Cannes: Gatsby takes lead at opulent film festival

Posters for the film 'The Great Gatsby' outside the Carlton Hotel, Cannes. Picture: Reuters

The decision by the world’s glitziest film festival to open its 2013 edition with Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby – in 3D, naturally – might have been a stroke of genius. After all, what could be better in these days of enforced belt-tightening than a tale (at least as written by F Scott Fitzgerald) that immerses us in its 1920s protagonist’s hedonism and wealth while simultaneously exposing the hollowness of the era’s decadence?

Were the organisers of the 66th Cannes Film Festival, which doesn’t exactly want for decadence itself, being self-aware? Ironic? Possibly. What can be said is that by raising the curtain yesterday with a film which had something for the 99 per cent and the 1 per cent, they were, at the very least, having their cake and eating it.

Speaking of decadence, a gobsmacking story in the Hollywood Reporter recently revealed the staggering sums of money that can be made by the sex workers who come to Cannes to service wealthy punters in the town’s luxury hotels and on extravagantly-priced yachts. According to Elie Nahas, a Lebanese businessman who used to work for Moatessem Gadhafi, the son of Muammar Gadhafi, and who was arrested in 2007 for running a Cannes prostitution ring, some “can make up to $40,000 a night. Arabs are the most generous people in the world. If they like you, they will give you a lot of money. At Cannes, they carry money around in wads of e10,000. To them, it’s just like paper. They don’t even like to count it. They’ll just hand it to the girls without thinking. I know the system.”

In some ways, the pole-position placement of the lavish Great Gatsby can be seen as the festival metaphorically setting out its stall. Despite the economic chill across most of Europe, this year’s Cannes looks like a particularly rich affair, full of dazzling treasures.

It should certainly be a vintage year for the star spotters who fanatically line the resort’s main esplanade, the Croisette, to watch the thrice-daily ritual of the film industry’s crème de la creme ascending the red-carpeted (apparently, there’s 60 metres of the stuff) steps of the Grand Palais for premieres and gala screenings. Indeed, the International Jury alone includes Steven Spielberg, taking on the role of president (he doesn’t just make movies about them, you know), Nicole Kidman, Christoph Waltz, Ang Lee, and, fresh from the Jane Got a Gun debacle, Lynne Ramsay. They are an eclectic bunch, and whether this will result in a shock winner of the festival’s top award, the Palme d’Or, or a compromise around a safe bet, time will tell.

Whoever the winner is, it won’t be a British film. While Ken Loach competed for the prize in 2012, with the good-natured, Glasgow-set whisky heist movie The Angels’ Share, this year there is not a single British film among the 20 titles selected for the main event. This is not to say homegrown talent isn’t being represented on the Riviera. On the contrary, Stephen Frears’s HBO drama, Muhammad Ali’s Greatest Fight, about the poetic pugilist’s refusal to go to Vietnam following his conversion to Islam, will screen out of competition; Clio Barnard, director of The Arbor, will unveil her second feature, The Selfish Giant – an updating of Oscar Wilde’s fairytale – in Director’s Fortnight; and For Those in Peril, the debut feature from Scotland’s Paul Wright, will unspool in Critics’ Week.

So, aside from no Brits, what can we expect from the competition? Blood, for a start, if Ryan Gosling’s claim that revenge thriller Only God Forgives, his second collaboration with the Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn, is more violent than their first one, Drive. Gosling’s appearance on the Croisette could be his last for a while in his capacity as actor, as he recently announced plans to take a break in order to regain “perspective” and “reassess why I’m doing it and how I’m doing it”. Meanwhile, he is letting his creative juices flow in another direction by going behind the camera for the first time, as the director of How to Catch a Monster, starring Mad Men redhead Christina Hendricks and Gosling’s real-life girlfriend, Eva Mendes.

Controversy is never far away in Cannes, and this year’s could come from Roman Polanski, who will be in town with his film version of David Ives’ 2010 off-Broadway play, Venus in Fur, in which an actress tries to convince a theatre director that she is perfect for the lead in his adaptation of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s eponymous novel – the inspiration for the term masochism. Mathieu Almaric and Polanski’s wife, Emmanuelle Seigneur, star in what sounds like a return to ground covered by the filmmaker in Death and the Maiden and Bitter Moon. Definitely one to watch.

Other competition highlights include: the return of the Coen brothers with Inside Llewyn Davis, a film set in New York’s folk music scene in the 1960s; Steven Soderbergh’s Behind the Candelabra, about the six-year relationship between Liberace and Scott Thorson, played by Michael Douglas and Matt Damon respectively; The Past, Iranian director Asghar Farhadi’s follow-up to his Oscar-winning drama, The Separation, and Alexander Payne’s latest road trip, Nebraska.

As if the main competition weren’t exciting enough – at least on paper – there are more potential gems aplenty in the sidebar sections, too, including Sofia Coppola’s latest, The Bling Ring, starring Emma Watson; The Congress, Ari Folman’s live-action/animation combo follow-up to Waltz with Bashir; Claire Denis’s The Bastards, and Max Rose, a new film starring comedy veteran Jerry Lewis. Anyone looking for more weighty fare won’t have to look much further than Claude Lanzmann’s documentary, The Last of the Unjust, constructed around an unused interview conducted for Shoah.

With such a wealth of talent in its programme, the 66th Cannes Film Festival could turn out to be a vintage year. On the other hand, as Shakespeare warned us and Gatsby discovers, all that glitters is not gold. We will know for sure when the curtain comes down on 26 May.

• The 66th Cannes Film Festival runs until 26 May. Stephen Applebaum will be tweeting from the festival at @grubstreetsteve