Lights, camera, inaction

Ah, Cannes . . . big stars, brilliant films and glamorous parties. Unless you've got the wrong colour pass, that is. When novelist Howard Jacobson hit the Croisette all he found were desperate wannabe film-makers, gloomy Brits and porn stars. Still, he did get to see Jean-Claude Van Damme perform one of his special kicks

"I'll call you."

"You haven't got my number."

"I'll call you."

Yeah, yeah, and pigs might fly. After three days I'm beginning to get the message. People don't mean what they say here. Even the bow-tied paparazzo who drops to his knees and snaps me as I'm approaching the Palais des Festivals turns out not really to know who I am and hands me a card showing where I can buy the photo. Welcome to Cannes 2001, Festival of Slights.

Walking in off the street to a press conference at the Directors' Fortnight pavilion, I hear Lai Miu-Suet, director of Glass Tears, explaining to enthusiasts of Hong Kong cinema that "growing up is a very lonely process". Tell me about it. I'm wandering up and down the Croisette, that boulevard of tawdry dreams, trying to get an invitation to a party, any party, wearing a press badge of a sort no one has ever seen before and which allows me into any screening of any silent movie not in competition, provided no one else in Cannes, and that includes members of the gendarmerie, wants my seat.

The colour of your accreditation is everything here. There are rumours of once great and influential film critics reduced to the indignities of blue - for blue is lowly - and having to queue for films which in better times they wouldn't have been seen dead at. It doesn't matter to me; I'm not a film man. But social exclusiveness is another thing, and I'm not enjoying seeing the Playboy yacht bobbing on the bay, knowing I'm never going to get aboard. They sucker you in with illusions in this place, then leave you with none. Already I've been shown the door at one swanky beach party to which I'd originally been invited because the producers mistook me for someone else. The Coen brothers, presumably, since it's at the very moment they turn up that I'm turfed out.

There's a lot of mistaking going on. Tonight I am being tailed - if it's possible to be tailed by someone walking in front of you - by a small-faced Truffaut anti-hero in a striped blue and white seersucker suit. Every 20 yards or so he stops, looks over his shoulder at me, smiles faintly, then goes on again. I am not, we finally get around to agreeing, the person he thought I was - in this instance Simon Perry, sometime boss of British Screen. The impression I get is that he is seeing Simon Perrys everywhere, hallucinating backers and distributors whom he can interest in his outlines. Twelve, 13 years he tells me he's been trying. Great scripts he's peddling, too, based on true stories. That's meant to be the clincher. Truth. And off he goes, a true story himself, his eyes darting everywhere, tailing from in front whoever looks like someone influential, spilling distributors' cards from his pockets like a bridesmaid shedding confetti.

That's the dread in half the faces you see. Always to be the bridesmaid, never to be the bride. I hadn't realised what a fevered marketplace Cannes was. I thought they just showed films here. But no - you come as to a knocking shop, and don't even bother to hide your desperation.

It's all so alluringly close. No more than a breath of wind between you on one side of the divide and the gods and goddesses of film on the other. Reach out and you can touch. Cream off the stars and most of those ascending the liquorice pink steps of the Palais are less glamorous than you are. If they, why not you? The seductive democracy of cinema. For everybody, that's the promise, but oh the difference once the lights start popping.

When Francis Ford Coppola turns up at the American pavilion the cameras explode like napalm, each flash setting off the next. Film apotheosising film. Eventually the camera will replace words. Flash, flash, snap, snap! What else is there to say? Coppola is here to promote his recut of Apocalypse Now, but most of his audience have come simply to be close to magic and hope it will rub off. Behind me in the queue, a hectic unknown film-maker from California works the crowd. "Awesome," he says whenever he encounters another film-maker from California. "You got distribution? Awesome!" Come questions, he is the first with his hand up. "As a fellow film-maker, Mr Coppola . . . " No one seems to mind that. Only me and, I suspect, Mr Coppola. The question bears on the suffering of the artist. And no one seems to mind that either. Even Mr Coppola, relaxed in his South Sea island shirt, creases his eyes benignly, offering this single proviso - that it is probably best not to let the suffering show. But then he might be saying that for my benefit.

Going to hear Coppola has denied me the chance of watching the Cup final on giant screens in the British pavilion. There are some who see this contrast of events as critically telling about the state of our cinematic culture, which enjoys scant regard in the eyes of this year's judges with not a single British film up for serious consideration. At the very hour Jesse Jackson is addressing the Americans and Samuel Goldwyn Jr is showcasing emerging film-makers, the British are awarding the first ever Palm Dog for a canine performance. Themes of death and desolation, cannibalism and the seduction of minors haunt the festival, but at the BBC party the talk is all of Rosie Millard, the corporation's arts correspondent, who became famous for reporting from the Oscars dressed like a courtesan. Myself, I find this topic every bit as interesting as cannibalism. But there you are, we British are an inconsequential people. And therefore we make inconsequential films.

"What else can you expect?" Colin MacCabe, erstwhile head of production at the British Film Institute, asks when I run into him on the Croisette. "What else are you ever going to get from a one-party state?" MacCabe is dashingly persuasive in an in-your-face tuxedo, having just come from a gala screening I was not able to get into, but he has a whinnying post- structuralist's laugh which undermines the gravity of what he says. And isn't that precisely our national problem at the moment? We've lost the knack of seriousness.

"Ooh, this is posh," Pauline Quirke observes in my hearing, arriving to open the British pavilion in an outfit that looks borrowed from Dinnerladies. Thereby underlining the other thing we've lost - a sense of occasion.

I sit on the terrace of the Carlton Hotel, where the light comes blue off the sea, and fret over all the above. We are too willing to be overawed by French abstractions, I decide. Our glory is our understatedness. In which case we probably shouldn't be here. But the excitement is irresistible. Everywhere you look, people are huddled over scripts. From the snowy white pavilions, erected as though to host some medieval joust, you can hear the buzz of opinion. This the still centre of the turning world. At a table next to mine, a priest of film and a prince of finance - for those are the jousting parties - discuss the progress of The Lord of the Rings. "Arrows through the face, arrows in the eyeballs, it's nice film-making, I grant you, but I don't know how they're going to recoup." Sitting between them, a woman whose lips have been fashioned out of spare flesh from her buttocks shakes her head with the worry of it all.

In a sequence of apparent illogicalities - though I suspect an underlying meaning - I suddenly feel fondly towards Pauline Quirke and decide I will after all go to Hugh Hefner's press conference. Hefner is in Cannes to celebrate his 75th birthday. Accompanying him on what the Playboy press release calls his "sophisticated schedule" of "shopping, partying and wining" are his seven girlfriends, all with sophisticated names like Kimberley or Tiffany. Whether the choice of seven is a sly reference to Snow White's dwarfs I don't know, but they do all strike me as physically challenged somehow, some with too many teeth, others with too many breasts, or with breasts they don't seem entirely familiar with, and all with eyes that don't open the way yours and mine do. Maybe they're tired, maybe that's the joke.

Tiredest of all is Hef himself, still having to go on looking, after all these years, like the cat that got the cream. He appears nervous at first and needs to put one shaking hand, once he is able to work out which it is, into his tuxedo pocket. Then he juts out that hard-working shovel of a jaw of his, squeezes what he remembers of satisfaction into the corner of those cruel little eyes and settles into his routine, half self-satisfied licentiousness - "How does it feel? It feels delicious!" - half sanctimonious cant - "The real obscenities are hatred, war and bigotry. Sex doesn't hurt people."

No one here is going to bother disagreeing with that. The photographers have fallen to fighting for position, bawling one another out of the way - "Sit down! Sit down!" - turning up the temperature of the occasion, creating the thing they feed off. Hef is going to cut the cake, with a Timberley on each side of him. "Mr Hefner, Mr Hefner, here!" And poor old Hef has to find yet one more smile before blowing out yet one more candle. While it's happening, one of the girls, could be Regina, could be Darlene, stares down at her foreign body in mystification. She screws her eyes up. Is she anybody she knows?

Once you start worrying about Playmates it's probably time you went to a movie. The trouble is, the weather's so good here, the light is so invigorating, and there's so much to gawp at on the streets, it seems criminal to lock yourself away in the dark for any length of time. I try a few off-the-wall films like He Died With a Felafel in His Hand where there's no queue and they turn a blind eye to my pass, but my heart's not in it. I haven't come for this. This I can do at home.

On the way back to my hotel I see photographers gathering like crows at the far end of the Noga Hilton pier. Jean- Claude Van Damme, the security guard tells me. Rather than ask who Jean-Claude Van Damme is I flash my badge and join the pack. It's not completely true that I don't know who Jean-Claude Van Damme is. He's a movie star. I just don't know what he looks like or what sort of movies he makes. But here's my chance to find out.

He's late. By half an hour, then by an hour, then by an hour-and-threequarters. Fingers on our triggers, we lean towards every speedboat, even scan the sky for helicopters or parachutes, but still no movie star. At last, with the light almost gone, a cameraman in a flak jacket suggests we walk away. A small revolution. For it to work we all have to agree. You can't have one staying behind and getting a scoop. And we do agree. One out, the lot out. My chest beats with the excitement of it. More of this and we could change the world, empty it of movie stars for ever, because what's a movie star without the photographic meaning we give him? Wonderful! It's in our hands to turn off the life support machines.

But no sooner do we ready ourselves to go than a boat skips across the water in our direction, points its nose at us, pretends to veer away, then heads for us again, teasing us, toying with our feelings. And that's it, the end of the revolution. For there on board, in a white suit, sunglasses and trainers, jiving like a madman for our behoof, is a person I have never seen before but who must assuredly, from the excitement on the pier, be Jean-Claude Van Damme. No presence, but then they never do have. If you've got presence you don't need to be in movies. To make up for all he doesn't have, Jean-Claude leaps on to the pier, throws off his white jacket and kicks. Just that. He falls backwards, supports himself with one hand, and kicks a foot in the air. Whoo! "Why's he doing that?" I ask a photographer who looks as though he might know. "It's what he does in his films." "Kicks?" The photographer turns out to be Scottish. "Aye. Kicks. Have you never seen him?" "Of course I've never seen him," I say. "What's he made?" "Arse Licker II," he tells me. Though in the noise of cameras going off and people screaming "Jean-Claude! Jean-Claude!" I may have misheard him. He may just have said Arse Kicker II.

It's depressing, standing on a pier for two hours, waiting to see a grown man kick. A piece of Hugh Hefner wisdom comes back to me. "Pornography is just the sex you don't like." What if the same holds true of futility and spectacle? Jean-Claude Van Damme strikes me as the end of civilisation as I used to know it, but when I discover that the Oscars for the sex industry are to be held tomorrow I am consumed with curiosity. Already the porn stars are on the streets, most of them underage waifs from eastern Europe hobbling on undernourished legs, pulling like beggars at their tiny skirts, but some go in for being more rounded and mature and knowing, like the aunties you always wished you'd had. I accost one who happens to be staying in my hotel to see if there's any chance of an invitation to the event. I've been a lifetime fan of your work, I tell her, and would love to see you get your deserts at the Oscars. On her glass stilettos, she is twice my height. She looks me up and down, but mainly down. "I'll call you," she says.