CANNES, FRANCE—So I'm here at the Cannes Film Festival in the sunny south of France, staring at a ridiculously dreamy ingénue named Naomi Watts doing press for the new David Lynch movie, and I'm thinking about pleasure. Le plaisir, as the French would say. Actually, I'm misérable: dangerously sleep-deprived, borderline delirious, sick of braving the crowds. But that's another story. This one is about pleasure.

The Cannes Film Festival was founded on pleasure. For the inaugural event back in 1939, Hollywood sent a “steamship of stars” to the Côte d'Azur, including Mae West, Gary Cooper, Norma Shearer, and Douglas Fairbanks, along with 10 of its newest movies. Alas, only The Hunchback of Notre Dame actually screened, on account of Adolf Hitler's decision to invade Poland on opening day. The timing of this real-life blockbuster was surely coincidental. Yet it bears mention that Cannes was conceived as the French critique of the Nazis' dictatorial direction of the Venice Film Festival, where Jean Renoir's pacifist Grand Illusion had met considerable resistance in 1938. Which is to say that Cannes, in addition to being about pleasure (and pain), is also about power.

How fitting, therefore, that the 2001 edition would begin with Moulin Rouge—another American take on French material, and set, as one of its characters gleefully reports, “where the rich and powerful come to play with the young and beautiful of the underworld.” According to the movie, it's artists who populate this “underworld,” tossing breadcrumbs to us lowly consumers who live and breathe in environs even further below notice. But who are the overlords governing the glitziest film event known to man? Well, the “Power List” in the current issue of Premiere gives top billing to megaconglomerate superstars Sumner Redstone (Viacom), Gerald Levin (Time Warner), and Rupert Murdoch (News Corp.)—the last of whom controls 20th Century Fox, and thus Moulin Rouge. True, the acknowledged director here is Baz Luhrmann, but to the French, or anyone else, this is nothing if not un film de Monsieur Murdoch.

Like Cannes itself, Moulin Rouge is one big, glittering billboard touting who owns what. Where, in most Hollywood musicals, the characters sing their innermost thoughts to one another, here the “underworld” playmakers of Paris circa 1900 communicate in anachronistic song samples of licensed material—the only context in which one could imagine David Bowie's “Heroes” mixing with Phil Collins' “One More Night.” In an early workshop for Spectacular Spectacular, the aptly nondescript epic within Murdoch's epic, the stage show's writer (Ewan McGregor) hits on an inspired lyric: “The hills are alive / With the sound of music.” Lucky for him (or Murdoch), the tune comes from a movie owned by Fox. The Spectacular star, Satine, whom Nicole Kidman plays as a liberated but fragile sexpot (who has the copyright on that?), makes her first appearance as she's being lowered on a swing set into the film's titular club, crooning “Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend”—from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, also owned by Fox.

Besides incorporating Orphean myth, Parisian politics, the threatened writers' strike, Kidman's personal life, and McGregor's “enormous talent” into its text, Moulin Rouge wraps all of Cannes' venerable contradictions into one overstuffed package. It's a star-driven blockbuster with the vague semblance of high art; in a year when the festival's acknowledged mandate is to cater to Hollywood, it's an American studio blockbuster—but set in the City of Lights.

Whether or not it's true of life or of movies across the board, I'm prepared to suggest here that pleasure at Cannes—particularly for the returning attendee—is synonymous with familiarity. We cinephilic pleasure-seekers want our auteurs to speak to us in a language we're already well acquainted with: We want Abel Ferrara to give us the filthy streets of New York and a few dope rhymes from Schoolly D; we want Claire Denis to tease us with sensuous glimpses of a tale that stubbornly resists the telling, a world at once alien and...oddly familiar. But what if it's too familiar? The Coens' The Man Who Wasn't There, a rather embarrassingly empty exercise in old Hollywood pastiche, slaps together James M. Cain and black-and-white “noir” atmospherics even less creatively than Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, with Billy Bob Thornton failing to earn laughs in the Monty Clift-style role of a pathetic Santa Rosa barber.

Similarly, Ferrara's 'R Xmas is a husband-and-wife drug-pusher melodrama that peddles the same smack from Bad Lieutenant in such a lazy fashion as to suggest that the dealer has been getting high on his own supply. And What Time Is It There? amounts to the umpteenth tale of urban ennui by the Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang (Vive L'Amour), who sends another ingeniously minimalist message but disappoints by not modulating the frequency.

So perhaps the trick for the successfully evolving auteur is to remain true to himself, but with a twist. In the case of Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now Redux, a restoration of the original that adds an hour of fascinating but narratively disruptive outtakes, the “new and improved” ethos seems to have been adopted more for marketing purposes than artistic ones. (Still, some joked that this 22-year-old movie looks and sounds fresher than anything current in Cannes—and, like the best jokes, the line had some truth to it.)

The twist in Todd Solondz's freakishly misshapen Storytelling is that the narrative terrorist has finally brought his critics into the frame, if only in an attempt to subject them to the same torture as everyone else. In the two-part film's first chapter, “Fiction,” a young creative-writing student (Selma Blair) suffers withering reviews from her classmates for perpetuating black-male sexual stereotypes—except that, wouldn't you know, her character (like Solondz's?) is drawn from real life. Same goes for “Non-Fiction,” whose documentary-making protagonist (Paul Giamatti) shoots a film of near-Solondz-esque cruelty about a high-school loser and his family of suburban New Jersey cretins, but isn't the least bit responsible for the very “real” tragedy that befalls them. As a longtime sufferer of Solondz, I find Storytelling to be at once despicably unpleasant and extremely interesting for its countless layers of reflexivity—the once persecuted auteur creating retaliatory fiction about nonfiction in order to whine in the end about how it's only a movie.

But the most striking of auteurist outings at Cannes come courtesy of Claire Denis and David Lynch. As regards the former, please allow me just one of the critic's familiarizing analogies: Denis' Trouble Every Day is this year's Crash, partly for polarizing the Cannes audience more fiercely than anything else, and partly for serving as a classic experiment in Cronenbergian body horror. Not that the movie itself offers much orientation, generic or otherwise. Denis drops us into the middle of an unsettling head trip involving murder, botany, and two of the most bizarre-looking people on the planet (Béatrice Dalle and Vincent Gallo, both of whom could stand a visit to the dermatologist). I won't say much to spoil the surprise of Trouble Every Day (“shock” is a better word), except to say that once Gallo's morose creep interrupts coitus with his bride (Tricia Vessey) to masturbate in the bathroom, then goes out and buys a puppy, all bets are off.

Then there's Lynch's Mulholland Drive, a tongue-in-cheek T&A thriller that had me wearing a guilty grin from start to finish. Returning to the deadpan camp territory of his initial Twin Peaks episode, Lynch here gives us the TV-soap alter egos of Laura Dern and Isabella Rossellini. A goody-goody young blonde from Canada (Naomi Watts, a truly beguiling comedienne in her first starring role) and a sultry-voiced femme fatale (Laura Elena Harring) with a bad case of amnesia meet in L.A.; become engrossed in a patently ludicrous yet oddly engrossing mystery; and erotically discover that two sets of twin peaks are better than one. The levelheaded Variety deemed the movie's half-hour dreamscape denouement “a severe and unwelcome turn down a lost highway,” then all but retracted the statement two days later. Seems even trade-paper critics want a little variety in their diet at Cannes.

Diversity aside, good business will occasionally allow for good deeds, and no film could make the point more strongly than ABC Africa, a documentary directed in typically spare style by Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami (Taste of Cherry). The film begins with a written request for help seen spilling out of the director's fax machine: The United Nations' International Fund for Agricultural Development is inviting Kiarostami (who received a UN award in 1997 for his humanitarian fictions) to document the progress of the Uganda Women's Effort to Save Orphans, thereby calling attention to its struggles on behalf of the 1.5 million Ugandan children orphaned by war and AIDS. Accepting the challenge, Kiarostami approaches his 10 days of shooting in Kampala from a compassionate rather than an investigative angle—which, in its way, is no less political. The director here traverses the vast gulf between children's play and their death—the latter represented most chillingly through the image of a young Ugandan AIDS victim being placed in a makeshift cardboard coffin and driven away on the back of a bicycle.

Still, the film hardly amounts to a visual catalog of Ugandan misfortune. Stylistically speaking, much of this beautiful, vibrant work reflects the basic truth that waving a camcorder among children in rural portions of Africa will inspire no small amount of curiosity—and mugging for the camera. Objectivity, such as it can ever exist in a documentary, simply isn't an option here. Perhaps for that reason, Kiarostami regularly turns the cameras on himself and his tiny crew. One unforgettable scene of the filmmakers fumbling toward their hotel rooms after a late-night power blackout makes it clear that light—and, by extension, cinema—is a privilege. Thus the question for the world's filmmakers ought to be, but too seldom is: What to do with that privilege?

It's a question that has particular importance for Kiarostami, who, though scarcely written about at length in the U.S., is a hugely acclaimed filmmaker with a devoted worldwide audience. At Cannes, members of that audience would likely have packed screening rooms to see a film of the director practicing choral recitations for three hours. And this dynamic makes the issue of what the artist will actually choose to create all the more vital. No wonder Kiarostami includes scenes of an Austrian couple with their adopted Ugandan child, promoting human fellowship where Moulin Rouge promotes mass consumption. More than anything, ABC Africa is a film whose message is simply to remind us of the power of any individual choice, including the choice to do nothing.

The question that plagues me in the wake of ABC Africa is: Given the very real tragedies taking place in Uganda and elsewhere, and their scarcity of coverage relative to that other disaster epic known as Pearl Harbor, can the pleasure of movies that aren't about grave world crises be excused? Kiarostami's film concludes, pointedly, with images of resilient Ugandans playing music and dancing, as if to say that cultural expression—if not mere entertainment—is of vital importance too. And yet when I'm fighting my way through a massive crowd gathered at the Variety Pavilion for a Roger Ebert-moderated panel discussion with American directors, and hear the critic rave about the likes of Jennifer Jason Leigh (The Anniversary Party) and Wayne Wang (The Center of the World) by saying, “They want to make the world a little better than it was when they started filming,” I feel less than fully convinced of the purity of their motives...or my own.

And then I see the movie I was most excited about on the plane ride over: Il Mio Viaggio in Italia, Martin Scorsese's four-hour-plus work-in-progress doc about his love of Italian cinema. “If you ever have a doubt about the potential of movies to effect change in the real world,” he says near the start (speaking directly to me, it seems), “study neorealism.” True enough: Working with nonprofessional actors on minuscule budgets, in a nation ravaged by World War II, directors Roberto Rossellini (Open City), Vittorio De Sica (Shoeshine), and Luchino Visconti (La Terra Trema) captured an Italy in shambles, the way it actually was—saying “a prayer,” per Scorsese, “that the rest of the world would look at the Italian people and see their essential humanity.”

In other words, like ABC Africa, but by different means, the postwar neorealist films tugged heartstrings—often through the stories of children—without resorting to undue artifice or convention, and without relieving us of our shared responsibility for real events. Though they're now more than 50 years old, Scorsese's chosen clips appear as pictorially vivid and as emotionally wrenching as ever. And yet just as powerful is the director's simple description of watching these films as an 8-year-old in the company of his Sicilian emigrant grandparents, who wept at the stark black-and-white images of their homeland in ruin.

If the lesson here would seem to be that human tragedy makes for great cinema, a more recent Italian film—Nanni Moretti's The Son's Room, a formulaic family-crisis weeper that ran away with this year's Palme d'Or—makes it clear that many viewers simply prefer to experience a less lacerating sort of pain. It's not just Moretti's total lack of visual imagination that makes his work undeserving of honor at the world's most prestigious film festival. Worse still is his unconscionable view that there's no use trying to make a difference in the world, since we're all purely victims of circumstance.

For now, I've concluded that what is most gratifying about cinema is the feeling of engaging the world rather than escaping from it or consuming it. But then how to explain the narcotic thrill of Lynch's T&A thriller? I imagine I'll still be grappling with such issues in Cannes next year. With pleasure.