Last year, the Cannes film festival came under fire from patriotic critics for having fostered a kind of cinematic Coalition of the Unwilling, led by films such as Dogville, Elephant and The Fog of War. This year, as the avowedly "apolitical" festival opened, it was all about cozy camaraderie. Shrek 2 was in competition for the grand-prize Palme d'Or. And jury president Quentin Tarantino—the very embodiment of style over substance—promised to bring only aesthetic considerations to bear on his determination of excellence.

Old Boy, a blood-soaked, Kill Bill-ish revenge opus from South Korea. No surprise, perhaps, given the chief juror. But Park's victory was just the penultimate scene of a wacky, perverse, Tarantino-esque awards show. The shock-inducing finale came with the recipient of the Palme: Fahrenheit 9/11.

That people were still debating Michael Moore's film days after its premiere—an anomaly at Cannes, given the sheer volume of films—indicated that it wasn't just Americans who were roused by his attempt to kick our unelected president out of office. No stranger to critical provocation himself, the old French New Wave giant Jean-Luc Godard deigned to enter the fray. In the course of a rambling, often hilarious, ingeniously theoretical press conference—ostensibly in support of his own lacerating Cannes entry Notre musique—Godard claimed that Moore's film could likely boost Bush's approval rating in the U.S.

Then again, one of the many things that Fahrenheit 9/11 does brilliantly is strip away the facade of political objectivity in film reviewing. The film's critics—some of whom would have needed to find an objection no matter what movie Moore had delivered—complained that he veers too far from his stated topic (Bush the String-Pulling Evildoer and Saudi/Halliburton Supplicant) to incorporate the voices of dismay and dissent. Speaking as a sporadic supporter of Moore, I'd say the director's strategy here is both humane (how to speak about evil without identifying its victims?) and shrewd (how to speak to the ordinary voter in an election year?). Moore's solemn, purposeful film is, I would say, about nothing more than getting George W. Bush out of the White House.

With expectations high, Fahrenheit 9/11 opens with a bang—the "Florida victory" fireworks of 2000—and then a whimper. "Was it a dream?" Moore wonders in voiceover, sounding not sarcastic but sad. The great surprise of Fahrenheit 9/11—particularly in light of Moore's bombastically jocular Bowling for Columbine—is that the movie sustains this delicate tone of weary disillusionment for the better part of two hours.

Leaving himself largely offscreen (a wise choice), regular-guy-turned-superstar Moore instead assumes—and seeks to strengthen—the viewer's identification with some of the Bush regime's victims. These include: black voters represented in vain by black members of Congress; U.S. taxpayers forced to subsidize Dubya's golf game for the first three quarters of 2001; loved ones of those killed on Sept. 11; the unnumbered casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq (Moore's agonizing footage focuses on dead and wounded children); the U.S. soldiers who've come to wonder what the hell they're fighting for; and a Republican woman whose support of the president gradually turns to rage after her son dies in combat. (The deceased's last letter home: "I really hope they do not elect that fool, Mama.")

Granted, the "hard" evidence that Moore presents in Fahrenheit 9/11 isn't particularly hard, and it's not at all new. (And he doesn't say a thing about Israel and Palestine—subjects of the next movie, we're told.) But what he does say is plenty persuasive. And he's going to be saying it through a helluva loud bullhorn, whatever creative solution the Disney-owned Miramax imprint finds to fulfill the terms of Moore's contract. As it stands, the movie has to be in U.S. theaters by the Fourth of July and on DVD a month before Election Day on Nov. 2. As my Croatian-born Cannes hotelier concurred (in the course of serving what he playfully termed my "freedom breakfast"): That's pretty rad.

Even so, when Moore's first-place finish was announced, I remained just a tiny bit skeptical of this final decision handed down by the maker of American gangster movies. Especially considering some of the other movies in competition, which managed to make the political personal—even affordable. Made with Macintosh's iMovie program for a mere $218.32, Jonathan Caouette's thoroughly obsessive autobiography-cum-therapy workout Tarnation tells mainly of the filmmaker's difficult relationship with a mother who suffered shock treatment and other abuses as a child. Caouette draws on two decades of diaristic home video, the starkly confessional tone abstracted through digital recoloring, copious split-screen effects and jarring interjections of printed text and unlicensed pop. But there's nothing the least bit distanced about the son's poignant attempts to connect with Mom, whose unconditional love is reciprocated through one of the most generously affectionate characterizations of a mother in all of movies.

Speaking of love and obsession: My favorite living director, an artist for whom passion is synonymous with pain, has a serious case of separation anxiety—and it makes me cherish him all the more. "All memories are moist," reads an early intertitle in Wong Kar-wai's 2046—which, aptly enough, arrived in Cannes still wet from the lab. In Wong's two-hour pseudo-sequel to his In the Mood for Love, Tony Leung's heartbroken journalist essentially revisits the old earlier film as if in a parallel universe. Though he was four long years in production on his latest film, the Hong Kong master of melodramatic indecision couldn't let go even in the final hours before his gala premiere. Shooting additional footage as recently as a couple weeks ago, scrambling to splice at least one new scene into each of two unscreened prints, and forcing Cannes to rejigger its schedule for the first time in the festival's 57-year history, the perfectionist may well have mustered another masterpiece.

Alas, he also apparently relinquished his chances of winning the Palme. So what were the issues for the maker of Pulp Fiction in weighing Fahrenheit 9/11 over 2046? Did the fact that he's "very good friends" (as the pre-awards coverage put it) with number-one Wong fan Sofia Coppola count for anything in relation to the fact that he's been working since 1992 for Miramax head Harvey Weinstein—Fahrenheit's credited co-producer? The awards show's climactic string of cuts—from Tarantino to Moore to Big Harvey, grinning from ear to ear—had nothing, perhaps, on Moore's photomontage of Bush and Rumsfeld joshing with members of the Saudi royal family. But the similarity sends a chill nonetheless.

So: Was this really the "apolitical" film festival? Or was it, as Moore might wonder, just a dream? Put it this way: The new politics at Cannes seem more or less the same as the old politics all over the world. It's not about what you think so much as it is about who you know.