Sunny Cannes full of gloom, sex

CANNES, France — In my nearly 25 years of attending the Cannes Film Festival, there have always been years when spring rains and cloudy skies have put a disappointing damper on the excitement. But not this year!

The weather in this palm-filled city strung along the Mediterranean could not have been more ideal ... although the international filmfare at Cannes 2006 could hardly have been more gloomy.

The long and grueling opening-night film "The DaVinci Code" was not only greeted with boos and whistles when it ended but received the next morning the most uniformly scathing reviews I think I have ever read of a Cannes opener.

But even films that were better received often reflected something more unsettling about humanity than a plot with so many discoveries and contrivances that it was headache-inducing.

Many had to do with war, oppression and terrorism:

• The long, ongoing bloody dispute between the British and the Irish ("The Wind that Shakes the Barley").

• The young Moroccan and Algerian men who gave their lives in WWII for France, which refused to treat them as equals ("Days of Glory").

• The turmoil of the Romanians under Ceaucescu ("The Way I Spent the End of the World").

• The Argentines under a rapacious fascist military government ("Buenos Aires 1977").

• Innocent and untrained farm boys from Flanders sent off to an unnamed war from which almost no one returned ("Flanders").

• An American airliner falling in the hands of ruthless terrorists ("United 93").

• A female suicide bomber slipping quietly among unsuspecting passersby in the heart of New York City ("Day Night, Day Night").

• An Australian community turning against four fishermen who took too long in reporting a body found in a stream ("Jindabyne").

Ironically, the one film that could have had the whole French Revolution at its core — Sofia Coppola's "Marie Antoinette" — devoted little more than five minutes to that famous war. But other films made up for it:

• An old Mexican violinist smuggling bullets in his violin case to soldiers hiding in the woods ("The Violin").

• Anti-Franco civilians sneaking supplies to the revolutionaries hidden in the mountains ("Pan's Labyrinth").