Samir Farid watches , which opened the Cannes Film Festival The 59th International Cannes Film Festival (May 15-28), provides ample proof that cinema is alive and kicking, and that whatever the threats posed by electronic media, cinema appears be thriving. The Cannes Film Festival is "the United Nations of Cinema", as Gilles Jacob, who has been working tirelessly on revamping the event, as artistic director between 1977 and 2005, and now as chairman of the festival board, likes to call it. This year Cannes will include ten programmes, the most notable being the official selection, which in itself comprises seven sections -- the feature competition, short films in competition, the student film competition, out of competition films, Un Certain Regard, Cannes Classics, and All the Cinemas of the World. In addition there is the Critics' Week programme and the Directors' fortnight, or the Quinzaine. This year's festival will screen a total of 205 films from 39 countries, including 107 full-length features, 60 shorts and 38 recently restored classics. Interestingly, despite the fact that Cannes was instrumental in promoting the fashion for Iranian films two decades ago not a single Iranian film is running in competition this year. The only Egyptian presence will be Tahani Rached's long documentary Al-Banat Dol (Those girls), screened out of competition. The festival opened with Ron Howard's , which no doubt hopes to replicate the success of Dan Brown's 2003 international best seller, on which it is based. The novel's controversial claim is that Jesus Christ married Mary Magdalene, and had a child by her, Sarah, who was smuggled to France. Sophie, who works for the French police, is a descendant of Sarah, the focus of an underground cult the adherents of which the Catholic Church is hunting in an attempt to keep the information secret. is Dan Brown's fourth novel, and he attempts to confer credibility on the fiction by drawing on historical facts and figures, including Leonardo Da Vinci who, the novel claims, encoded ciphers in many of his painting, including the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper, pointing to the secret marriage. The novel is a thriller, narrated by an American scholar, Robert Langdon, who specialises in deciphering historical and religious codes, and is written in a fashion that draws on montage and other cinematic techniques, merging fiction with documentary material. Translated into Arabic in Lebanon in 2004, the book was subsequently confiscated by the Lebanese authorities at the behest of the Catholic Media Centre in Lebanon. The film has likewise attracted criticism, even before being seen. In Egypt the film was scheduled for public release on 17 May. A week before the release date, though, the film's trailers were banned while the head of the Censorship Bureau announced that his office had yet to receive a copy of the film in order to decide whether it would or would not be screened. Although receives its release in many cities today, Columbia-Sony, the film's distributors, has not held any private screenings for critics, meaning it will open without the usual previews. In Cannes, though, and for the first time in the festival's 59 years, the administration decided to hold a private press screening of its opening film on the eve of the festival. The premier took place in Claude Debussy Hall, named after the French composer who interestingly enough figures in Dan Brown's novel as one of the cult leaders. The two and a half hour- screening elicited no applause, though there was some jeering and booing. The American Newsweek had predicted would be the box office hit of 2006, just as the novel had been the bestseller of 2003. And the film is certainly going to attract a large audience, on the grounds of curiosity if nothing else. The director, Ron Howard, has 17 other films to his name, and 's cast boasts many stars, including Tom Hanks in the role of Robert Langdon, French actress Audrey Tautou as Sophie, and Sir Ian McKellen. Just as the novel is not great literature, so Don Howard's film is not great cinema: indeed it seems close to much ado about nothing. Just as one cannot write a Western about death and metaphysics, so a thriller, whether film or a novel, is hardly the most appropriate genre to treat the life of Jesus Christ or the history of the Catholic Church. Of course, Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment includes a crime and then the search for the criminal, but the novel is not a thriller in any traditional sense of the word. lacks the necessary depth to stir contemplation, and the film mirrors the novel in its addiction to cheap thrills. The book's popularity, argued an article that appeared in Newsweek earlier this year, owes much to the atmosphere of conspiracy that has prevailed in the US and much of the Western world since 9/11. And it is true that the novel and the film are steeped in conspiracies, and as such are intimately related to the manner in which globalisation fosters religious conflicts worldwide, a tendency on the rise since Sharon visited the Aqsa Mosque in September 2000, thereby turning an unresolved political conflict into a religious one, and since Bin Laden's attacks in September 2001 and Bush's designation of his counterattack as a "crusade". Both Brown's novel and Howard's film attempt to humanise Christ, and in that sense they are linked to the Danish cartoons of 2005 which depicted Prophet Muhammad in a manner Muslims found offensive. Cinematically Howard's film often resembles a video game or else TV drama, especially in the chase scenes and dialogue mainly consisting of questions by Sophie and answers by Langdon, with illustration in the background. Compared to the film the novel seems, if anything, the more cinematic. Tom Hanks' performance is riddled with contradictions -- the character he plays was in the novel an atheist, though this is muted in the film presumably on the grounds that atheism is deemed too risky for a Hollywood star. In contrast, Paul Bettany, cast in the role of Silas, the murderer afflicted with leprosy, stole the show.
