Lee, who quickly set a political tone.

"This world is run by gangsters," Lee said in response to an emotional appeal from a Georgian journalist who spoke about a recent crackdown on a Pride celebration in her country, which she blamed on Russian influence.

Lee also stuck the knife into Donald Trump, who he calls "Agent Orange", and sported a cap reading "1619", referring to the year in which the first slaves arrived in the Americas.

"Agent Orange, this guy in Brazil (President Jair Bolsonaro), and Putin are gangsters. They have no morals, no scruples. That's the world we live in. We have to speak out against gangsters like that," Lee said.

The festival palace -- a squat, concrete construction dubbed "the bunker" -- is draped in a poster featuring Lee, in oversize spectacles, peering between two palm trees.

His jury this year has a female majority, including US star Maggie Gyllenhaal, Canadian-French singer Mylene Farmer and French-Senegalese director Mati Diop.

As evening falls, stars will strut down the recycled red carpet, which has been cut down in size as part of a green makeover.

American actor and director Jodie Foster will officially open the festival and will later be awarded an honorary Palme d'Or.

Annette tells the story of a celebrity couple and their mysterious child, the titular Annette.

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The film brings together the supremely gifted and the socially awkward as the stars sing their way through a story that began as an idea by Ron and Russell Mael, the eccentric Los Angeles pop duo known as the Sparks.

They brought Annette to Carax after meeting him at Cannes in 2013.

The result is a rock opera with musical styles ranging from danceable electro to classically inspired lyrical passages.

The stars do most of their own singing which, Cotillard told AFP, required "a major preparation effort in a very limited time."

Her co-star Driver famously hates watching himself on screen, and said the musical will be no exception.

"My plan is to go in and when the lights go down, I run," Driver told AFP.

He said he would try to find an empty office and sit out the screening while "playing with staplers" and making phone calls.

Describing his usual technique, he said "then I go back, and when the lights come up, I stand up, I pretend that I was there the whole time."

This year, 24 films will compete for the festival's top prize, the Palme d'Or.

The directors vying for glory include such perennial Cannes favourites as Italy's Nanni Moretti with his new film Tre Piani, France's Jacques Audiard (Les Olympiades) and Thailand's master of the slow burn, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, with his English-language debut (Memoria).

Other contenders include Sean Penn, whose Africa-based humanitarian love story The Last Face bombed at Cannes in 2016; Iran's two-time Oscar winner Asghar Farhadi; and Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov, who is barred from leaving the country due to an embezzlement conviction widely seen as punishment for his criticism of President Vladimir Putin.

With just four female directors in the competition, the festival's tendency to pick the usual (male) suspects of the arthouse elite is once again under scrutiny.

Only one woman has won the Palme d'Or in 73 editions of the festival -- Jane Campion for The Piano in 1993.